The highest standards in the evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines were applied by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). As for every other product it evaluates, EMA’s human medicines committee[1] (CHMP) considered the need for good clinical practice (GCP) inspections.
Studies supporting the authorisation of a medicine must comply with GCP. Regulators can request and conduct inspections to verify compliance with the standards.
Criteria used to select a GCP inspection is published[2]. When a GCP inspection is requested by the CHMP, EMA makes a call for available EU national GCP inspection resources.
The Member States have the final say on whether to send inspectors for an EMA-coordinated inspection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the restrictions to travel with a view to protect public health, regulators assessed the need for inspections and decided on a case-by-case basis the most appropriate and viable approach to take.
The European Public Assessment Reports for Vaxzevria[3] and Comirnaty[4] are publicly available.
The first cases of myocarditis that occurred in Israel in 2021 following vaccination with Comirnaty triggered a formal review by EMA[5].
The outcome was that the risk for myocarditis and pericarditis was overall ‘very rare’ (up to one in 10 000 vaccinated people may be affected) with the highest risk in younger males[6].
The product information of Comirnaty and Spikevax was revised adding myocarditis and pericarditis as new side effects with a warning to raise awareness.
[6] Meeting highlights from the Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) 29 November — 2 December 2021 https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/meeting-highlights-pharmacovigilance-risk-assessment-committee-prac-29-november-2-december-2021.
The Commission is currently implementing an Action Plan on labour and skills shortages of 20 March 2024[1]. The action plan sets out 87 actions or commitments that the EU, Member States and social partners will or should take to tackle these shortages.
It contains a call to Member States to develop policies to attract and retain nurses through improving working conditions and mentoring young professionals, with the support of the EU4Health Programme .
The collection of data for a survey on the health professionals’ mental health was carried out by the World Health Organisation (WHO) with EU4Health funding, and its results are planned to be published in October 2025. The WHO will then develop a set of proposed policy actions to protect the mental health of the health workforce, planned for publication before the end of 2025[2].
The Commission’s Expert Group on Health Systems Performance Assessment[3] is mapping various approaches to ensuring safe staffing levels in healthcare.
The Commission also helps Member States, including France, in seizing opportunities from the digitalisation of health systems. Among others, the European Health Data Space initiative[4] aims to establish a common framework for the use and exchange of electronic health data.
T hrough the European Semester, t he Commission provides country-specific policy advice to support health system reforms , including those related to the health workforce. Substantial EU funding[5] is available to support skills development programmes[6] and planning and forecasting tools[7].
I n the context of the Union of Skills[8] and its Skills Portability Initiative, the Commission will explore common rules for recognising the qualifications of third-country nationals, and thus facilitate the integration of non-EU workers into the EU labour markets, including in the healthcare sector.
The forthcoming Quality Jobs Roadmap will support progress on the various dimensions of job quality in the evolving world of work.
[1] Commission Communication on Labour and skills shortages in the EU: an action plan, COM(2024) 131 final (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52024DC0131).
Under Erasmus+, FEMYSO was selected, after assessing the criteria set out in the calls for proposals and on the basis of the relevant programme rules, as applicant for grants of a total value of EUR 119 881, further to the calls for proposals ‘Dialogue and cooperation — Civil Society cooperation: Education, Training and Youth’ in 2014, 2015 and 2017.
Actual payments for the Erasmus+ projects referred to above amounted to EUR 117 423 (payments processed from 2014 to 2017). Other payments were made in 2015 for an amount of EUR 3 198.28 (estimated share of FEMYSO in the final payment for the project ‘Combatting human rights violations associated with Islamophobia’) under the Fundamental Rights and Justice programme, and in 2019 for an amount of EUR 14 397.92 (project ‘Meet’) under the then Rights, Equality and Citizenship programme.
The Commission and its Coordinator on combating anti-Muslim hatred interact with a wide range of relevant stakeholders who respect EU values.
The Coordinator liaises with Member States, European institutions, civil society and academia to strengthen policy responses to combat anti-Muslim hatred. In this role, the Coordinator is the main point of contact for organisations working in this field in the EU.
A serving Metropolitan Police officer has appeared at court following sexual assault charges.
Inspector Michael Richards, attached to Learning and Development, was charged with two counts of sexual assault by touching on Sunday, 25 May.
He appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday, 23 June. He was bailed to next appear at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, 21 July.
He remains suspended from duty.
Insp Richards was arrested on Wednesday 17, September on suspicion of sexual assault by touching. The allegations relate to a male and a female victim, both over the age of 18. They are alleged to have taken place on the same day as the arrest while Insp Richards was off-duty.
The Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards is aware.
But many asylum-seekers face significant challenges. Refugees formally in the asylum system are often denied residency permits, which means they face persistent insecurity, poverty and isolation
These conditions are compounded by restrictive and limited services for asylum-seekers. This deepens the precarity and exclusion refugees face within a political and economic system that treats them more like economic burdens than as human beings with rights who need help.
In response to these institutional failures, citizens, volunteers and refugees themselves have begun to build grassroots networks of care and solidarity in the ROC and beyond to support refugee communities.
In 2022 and 2023, we conducted interviews with women volunteers and refugees affiliated with The Learning Refuge, a civil society organization in the city of Paphos in southwest Cyprus that cultivates dialogue and collaboration among these two diverse groups.
Women-led initiatives
Many displaced people first arrive on the island of Cyprus through the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). However, the absence of a functioning asylum system or international legal protections leaves them in limbo.
With no viable path to status in the TRNC, most cross the Green Line that bifurcates Cyprus into the ROC, where European Union asylum frameworks exist but remain limited in practice.
In Cyprus, ss in manyother countries, a variety of community-building efforts are important responses to limited or restricted state support and humanitarian aid for refugees.
Women-led efforts offer opportunities to deliver educational activities and establish networks, and to help improve the welfare and social protection of refugee women, however imperfectly.
Founded in 2015, The Learning Refuge began as community meetings in a city park. The organization then used space from a nearby music venue to conduct support activities, and later, established itself in a dedicated building.
Organizations like The Learning Refuge emerged to address the limited state support and humanitarian assistance services available to refugees.
The Learning Refuge cultivates dialogue and collaboration among a diverse group of community volunteers. (Suzan Ilcan)
The Learning Refuge cultivates dialogue and collaboration among a diverse group of community volunteers, including schoolteachers, artists, musicians, local residents, refugees and other migrants.
With the aid of 20 volunteers, the loosely organized groups provide women refugees with material support and resources to enhance collective activities, including art and music projects, while also engaging in educational and friendship activities.
While modest in scale, the organization has formed partnerships with local and international organizations, including Caritas Cyprus, UNHCR-Cyprus and the Cyprus Refugee Council to extend its outreach to various refugee groups.
The organization has also launched creative initiatives aimed at cultivating additional inclusive civic spaces. One such effort, “Moms and Babies Day,” was developed in response to the rising number of single mothers from Africa arriving on the island. These women often face poverty and isolation, and struggle with language barriers.
These efforts highlight how grassroots responses — especially those led by women — can offer partial but vital educational and emotional support to refugees struggling to find their footing in a new country.
Negotiated belonging
Through participation in The Learning Refuge, refugee women in Paphos engage in a dynamic process of negotiated belonging, navigating challenges like language barriers, gendered isolation, domestic violence and poverty while contributing to broader community-building efforts.
For example, Maryam, a Syrian woman and mother of three, told us how The Learning Refuge helped her children establish friendships and learn Greek. She also highlighted that it helped her form close ties with volunteers and other Syrian women living in Cyprus, and find paid work in the city.
The volunteers and women refugees participating in The Learning Refuge’s activities emphasized not only their capacity to develop new forms of belonging and solidarity; they also help reshape communal knowledge and generate supportive spaces for women from various backgrounds.
Our research shows that women-led community-building is an effective, though short-term, response to insufficient state support and humanitarian aid systems that leave many refugees in precarious situations.
In varying degrees, these efforts offer women and their families spaces to learn and cultivate new relationships, and foster collective projects and better visions of resettlement and refuge.
Suzan Ilcan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Seçil Daǧtaș receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides recently announced the province will move ahead to develop provincial standards “to ensure the age-appropriateness of materials available to students in school libraries.” This followed a public engagement survey related to what he said were concerns about “sexually explicit” books in Edmonton and Calgary schools.
Like Florida’s statute on K-12 instructional materials, Alberta’s proposal centres on age-appropriateness and increasing parental choice in learning materials.
Confusion and a climate of fear caused by the bill has led Florida teachers and librarians to self-censor. Florida’s Department of Education urged districts to “err on the side of caution” to avoid potential felony charges.
Such fear and surveillance lead to unnecessary restrictions on students’ rights.
However, as PEN Canada notes, the implications of the proposed policies raise alarm bells, with the government’s actions “paving the way to a new era of government-sponsored book banning.” Singling out books has the same effect as a ban, according to the CEO of the St. Albert Public Library.
Nicolaides also said the proposed policy is focused on sexual content, so themes and depictions of graphic violence are “probably not” an issue.
Rolling back trans, queer rights
Alberta has already rolled back the rights of trans and non-binary children and youth to use different pronouns, access gender-affirming care and participate in sports.
Queer and trans identities are also absent from all subjects in the K-12 program of studies, including recently updated K-6 curriculum. New sexual health resource guidelines prohibit the use of learning materials that primarily and explicitly address sexual orientation or gender identity unless they have been vetted and approved by Alberta Education (except for use in religion classes).
Survey amplifies moral panic
Through specific communication tactics, the minister’s public engagement works to exacerbate moral panics about sexuality as a threat to childhood innocence. This influences broader messages about 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion.
The government-created survey shared illustrations and text excerpts on their own, without context or consideration of their narrative purpose in each book. Although the excerpts flagged by the minister make up between 0.1 to two per cent of the total page count in each book, the books as a whole are labelled “extremely graphic.”
Forty-nine per cent of parents of school-aged children were not at all or not very supportive of the creation of government guidelines, compared to 44 per cent of the same demographic who were somewhat or very supportive (eight per cent were unsure). Across each other demographic, most respondents expressed that they didn’t support the creation of new government standards. But the ministry plans to move ahead anyway.
Parental rights groups and far-right activists have long asserted that 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion in schools “indoctrinates” and sexualizes children.
We’re concerned the Alberta government may be reinforcing this message to manufacture a greater public consensus in support of wider policies against 2SLGBTQIA+ rights.
Far-right activist groups like Take Back Alberta have shaped the UCP government’s policies alongside special interest groups like Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education.
Queer and trans identities are viewed as a social contagion threatening to change anyone exposed to them, and efforts for inclusion are labelled “gender ideology.”
These misconceptions, combined with political and religious biases, frame queerness and transness as “adult topics” that will confuse or harm children. However, research confirms ignoring these topics is of far greater concern when children may already experience discrimination about their gender expression by the age of five.
Earlier learning about diverse forms of gender expression and relationships can reduce victimization, and prevent young children from becoming perpetrators of, or bystanders to, anti-2SLGBTQIA+ harassment and violence.
Access to self-selected literature is important for all students, and can be a lifeline for 2SLGBTQIA+ students who don’t see themselves in the curriculum.
If Alberta Education will not prepare students for the world they live in — where we queer and trans people exist, flourish and are loved — then students should be able to seek out stories that reflect that world. It’s a matter of protecting their freedom of expression.
Jamie Anderson has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Calgary.
Tonya D. Callaghan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Trusts.
Caitlin Campbell and Nicole Richard do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: United States Senator for Connecticut – Chris Murphy
June 20, 2025
PARIS—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a major speech on the threats posed to the U.S. economy and spiritual health of Americans by unregulated artificial intelligence technology at the Paris Institute of Political Studies during a congressional delegation to Paris, France and Bucharest, Romania.
Murphy acknowledged the potential benefits of this transformational technology: “It will likely turn out to be one of the most socially and economically disruptive technologies ever. It’s probably going to be bigger than the printing press or advanced medicine or the internet. And there’s also no doubt that it has enormous practical upsides. Medical advances will come more quickly. Production will be cheaper. Administration will become more efficient. Complex societal problems will be solved more easily.”
But Murphy warned the Trump administration is downplaying the potential risks of unregulated AI technology, evidenced by a speech given earlier this year by Vice President J.D. Vance: “The current U.S. administration is right now fully captured by the AI industry, and they are focused only on driving up the industry’s profits at the expense of the American worker and the American family. The vice president said at that summit that the White House refuses to view AI as a purely disruptive technology that will inevitably automate away our labor force. But this is exactly what unregulated, unchecked AI will do. The vice president claimed that the White House wanted the AI driven internet to be a safe place, but refused to endorse a single rule or a single idea that would keep it safe, apparently believing the industry whitewash that they will just self-regulate and prioritize family and citizen safety above profits, something the tech industry has never done.”
He argued the industry leaders lobbying against AI regulation are prioritizing profit over the common good: “The leaders of these companies, brimming with dangerous hubris, rapacious in their desire to build wealth and power, and far too comfortable in shrugging off the destructive power of their product… They’re in a race to deploy and commercialize and profit, and they are paying mere lip service to the ways in which AI and AGI could destroy the already fraying fabric of our country…If we don’t decide collectively as a transatlantic community to protect ourselves from the most transformational technology of our lifetime. And as I said, perhaps in the history of the world, we won’t have democracies to be able to protect the values that we care so deeply about. We won’t be able to debate domestic and foreign policy.”
He pushed back on those who argue regulating AI in the U.S. will give China a strategic advantage in developing the technology: “Frankly, China is likely rooting for us to use American and European citizens as guinea pigs for the AI revolution because they aren’t doing that. China’s attempts at regulation have been lighter than the EU, but it’s just not true that China believes that the way to beat the United States towards AI prominence is by not regulating the industry. China would love for the United States economy to collapse, because we are less thoughtful than Beijing in controlling the job loss they would love for unchecked fake video and audio to turn our culture into chaos. They would love for our young people to become even further lost and isolated as robot friends replace real friends and real interaction. Regulating AI isn’t a gift to China – it’s a way to make sure that we manage the growth of AI in a way that makes sure that we beat the Chinese in this race.”
This summer, several of my colleagues in the Congressional Budget Office’s Health Analysis Division will present their work in three sessions at the 14th Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) in Nashville, Tennessee. The presentations are part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to engage with the broader research community. Those efforts include calls for research, such as the agency’s recent blog post on nutritional standards in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; public posting of code; and updates on ongoing work. By engaging with researchers outside the agency, CBO improves the quality of its analysis and makes its methods and findings more transparent and available. We look forward to discussion and feedback on the following topics of this summer’s presentations:
Spotlight Session: Putting Research to Work: How CBO Uses Research to Inform Policymakers
Presenters Noelia Duchovny (CBO), Sean Lyons (CBO), Jared Maeda (CBO), J. Michael McWilliams (Harvard Medical School), Mark Shepard (Harvard University), and Bryan Tysinger (USC Schaeffer Center)
Moderator Tamara Hayford (CBO)
Session Spotlight Session: Putting Research to Work: How CBO Uses Research to Inform Policymakers
Description CBO uses published research and discussions with experts to inform the agency’s analytical work, including estimates of the budgetary effects of proposed legislation. In addition, CBO actively engages with the research community to develop the agency’s evidence base and analytical methods. For example, CBO has published four blog posts in the past two years calling for new research on topics in the health space ranging from how health care providers respond to cost shocks to take-up rates and costs of treatment for complications from hepatitis C. Because CBO is often tasked with projecting the impact of new programs or policies on the federal budget, descriptive data and research on the impact of policy, health, and pricing shocks on health care service use and spending are particularly valuable to the agency. In this session, CBO’s Health Analysis Division highlights three examples of research that have been particularly helpful. The session will include short presentations by study authors, discussions of how the work was used and what made it helpful by CBO analysts, and a Q&A at the end for session attendees to learn about CBO’s work and what makes research particularly useful and informative.
Tracking the Incidence of Medicare Advantage Payments
Presenter Eric Schulman
Session Poster Reception
Authors Jared Maeda (CBO) and Eric Schulman (CBO)
Abstract This paper investigates how nominal payments to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have changed over time and how those changes have shaped economic outcomes for plans and beneficiaries. The question is policy-relevant because of differences in the relationships between benchmarks, enrollment, and benefit generosity under the Benefits Improvement and Protection Act (BIPA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which potentially contributed to inaccurate forecasts of the ACA’s impact. A potential reason for the difference between projected and actual outcomes is that regulatory rulemaking shaped actual payment amounts in unexpected ways. For example, although the ACA lowered MA benchmarks, total payments increased because of simultaneous growth in risk adjustment payments, complicating efforts to measure the economic incidence of the ACA (that is, which parties ultimately benefited from or bore the burden of payment changes). Our project examines the extent to which local-level, rule-based changes in payments affected who benefited or bore the burden of the ACA payment changes, compared with changes to plans and beneficiary behavior.
Initial descriptive statistics suggest that BIPA’s payment floors functioned as a progressive subsidy that primarily benefited rural, low-spending counties, whereas the ACA payment cuts were proportional to spending and concentrated in high-spending urban areas. That geographic pattern suggests that local market conditions—such as insurer competition, beneficiary health profiles, and physician practices—may significantly shape the incidence of payment reforms. Our descriptive findings so far highlight the need to further investigate how local market characteristics interact with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’s (CMS’s) rulemaking around plan finances to determine which parties benefit from or bear the burden of payment changes. As a next step, we intend to decompose the variation in plan payments, premiums, and benefits into components explained by observable factors (such as benchmarks, risk scores, quality bonuses, and rule-based elements in the CMS bidding tool) and unobservable factors (such as behavioral responses) to better understand the economic incidence of the ACA.
Substitution Between Medicare Advantage and Medigap
Presenter Daria Pelech
Session Enrollment Decision-Making in Medicare Advantage
Authors Daria Pelech (CBO) and Margaret Kallus (UC Berkeley Economics)
Abstract Though Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) covers many benefits, the program’s cost-sharing structure can expose beneficiaries to substantial financial risk. To protect against that risk, most beneficiaries obtain additional coverage. Historically, many beneficiaries have purchased supplemental Medigap policies—private insurance plans that “wrap around” Medicare FFS and cover Medicare FFS deductibles, copayments, and coinsurances. Increasingly, however, Medicare beneficiaries have enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, in which a private insurer covers enrollees’ Medicare benefits and often restructures their cost-sharing to reduce enrollees’ financial risk. As of 2024, just over half of all Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in MA, up from less than a third a decade earlier. Because Medigap and MA fill some of the same financial needs for many beneficiaries—defraying the cost of the traditional Medicare benefit—the premiums and availability of Medigap policies likely influence beneficiaries’ choices between Medicare FFS and MA. In the past decade, Medigap premiums have grown with inflation while MA premiums have largely stayed flat. The diverging affordability between those options might explain some of the increase in MA enrollment over the past 20 years.
This paper combines detailed data on Medigap premiums and Medicare enrollment to estimate the effect of Medigap premiums on MA enrollment. Specifically, we estimate how variation in Medigap premiums affects the probability that beneficiaries who are newly enrolling in Medicare choose MA. We also estimate the probability that MA enrollees leave their plans following a health shock or an increase in MA premiums. Using brokerage data on Medigap premiums, we estimate the average and minimum premiums each individual might face on the basis of their age, gender, zip code, and eligibility for an open-enrollment period. We combine that with a 10-year panel of individual Medicare enrollment data identifying beneficiaries who are new to Medicare or who disenroll from their MA plans. For enrollees who are new to Medicare, we estimate their probability of enrolling in MA on the basis of Medigap premiums and characteristics of the MA market in their area. For individuals who are enrolled in MA, we match Medicare enrollment data to external data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services using MA plan identifiers to identify which plans have experienced changes in premiums or benefits (which might induce a beneficiary to shop for a new plan) and which plans have been canceled (which requires a beneficiary to select a new plan). We also use individual-level beneficiary risk scores to identify beneficiaries who experience large health shocks, to compare their probability of leaving MA with that of other beneficiaries.
The results of this study will help us better understand Medigap’s role in the increase in MA enrollment, which in turn will help improve future projections of MA enrollment growth. The results will also inform estimates of policies that might change Medigap or MA availability—such as guaranteed open-enrollment periods for those who leave their MA plans or changes in payments to MA plans.
Chapin White is CBO’s Director of Health Analysis.
Headline: New Mu language model powers the agent in Windows Settings
We are excited to introduce our newest on-device small language model, Mu. This model addresses scenarios that require inferring complex input-output relationships and has been designed to operate efficiently, delivering high performance while running locally. Specifically, this is the language model that powers the agent in Settings, available to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel with Copilot+ PCs, by mapping natural language input queries to Settings function calls.
Mu is fully offloaded onto the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and responds at over 100 tokens per second, meeting the demanding UX requirements of the agent in Settings scenario. This blog will provide further details on Mu’s design and training and how it was fine-tuned to build the agent in Settings.
Model training Mu
Enabling Phi Silica to run on NPUs provided us with valuable insights about tuning models for optimal performance and efficiency. These informed the development of Mu, a micro-sized, task-specific language model designed from the ground up to run efficiently on NPUs and edge devices.
Encoder-Decoder Architecture compared to Decoder-only Architecture
Mu is an efficient 330M encoder–decoder language model optimized for small-scale deployment, particularly on the NPUs on Copilot+ PCs. It follows a transformer encoder–decoder architecture, meaning an encoder first converts the input into a fixed-length latent representation, and a decoder then generates output tokens based on that representation.
This design yields significant efficiency benefits. The figure above illustrates how an encoder-decoder reuses the input’s latent representation whereas a decoder-only must consider the full input + output sequence. By separating the input tokens from output tokens, Mu’s one-time encoding greatly reduces computation and memory overhead. In practice, this translates to lower latency and higher throughput on specialized hardware. For example, on a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (a mobile AI accelerator), Mu’s encoder–decoder approach achieved about 47% lower first-token latency and 4.7× higher decoding speed compared to a decoder-only model of similar size. These gains are crucial for on-device and real-time applications.
Mu’s design was carefully tuned for the constraints and capabilities of NPUs. This involved adjusting model architecture and parameter shapes to better fit the hardware’s parallelism and memory limits. We chose layer dimensions (such as hidden sizes and feed-forward network widths) that align with the NPU’s preferred tensor sizes and vectorization units, ensuring that matrix multiplications and other operations run at peak efficiency. We also optimized the parameter distribution between the encoder and decoder – empirically favoring a 2/3–1/3 split (e.g. 32 encoder layers vs 12 decoder layers in one configuration) to maximize performance per parameter.
Additionally, Mu employs weight sharing in certain components to reduce the total parameter count. For instance, it ties the input token embeddings and output embeddings, so that one set of weights is used for both representing input tokens and generating output logits. This not only saves memory (important on memory-constrained NPUs) but can also improve consistency between encoding and decoding vocabularies.
Finally, Mu restricts its operations to those NPU-optimized operators supported by the deployment runtime. By avoiding any unsupported or inefficient ops, Mu fully utilizes the NPU’s acceleration capabilities. These hardware-aware optimizations collectively make Mu highly suited for fast, on-device inference.
Packing performance in a tenth the size
Mu adds three key transformer upgrades that squeeze more performance from a smaller model:
Dual LayerNorm (pre- and post-LN) – normalizing both before and after each sub-layer keeps activations well-scaled, stabilizing training with minimal overhead.
Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) – complex-valued rotations embed relative positions directly in attention, improving long-context reasoning and allowing seamless extrapolation to sequences longer than those seen in training.
Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) – sharing keys / values across head groups slashes attention parameters and memory while preserving head diversity, cutting latency and power on NPUs.
Training techniques such as warmup-stable-decay schedules and the Muon optimizer were used to further refine its performance. Together, these choices deliver stronger accuracy and faster inference within Mu’s tight edge-device budget.
We trained Mu using A100 GPUs on Azure Machine Learning, taking place over several phases. Following the techniques pioneered first in the development of the Phi models, we began with pre-training on hundreds of billions of the highest-quality educational tokens, to learn language syntax, grammar, semantics and some world knowledge.
To continue to enhance accuracy, the next step was distillation from Microsoft’s Phi models. By capturing some of the Phi’s knowledge, Mu models achieve remarkable parameter efficiency. All of this yields a base model that is well-suited to a variety of tasks – but pairing with task-specific data along with additional fine-tuning through low-rank adaption (LoRA) methods, can dramatically improve the performance of the model.
We evaluated Mu’s accuracy by fine-tuning on several tasks, including SQUAD, CodeXGlue and Windows Settings agent (which we will talk more about later in this blog). For many tasks, the task-specific Mu achieves remarkable performance despite its micro-size of a few hundred million parameters.
When comparing Mu to a similarly fine-tuned Phi-3.5-mini, we found that Mu is nearly comparable in performance despite being one-tenth of the size, capable of handling tens of thousands of input context lengths and over a hundred output tokens per second.
Task Model
Fine-tuned Mu
Fine-tuned Phi
SQUAD
0.692
0.846
CodeXGlue
0.934
0.930
Settings Agent
0.738
0.815
Model quantization and model optimization
To enable the Mu model to run efficiently on-device, we applied advanced model quantization techniques tailored to NPUs on Copilot+ PCs.
We used Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) to convert the model weights and activations from floating point to integer representations – primarily 8-bit and 16-bit. PTQ allowed us to take a fully trained model and quantize it without requiring retraining, significantly accelerating our deployment timeline and optimizing for efficiently running on Copilot+ devices. Ultimately, this approach preserved model accuracy while drastically reducing memory footprint and compute requirements without impacting the user experience.
Quantization was just one part of the optimization pipeline. We also collaborated closely with our silicon partners at AMD, Intel and Qualcomm to ensure that the quantized operations when running Mu were fully optimized for the target NPUs. This included tuning mathematical operators, aligning with hardware-specific execution patterns and validating performance across different silicon. The optimization steps result in highly efficient inferences on edge devices, producing outputs at more than 200 tokens/second on a Surface Laptop 7.
Mu running a question-answering task on an edge device, using context sourced from Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)
Notice the fast token throughputs and ultra-fast time to first token responses despite the large amount of input context provided to the model.
By pairing state-of-the-art quantization techniques with hardware-specific optimizations, we ensured that Mu is highly effective for real-world deployments on resource-constrained applications. In the next section, we go into detail on how Mu was fine-tuned and applied to build the new Windows agent in Settings on Copilot+ PCs.
Model tuning the agent in Settings
To improve Windows’ ease of use, we focused on addressing the challenge of changing hundreds of system settings. Our goal was to create an AI-powered agent within Settings that understands natural language and changes relevant undoable settings seamlessly. We aimed to integrate this agent into the existing search box for a smooth user experience, requiring ultra-low latency for numerous possible settings. After testing various models, Phi LoRA initially met precision goals but was too large to meet latency targets. Mu, with the right characteristics, required task-specific tuning for optimal performance in Windows Settings.
While baseline Mu in this scenario excelled in terms of performance and power footprint, it incurred a 2x precision drop using the same data without any fine-tuning. To close the gap, we scaled training to 3.6M samples (1300x) and expanded from roughly 50 settings to hundreds of settings. By employing synthetic approaches for automated labelling, prompt tuning with metadata, diverse phrasing, noise injection and smart sampling, the Mu fine-tune used for Settings Agent successfully met our quality objectives. The Mu model fine-tune achieved response times of under 500 milliseconds, aligning with our goals for a responsive and reliable agent in Settings that scaled to hundreds of settings. The below image shows how the experience is integrated with an example showing the mapping from a natural use language query to a Settings action being surfaced by the UI.
Screenshot demonstrating the agent in Settings
To further address the challenge of short and ambiguous user queries, we curated a diverse evaluation set combining real user inputs, synthetic queries and common settings, ensuring the model could handle a wide range of scenarios effectively. We observed that the model performed best on multi-word queries that conveyed clear intent, as opposed to short or partial-word inputs, which often lack sufficient context for accurate interpretation. To address this gap, the agent in Settings is integrated into the Settings search box, enabling short queries that don’t meet the multi-word threshold to continue to surface lexical and semantic search results in the search box, while allowing multi-word queries to surface the agent to return high precision actionable responses.
Managing the extensive array of Windows settings posed its own challenges, particularly with overlapping functionalities. For instance, even a simple query like “Increase brightness” could refer to multiple settings changes – if a user has dual monitors, does that mean increasing brightness to the primary monitor or a secondary monitor?
To address this, we refined our training data to prioritize the most used settings as we continue to refine the experience for more complex tasks.
What’s ahead
We welcome feedback from users in the Windows Insiders program as we continue to refine the experience for the agent in Settings.
As we’ve shared in our previous blogs, these breakthroughs wouldn’t be possible without the support of efforts from the Applied Science Group and our partner teams in WAIIA and WinData that contributed to this work, including: Adrian Bazaga, Archana Ramesh, Carol Ke, Chad Voegele, Cong Li, Daniel Rings, David Kolb, Eric Carter, Eric Sommerlade, Ivan Razumenic, Jana Shen, John Jansen, Joshua Elsdon, Karthik Sudandraprakash, Karthik Vijayan, Kevin Zhang, Leon Xu, Madhvi Mishra, Mathew Salvaris, Milos Petkovic, Patrick Derks, Prateek Punj, Rui Liu, Sunando Sengupta, Tamara Turnadzic, Teo Sarkic, Tingyuan Cui, Xiaoyan Hu, Yuchao Dai.
Headline: AI at Work: Harvard’s Karim Lakhani on how AI is shifting from tool to ‘teammate’
Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani doesn’t just have theories about AI transforming work—he studies how it’s actually happening.
In a groundbreaking paper called “The Cybernetic Teammate,” he and his co-authors showed how individuals working with AI can be as effective as entire teams working without it. He is also rapidly evolving Harvard’s MBA program for the age of AI, which includes the launch of a new required course called Data Science and AI for Leaders.
When I hosted Karim for a conversation at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference last month in Las Vegas, he raised a provocative question: will AI drive the marginal cost of expertise down toward zero? As AI democratizes access to specialized knowledge across domains, it follows that expertise will shift from being rare and costly to abundant and accessible. “This will dramatically impact the nature of our organizations and strategy,” he told me, “because what are companies but bundles of expertise? And all of us invest to become deep experts in a domain.”
Here’s our conversation about organizations and leadership in the AI era (edited and condensed for clarity).
It’s a pleasure to talk with one of my friends about where AI is going and what it means for leaders. Karim, I want to start with that “Cybernetic Teammate” study, done with Procter & Gamble. Could you give us the backstory?
KARIM LAKHANI: The institute I run at Harvard, the Digital Data Design Institute, is looking at generative AI like a new “drug” in the economy. We don’t know its efficacy, the right doses, the side effects, or the right diet to follow while using it. We don’t know how actual work will transform with the introduction of this technology, so we run the equivalent of “clinical trials”—randomized controlled trials.
Victor Aguilar, head of research and development for Procter & Gamble, wanted to understand how generative AI could radically transform the innovation process at P&G. In innovation, there’s often this interaction between R&D and commercial people: R&D comes up with the technical ideas, but the commercial team asks, “is there a market for this or not?” The best practice is to have them collaborate in a team.
We designed this study of 758 professionals as what we call a two-by-two design: We had commercial and marketing folks work on challenges given by their business leaders—one group working without AI and one with AI. We also tested individuals under the same conditions. Then we randomized who was in which treatment and had them solve their problems with those tools.
Let’s talk about the results. This is the study that showed an individual equipped with AI could perform at least as well as—and sometimes outperform—entire teams of people without AI. It’s a landmark finding. Can you tell us about that?
LAKHANI: What does a teammate provide? They provide you with functional expertise, help you with coordination, and give you a sense of camaraderie. We measured these three elements remotely using Microsoft Teams as the platform.
The first finding was that when you look at pure performance, the quality of the ideas being created, individuals with AI were as good as a team without AI—and often as good as a team with AI. That was remarkable from our perspective.
The other interesting thing we saw was that individuals without AI tended to veer toward their functional expertise: marketing people gave marketing-based solutions, R&D people offered R&D-based solutions. But individuals with AI produced balanced solutions—comparable to the balanced solutions we saw from teams. That was a big moment for us.
Were there any other surprises in how people used AI, reframed their work, or wanted to use it going forward?
LAKHANI: We had done various studies before showing the productivity effects of AI, in terms of both quality and time. The time compression was actually quite remarkable. Teams normally experience a time penalty [because coordination takes time]. But with AI, that time penalty disappeared.
That was a big surprise. Another surprise was how people felt while using AI. They reported more positive emotions and fewer negative ones as they were doing the work.
The big aha for us was that AI shifted from being a tool to a teammate. This is unprecedented. We now have intelligence and expertise on tap.
I imagine what’s on people’s minds is, “I get it. I understand where the technology is…but what does this mean for me? What do I do as a leader?” What advice might you have for the group?
LAKHANI: Do you remember debates about whether we should have Wi-Fi in our offices? I’m sure some of you participated in them. The question maybe went up to your boards. Or remember the question, “Should employees have browsers? Access to global information?”
Those things didn’t fundamentally change the nature of work. But intelligence on demand, expertise on demand—these technologies are about work itself. You need to drive as much organizational transformation as technical transformation. We often say it’s 30% tech, 70% organization. Staple yourselves to your HR teams. Or have Copilot teach you the things about HR that you should know. It creates great tutorials, as you know. That’s the first thing.
Second: People are worried—really worried—about these technologies. That’s part of the conversation you need to have. How do we have an abundance mindset around this? What are the capability unlocks? Again, these are things that technology leaders have not typically been asked about. But you need to own it and engage in a conversation with your leaders and teammates about it.
Third: This type of change has to come from the top. I came up in the era of Wired magazine and Fast Company in the 1990s, when the internet came to workplaces. Fast Company was all about change agents. But change agents get massacred in most corporations. Why? Because if there’s no top-down buy-in, the change agents die on the vine. The key for us here is to make sure our top leaders understand this and see AI as a work and business technology, not as an information technology. Leaders in companies need to “do AI” (use Copilot as a thought partner all the time, build their own agents) as much as they “talk AI.”
Is there any last concept or idea that you feel has been left unsaid?
LAKHANI: Well, if I was good at predicting the future, I would be in the stock market, not academia. I tend to be very much an empiricist: I’ll come in with a discovery mindset, we’ll run the experiment, and then we’ll get the facts. But I’d love to offer a framing around this intelligence view.
I decided to become an academic in the 1990s when I discovered open-source software. We’re at the same juncture now. This stuff works in practice, but our management theories or economic theories don’t know how to handle this kind of technology.
Think back to the ‘90s again, when the browser became available. What did the browser and the internet really do? Essentially, they lowered the marginal cost of information transmission. If you go on a Teams call today with a global or national team, you don’t think twice about all the videos that are coming in. Thirty years ago, every one of us would have needed a camera operator, a sound operator, a satellite truck uplink, and a downlink. This would be prohibitively expensive. But today, the marginal cost of information transmission has gone down to zero, and we can seamlessly connect with anyone or any device globally.
In this moment, we’re predicting the same thing for expertise: the marginal cost of expertise is going to zero.
The clinical trials with our collaborative partners (Boston Consulting Group and P&G) are pointing in this direction, and this will dramatically impact the nature of our organizations and strategies. Because what are companies but bundles of expertise? We have finance, marketing, sales, R&D, and brand. You have all this expertise. As that cost of expertise drops, what a company does—what all of our roles are—is all up for invention and reinvention.
The direction of this change is up to all of us. We can’t just be the receivers of it; we have to understand what’s happening and then set the direction for ourselves and our companies.
Listen to Karim Lakhani’s recent appearance on the WorkLab podcast. For more insights about AI and the future of work, subscribe to this newsletter
Austin, TX , June 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pocket Knife Software, Inc. has announced the public launch of ANNIE, its proprietary AI-powered stock trading platform, after nearly a decade of private development and real-world testing. The system, originally built for personal use, is now available to independent investors via subscription at AI-StockTrading.com.
Rick Cockerham, Founder of Pocket Knife Software
Unlike traditional predictive models, ANNIE employs a hybrid of neural networks and genetic algorithms to evolve trading strategies based solely on real-world performance, leveraging real-world trading data since April 2024. The AI reviews over 1,200 U.S. equities daily and generates trade recommendations designed for consistency rather than speculation. Recent iterations of ANNIE have demonstrated performance levels approximately twice as strong as earlier versions, according to Pocket Knife Software’s internal data.
“ANNIE isn’t trying to guess where the market is going tomorrow,” said Rick Cockerham, creator of ANNIE and founder of Pocket Knife Software. “It’s designed to make sound trading decisions based on what works, using evolved strategies that continuously adapt to changing market conditions”.
And when ANNIE gives out recommendations, they’re exactly that. Because ANNIE delivers trade ideas – not automated trades – users stay in control of their money, their account, and their decisions.
Originally conceived while Cockerham was studying AI at Iowa State University in the 1990s, ANNIE has undergone years of iteration. These iterations led him to make ANNIE available to other independent investors seeking an alternative to traditional financial services.
The subscription service delivers daily buy and sell signals through email or text message approximately one hour before market close. Subscribers maintain full control over their investment accounts, allowing them to manually execute trades based on ANNIE’s recommendations. The platform also includes portfolio tracking and risk management signals such as stop-loss alerts.
“Most AI stock pickers rely on predictive models that can’t consistently outperform the market,” said Rick. “ANNIE is different because it evolves – discarding what doesn’t work and refining what does through live market results. That evolutionary engine is what sets ANNIE apart”.
ANNIE’s public release comes at a time when individual investors face mounting challenges competing against institutional capital and increasingly complex markets. Cockerham emphasizes that the platform is designed for serious, self-directed investors seeking a transparent and disciplined system that complements their own trading decisions.
About Pocket Knife Software
Founded by Rick Cockerham, Pocket Knife Software develops AI-powered financial tools for independent investors. The company’s flagship product, ANNIE, combines neural networks and genetic algorithms to evolve trading strategies based on real-world market performance. Operating from Austin, Texas, Pocket Knife Software is committed to making hedge-fund-grade technology accessible to self-directed investors. Learn more at AI-StockTrading.com.
Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts Ed Markey
Washington (June 20, 2025) — Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) today joined Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA-36) to introduce the “World Refugee Day Resolution” to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to supporting the safety, health and welfare of refugees and forcibly displaced persons worldwide as they flee persecution, conflict and violence. The resolution was cosponsored by 23 Senators and 49 Representatives.
“On World Refugee Day, I am reminded of our nation’s history of welcoming those who have been forced to flee from violence, persecution, disease, famine, and climate disaster,” said Senator Markey. “The United States must honor that history and remain a beacon of hope and safety. It is unconscionable that the Trump administration has turned its back on refugees and halted funding to resettlement agencies. Due to these cruel actions, refugees who have been rigorously vetted are being denied entry into the United States and forced to remain in dangerous conditions. While the world is dealing with the growing threats of climate change and ongoing conflicts, the United States mut remain a beacon of hope and safety. I am calling on the Trump administration to resume the resettlement of refugees without any further delays. Today and every day, we must say loudly and clearly that refugees are welcome here.”
“Conflict, persecution and violence continue to force millions of people from their homes – with more than 123 million people forcibly displaced at the end of 2024, including Afghans, Burmese Rohingya and Sudanese,” said Ranking Member Shaheen. “The United States has long been a leader in supporting refugees overseas and welcoming the most vulnerable, promoting stability around the world and boosting the U.S. economy through refugees’ contributions. Yet the Trump Administration is turning its back on this bipartisan legacy of support, slashing U.S. foreign aid programs that help refugees and host communities and indefinitely suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. On this World Refugee Day, our resolution honors the resilient spirit of forcibly displaced persons globally and calls on the Trump Administration to recommit to supporting refugees and displaced persons.”
“There used to be more consensus among Democrats and Republicans that the world’s wealthiest nation has an obligation to help those seeking refuge from violence, persecution, human rights abuses, and other dangers,” said Representative Lieu. “A strong U.S. foreign aid program was once considered both morally correct policy, and a smart return on investment that engendered good will and protected our national security. Now, Trump has turned his back on the world’s most vulnerable people by banning refugees and pulling funding for foreign aid programs. This is a terrible abdication of our duty to help those who need it the most. On World Refugee Day, those of us who want the world to be a more peaceful, prosperous place for everyone reiterate our call to help refugees who are fleeing unimaginable circumstances. Everyone deserves to live freely and safely.”
“With an ongoing refugee ban leaving so many with no path to protection – it is imperative we take this opportunity to stand in solidarity with all those forced to flee their homes around the world,” said Erol Kekic, Chief Strategy Officer at Church World Service. “CWS thanks Senator Shaheen and Representative Lieu for honoring refugees and leading this year’s congressional World Refugee Day resolution. From 80 years of walking alongside newcomers, CWS knows that refugees and immigrants enrich our communities – culturally, artistically, religiously, and economically. They are our neighbors and friends. They are mothers and fathers working to build better futures for their children.”
“Today, more than 123 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes—the highest number in recorded history,” said Myal Greene, President and CEO of World Relief. “On World Refugee Day, we remember that behind every statistic is a person made in the image of God, longing for safety, stability, and hope. This crisis should stir the conscience of lawmakers and citizens alike–particularly those, like me, motivated by the Christian faith. We urge Congress to champion policies that protect the persecuted, restore dignity, and uphold America’s long legacy of welcoming those fleeing violence and oppression.”
“On World Refugee Day, we are reminded that the right to seek safety is both a legal commitment and a moral imperative,” said Sharif Aly, President of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “The United States has the capacity, and the obligation, to uphold its commitments to refugees and asylum seekers. Yet today, tens of thousands of people who were promised protection under the U.S. resettlement program remain stranded due to unlawful and discriminatory policies. We commend this resolution for reaffirming the values enshrined in our Constitution and refugee laws and urge our leaders to restore U.S. leadership in protecting the rights and dignity of those forced to flee.”
“There has never been a more urgent moment for Congress to reaffirm America’s support for refugees, both at home and abroad,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International. “On World Refugee Day, we must renew our pledge to advance refugee protection, including by ensuring refugees have a role in shaping policy; to uphold the right to seek asylum; and to generously welcome those who seek safety and the chance to rebuild their lives with dignity and opportunity.”
“RCUSA reminds the Trump administration of the incredible contributions that refugees have made in the 45-year history of the refugee resettlement program,” said John Slocum, Executive Director of Refugee Council USA. “We stand in solidarity with those forced to flee their homes due to violence and persecution – families and individuals continue to seek safety, dignity, freedom, and opportunity in the face of unimaginable hardship. As global displacement reaches historic highs, the United States must lead with compassion and courage. That means rejecting fear-based policies and recommitting to a system that upholds the rights of all people to seek safety. Congress must invest in our nation’s capacity to welcome refugees and asylum seekers — and safeguard the use of public resources in good faith. RCUSA calls on all people of conscience to stand with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants, not only today but every day. Our work is far from over.”
The resolution is also cosponsored by Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Chris Coons (D-DE), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), John Fetterman (D-PA), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Peter Welch (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The House resolution is cosponsored by Representatives Gabe Amo (RI-D), Yassmin Ansari (AZ-D), Becca Balint (VT-D), Joyce Beatty (OH-D), Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL-D), Judy Chu (CA-D), Gil Cisneros (CA-D), Steve Cohen (TN-D), Danny Davis (IL-D), Diana Degette (CO-D), Suzan DelBene (WA-D), Mark DeSaulnier (CA-D), Adriano Espaillat (NY-D), Chuy Garcia (IL-D), Robert Garcia (CA-D), Sylvia Garcia (TX-D), Jonathan L. Jackson (IL-D), Pramila Jayapal (WA-D), Hank Johnson (GA-D), Ro Khanna (CA-D), Troy A. Carter, Sr. (LA-D), Summer Lee (PA-D), Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-D), Stephen Lynch (MA-D), Jennifer McClellan (VA-D), Betty McCollum (MN-D), Jim McGovern (MA-D), Robert Menendez (NJ-D), Gwen Moore (WI-D), Seth Moulton (MA-D), Kevin Mullin (CA-D), Jerrold Nadler (NY-D), Eleanor Norton (DC-D), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-D), Ilhan Omar (MN-D), Nancy Pelosi (CA-D), Mark Pocan (WI-D), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Jan Schakowsky (IL-D), Darren Soto (FL-D), Shri Thanedar (MI-D), Dina Titus (NV-D), Rashida Tlaib (MI-D), Jill Tokuda (HI-D), Paul Tonko (NY-D), Derek Tran (CA-D), Nydia Velazquez (NY-D), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-D) and Nikema Williams (GA-D).
The resolution is supported by the following organizations: Church World Service, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, Center for Victims of Torture, Climate Refugees, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, Franciscan Action Network, Friends Committee on National Legislation, HIAS, International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), Just Neighbors, National Partnership for New Americans, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, Refugee Advocacy Lab, Refugee Council USA, Refugee Congress, Refugees International, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, United Church of Christ, Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), World Relief and Women’s Refugee Commission.
Full text of the resolution is available HERE.
nited Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, following consultation with the United Nations University (UNU), announced today the appointment of Aya Suzuki of Japan as the next UNU Senior Vice-Rector. She succeeds Sawako Shirahase of Japan, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her dedication and service. Ms. Suzuki is a distinguished Japanese development economist whose main research interest is examining how developing countries can reduce poverty levels, with a particular focus on agricultural and industrial development.
She is a Professor in the Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She also serves as Special Adviser to the President of the University of Tokyo and as Deputy Director General of the Division of University Corporate Relations. In these leadership capacities, she has championed initiatives to promote social entrepreneurship, foster international collaboration and enhance support for students from the Global South.
Ms. Suzuki serves as an Auditor for the Japanese Association for Development Economics, an Editorial Board Member for the Asian Development Review, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, the Division of Management, the University of Waikato (New Zealand). She was a Founding Board Member of the Japanese Association for Development Economics. Her previous positions include Associate/Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo; Assistant Professor, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan); Visiting Scholar, School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, the Division of Management, the University of Waikato (New Zealand); Visiting Scholar at the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Research Institute; and policy advisory work with the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development.
Ms. Suzuki has published extensively on topics related to agricultural marketing and development economics. She holds a PhD in Development and Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Davis, United States; a Master of International Development Studies from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan; and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Waseda University, Japan. She is fluent in English, Japanese, and speaks basic Chinese (Mandarin).
New York, NY, June 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — After proving its AI tutoring platform with impressive MCAT results, averaging 2.9 hours of daily student engagement and an 11.2-point score improvement among retakers that outperformed all industry benchmarks, Studyverse is now taking its technology to tutoring firms nationwide.
Prynce Karki, CEO of Studyverse
“We had so many parents come up to us like, ‘Hey, can I get this for my other kid who’s not going into medicine?’” said Prynce Karki, CEO of Studyverse. The edtech startup behind MyMCAT.ai is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the tutoring industry, offering what Karki describes as “Palantir for tutoring firms, Duolingo for students.”
Originally built to tackle inefficiencies in standardized test prep, Studyverse guided pre-med students through gamified learning experiences with an AI cat named Kalypso, dramatically boosting both engagement and scores. Now, the company is licensing this proven technology to tutoring firms looking to modernize their operations and provide smarter student support, whether in sessions or between them.
“Most tutors just don’t have the time to understand their students,” said Karki. “But this gives students a learning companion who understands what they’re weak in, which allows tutors to spend their time more efficiently, and helps firms have the insight to deliver on the promises they sell.”
Prynce graduated from Rice University as a premed and helped dozens of students get into medical school as a tutor and leader within multiple firms. He created the platform to address the frustrations he faced with firms overcharging and underdelivering to the students that need it most. Diagnosed as a child, Karki spent much of his early education battling illness in and out of hospitals. With his family unable to afford private tutors due to medical expenses, he fell behind academically. “I needed something like this growing up,” he said. “So do millions of students across the United States.”
Pictured: MyMCAT’s digital studyverse to create a gamified immersive experience
MyMCAT.ai became a proof-of-concept: a gamified AI tutor that not only held students’ attention but also drove statistically significant results. “I spent so much money on a formal post baccalaureate degree and expensive prep course just to fail my MCAT,” Kaya said. “But I succeeded with MyMCAT.ai.”
Studyverse’s B2B platform is now onboarding tutoring organizations interested in complementing their tutoring with 24/7 AI-assisted instruction. The company reports active contract discussions and early adoption from firms seeking to upgrade their systems to thrive in an era defined by AI.
The broader vision, Karki noted, is to evolve humanity by becoming the digital infrastructure for the global tutoring market. “Every student we don’t support is potential we’re all losing: future doctors, innovators, leaders who never get their chance,” he said. “We plan to give every one of these students a tutor that cares.”
About Studyverse
Studyverse builds intelligent, gamified tutoring software that enhances student engagement and outcomes. Its flagship product, MyMCAT.ai, helped people who previously did poorly on the MCAT improve scores by an average of 11.2 points – more than triple the national benchmark, which is 3 points for retakers. Now expanding into B2B, Studyverse equips tutoring firms with adaptive AI infrastructure to drive results at scale. Learn more at studyverse.ai.
New York, NY, June 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — After proving its AI tutoring platform with impressive MCAT results, averaging 2.9 hours of daily student engagement and an 11.2-point score improvement among retakers that outperformed all industry benchmarks, Studyverse is now taking its technology to tutoring firms nationwide.
Prynce Karki, CEO of Studyverse
“We had so many parents come up to us like, ‘Hey, can I get this for my other kid who’s not going into medicine?’” said Prynce Karki, CEO of Studyverse. The edtech startup behind MyMCAT.ai is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the tutoring industry, offering what Karki describes as “Palantir for tutoring firms, Duolingo for students.”
Originally built to tackle inefficiencies in standardized test prep, Studyverse guided pre-med students through gamified learning experiences with an AI cat named Kalypso, dramatically boosting both engagement and scores. Now, the company is licensing this proven technology to tutoring firms looking to modernize their operations and provide smarter student support, whether in sessions or between them.
“Most tutors just don’t have the time to understand their students,” said Karki. “But this gives students a learning companion who understands what they’re weak in, which allows tutors to spend their time more efficiently, and helps firms have the insight to deliver on the promises they sell.”
Prynce graduated from Rice University as a premed and helped dozens of students get into medical school as a tutor and leader within multiple firms. He created the platform to address the frustrations he faced with firms overcharging and underdelivering to the students that need it most. Diagnosed as a child, Karki spent much of his early education battling illness in and out of hospitals. With his family unable to afford private tutors due to medical expenses, he fell behind academically. “I needed something like this growing up,” he said. “So do millions of students across the United States.”
Pictured: MyMCAT’s digital studyverse to create a gamified immersive experience
MyMCAT.ai became a proof-of-concept: a gamified AI tutor that not only held students’ attention but also drove statistically significant results. “I spent so much money on a formal post baccalaureate degree and expensive prep course just to fail my MCAT,” Kaya said. “But I succeeded with MyMCAT.ai.”
Studyverse’s B2B platform is now onboarding tutoring organizations interested in complementing their tutoring with 24/7 AI-assisted instruction. The company reports active contract discussions and early adoption from firms seeking to upgrade their systems to thrive in an era defined by AI.
The broader vision, Karki noted, is to evolve humanity by becoming the digital infrastructure for the global tutoring market. “Every student we don’t support is potential we’re all losing: future doctors, innovators, leaders who never get their chance,” he said. “We plan to give every one of these students a tutor that cares.”
About Studyverse
Studyverse builds intelligent, gamified tutoring software that enhances student engagement and outcomes. Its flagship product, MyMCAT.ai, helped people who previously did poorly on the MCAT improve scores by an average of 11.2 points – more than triple the national benchmark, which is 3 points for retakers. Now expanding into B2B, Studyverse equips tutoring firms with adaptive AI infrastructure to drive results at scale. Learn more at studyverse.ai.
Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.
But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.
Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.
Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.
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This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?
Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.
This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.
Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.
Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.
In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.
The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.
Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.
Trust before profits
Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.
In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.
Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.
For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.
When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.
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Atul K. Shah 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.
Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.
But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.
Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.
Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.
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This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?
Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.
This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.
Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.
Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.
In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.
The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.
Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.
Trust before profits
Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.
In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.
Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.
For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.
When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Atul K. Shah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Grace, PhD Candidate, Climate Change and Literature, Nottingham Trent University
Whether your favourite tree is in a private garden, on wasteland, in a school playground or on the street, your emotional response may be admiration, relaxation, rejuvenation or awareness of the seasons passing. But so many special trees are experiencing a combination of threats.
According to a new report from environmental charity the Tree Council and government-funded agency Forest Research, introduced pests and diseases, pollution, extreme weather and infrastructure development are all on the increase, which could be a disaster for the UK’s trees. These affect trees’ condition, resilience and capacity to mitigate the climate and nature crises.
Not only do trees play ecological roles in nature, such as shelter for wildlife and protection from floods, many people have long-standing connections to trees. A report from the Tree Council highlights the role of trees as an important part of the “fabric of human cultures and societies”.
This demonstrates a move away from appreciating only the ecological benefits provided by urban trees and towards the social and cultural importance they hold for local populations.
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The ecological and biodiversity values of trees are well-documented. Trees offer homes and food for birds, insects and wildlife. They prevent rainwater reaching the ground by as much as 45%. When combined with grass, surface water flooding is reduced by 99% compared with tarmac. Urban trees reduce air pollution, quieten noise and keep cities shaded and cool.
Thousands of people cast votes for their favourite trees in the UK and Europe. In a recent study, over half of 1,800 adults surveyed said they had a favourite tree and 74% felt that urban development is the greatest threat to our trees.
That’s not the only threat, though. Single species planting of street trees, for example, leaves the trees vulnerable to diseases (such as Dutch elm or ash dieback). Rising temperatures and water scarcity leaves trees competing for resources.
But what does that mean for our urban trees? Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside forest and woodland. Such trees form an essential habitat in urban areas where 83% of the UK’s population live, yet more than ever before our urban trees are facing threats from a deadly combination of environmental change and human development. In Wales, for example, 7,000 mature trees in towns and cities were lost between 2006 and 2013.
These can be on a street corner, beside a railway track or in a market square and includes very old trees like those listed on the ancient tree inventory plus otherwise unremarkable trees growing in unusual settings, such as the vandalised 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree.
Why we love trees
England is dawdling behind many other countries when it comes to protecting important trees. Forest Research found that trees outside woodland share many of the social and cultural values associated with trees in woodlands, however people make specific relationships with these urban trees and they are more likely to be considered unique and irreplaceable.
They can be recognised for their grace and beauty or for their associations with customs, beliefs and rituals. They can be a place to rest and play and symbols of community belonging. They can give a sense of continuity, connecting people’s lifespans with reflections about the natural world and everything beyond.
Many countries give clear titles to their important trees. In Poland, they are called natural monuments, in Germany they are living monuments. Spain, Belgium, Greece, Mexico and Finland use the term “monumental trees”. In New Zealand, special urban trees are referred to as national living landmarks. Currently England falls behind in designating trees for protection based on their historical or aesthetic importance.
Trees for everyone
A common feature across many countries is the opportunity for anyone, including members of the public, to recommend a tree for protection. Tree equity is the idea that everyone should have access to the benefits of trees. It includes prioritising and deploying resources in the areas where people have least access to them.
Tree inequity exists in most UK towns and cities. On average, the most economically and socially deprived and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have half the tree canopy cover compared to the least deprived and least diverse.
Canopy cover ranges from 1–2% in parts of north-east England to 36% in Hampstead, north London. Even within London there are wide variations.
So ensure your favourite tree can be appreciated and celebrated by your community as a living monument, make sure it is on the Trees Outside Woodland map. And check if itneeds a drink.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Grace, PhD Candidate, Climate Change and Literature, Nottingham Trent University
Whether your favourite tree is in a private garden, on wasteland, in a school playground or on the street, your emotional response may be admiration, relaxation, rejuvenation or awareness of the seasons passing. But so many special trees are experiencing a combination of threats.
According to a new report from environmental charity the Tree Council and government-funded agency Forest Research, introduced pests and diseases, pollution, extreme weather and infrastructure development are all on the increase, which could be a disaster for the UK’s trees. These affect trees’ condition, resilience and capacity to mitigate the climate and nature crises.
Not only do trees play ecological roles in nature, such as shelter for wildlife and protection from floods, many people have long-standing connections to trees. A report from the Tree Council highlights the role of trees as an important part of the “fabric of human cultures and societies”.
This demonstrates a move away from appreciating only the ecological benefits provided by urban trees and towards the social and cultural importance they hold for local populations.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
The ecological and biodiversity values of trees are well-documented. Trees offer homes and food for birds, insects and wildlife. They prevent rainwater reaching the ground by as much as 45%. When combined with grass, surface water flooding is reduced by 99% compared with tarmac. Urban trees reduce air pollution, quieten noise and keep cities shaded and cool.
Thousands of people cast votes for their favourite trees in the UK and Europe. In a recent study, over half of 1,800 adults surveyed said they had a favourite tree and 74% felt that urban development is the greatest threat to our trees.
That’s not the only threat, though. Single species planting of street trees, for example, leaves the trees vulnerable to diseases (such as Dutch elm or ash dieback). Rising temperatures and water scarcity leaves trees competing for resources.
But what does that mean for our urban trees? Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside forest and woodland. Such trees form an essential habitat in urban areas where 83% of the UK’s population live, yet more than ever before our urban trees are facing threats from a deadly combination of environmental change and human development. In Wales, for example, 7,000 mature trees in towns and cities were lost between 2006 and 2013.
These can be on a street corner, beside a railway track or in a market square and includes very old trees like those listed on the ancient tree inventory plus otherwise unremarkable trees growing in unusual settings, such as the vandalised 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree.
Why we love trees
England is dawdling behind many other countries when it comes to protecting important trees. Forest Research found that trees outside woodland share many of the social and cultural values associated with trees in woodlands, however people make specific relationships with these urban trees and they are more likely to be considered unique and irreplaceable.
They can be recognised for their grace and beauty or for their associations with customs, beliefs and rituals. They can be a place to rest and play and symbols of community belonging. They can give a sense of continuity, connecting people’s lifespans with reflections about the natural world and everything beyond.
Many countries give clear titles to their important trees. In Poland, they are called natural monuments, in Germany they are living monuments. Spain, Belgium, Greece, Mexico and Finland use the term “monumental trees”. In New Zealand, special urban trees are referred to as national living landmarks. Currently England falls behind in designating trees for protection based on their historical or aesthetic importance.
Trees for everyone
A common feature across many countries is the opportunity for anyone, including members of the public, to recommend a tree for protection. Tree equity is the idea that everyone should have access to the benefits of trees. It includes prioritising and deploying resources in the areas where people have least access to them.
Tree inequity exists in most UK towns and cities. On average, the most economically and socially deprived and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have half the tree canopy cover compared to the least deprived and least diverse.
Canopy cover ranges from 1–2% in parts of north-east England to 36% in Hampstead, north London. Even within London there are wide variations.
So ensure your favourite tree can be appreciated and celebrated by your community as a living monument, make sure it is on the Trees Outside Woodland map. And check if itneeds a drink.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Twenty-three years on from director Danny Boyle’s unforgettable film 28 Days Later, and five years on from COVID, horror is having a spectacular renaissance. With 28 Years Later, the franchise has returned to cinema as a mouthpiece for the unique pressures Britain is facing post-pandemic and post-Brexit.
In 2020, speculative architect and director Liam Young said: “I’m sure the scripts for a new genre of virus fictions or ‘Vi-Fi’ are already in the works and perhaps that is the real opportunity of this present moment, to imagine the potential fictions and futures, and to prototype the new worlds that we all want to be a part of when the viral cloud lifts.” Well, here that vision is.
In this film, Europe has contained the “rage virus” to Britain. There are French boats on quarantine patrols, Swedish soldiers mocking remaining mainlanders and St George’s flags burning.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
28 Years Later is set on Holy Island, off the coast of the UK. There, an isolated community is protected by tides which conceal and reveal a causeway through which islanders can leave to get to the mainland to forage.
One of the film’s most adrenaline-spiking scenes comes in the form of a terrifying chase back to the island. A young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) is hurrying back after performing his rite of passage ceremony in which he is instructed to kill infected people on the mainland. It’s sound-tracked to the transcendental tones of Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude.
Twenty-eight years on from the events of the first film, the infected have evolved. Boyle has re-imagined them in even more monstrous forms. Gore-lovers will enjoy the menacing new brand of infected – seven-foot “alphas” – who rip heads from the living and dangle their severed spines.
An ode to COVID
Talking about how the pandemic inspired 28 Years Later, Boyle told Sky News:
Suddenly everybody’s capital city, everywhere around the world was the same. And what was incredible about it was obviously just this idea which had previously only really belonged to films, like our film, where culture is suddenly just stopped dead.
Danny Boyle speaks about 28 Years Later.
The film’s stars, Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor Johnson, meanwhile have both said that they drew from their real-life experiences of pandemic isolation for their roles as Spike’s Geordie parents. As Taylor explained:
My son was 13, the same age as Alfie was when we were making this movie. I know what it was like to protect your family but also to not understand what was happening around us. And I thought it was interesting whilst reading this that an audience is going to understand that journey […] I drew upon a lot of those scenarios.
The film ushers in a new age of “Vi-Fi” without succumbing to pulpy pandemic storytelling. Boyle gives us an antidote to cultural amnesia around the pandemic through Dr Kelson, the mad doctor played by Ralph Fiennes.
Dr Kelson pushes against cultural erasure through his construction of a temple of bones: totems of tibias and a spire of skulls that honour the virus victims.
The trailer for 28 Years Later.
He touchingly explains that we are to remember death and remember love: “Every skull is a set of thoughts, these sockets saw, and these jaws swallowed.” Fiennes is adept at rendering this “crazy” loner character who has a knack for turning up at the right time; the effortlessness of his humanity is a pleasure to watch.
Boyle explained: “The COVID memorial wall opposite parliament is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … it sort of inspired Ralph Fiennes’ character and what he’s building as a gesture towards remembering everyone as a way of actually looking forwards, not a way of looking back.”
After the creative inertia brought on by the COVID lockdowns, I’ve detected tectonic shifts in pandemic storytelling in my interviews with COVID authors.
Stories like 28 Years Later that “quietly” insert the pandemic and push COVID into the background are considered the easiest to digest. These stories are part of a new, radical literary avant-garde that has emerged in contemporary literature to chronicle the COVID era.
Pandemic fiction has become an oft-maligned genre; conversations on my podcast, Pandemic Pages, with emergency planner Professor Lucy Easthope and horror author Kylie Lee Baker confirm that literary festivals and agents have expressed reluctance to read or publish COVID fiction. Professor Easthope explained that many people just don’t feel ready to read about the pandemic.
For Baker, it’s that many people simply find the associations too traumatic. However, judging from the reactions of cinema-goers when I saw 28 Years Later, there is an audience hungry for another serving of Boyle’s insatiable trilogy.
Lucyl Harrison 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.
Twenty-three years on from director Danny Boyle’s unforgettable film 28 Days Later, and five years on from COVID, horror is having a spectacular renaissance. With 28 Years Later, the franchise has returned to cinema as a mouthpiece for the unique pressures Britain is facing post-pandemic and post-Brexit.
In 2020, speculative architect and director Liam Young said: “I’m sure the scripts for a new genre of virus fictions or ‘Vi-Fi’ are already in the works and perhaps that is the real opportunity of this present moment, to imagine the potential fictions and futures, and to prototype the new worlds that we all want to be a part of when the viral cloud lifts.” Well, here that vision is.
In this film, Europe has contained the “rage virus” to Britain. There are French boats on quarantine patrols, Swedish soldiers mocking remaining mainlanders and St George’s flags burning.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
28 Years Later is set on Holy Island, off the coast of the UK. There, an isolated community is protected by tides which conceal and reveal a causeway through which islanders can leave to get to the mainland to forage.
One of the film’s most adrenaline-spiking scenes comes in the form of a terrifying chase back to the island. A young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) is hurrying back after performing his rite of passage ceremony in which he is instructed to kill infected people on the mainland. It’s sound-tracked to the transcendental tones of Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude.
Twenty-eight years on from the events of the first film, the infected have evolved. Boyle has re-imagined them in even more monstrous forms. Gore-lovers will enjoy the menacing new brand of infected – seven-foot “alphas” – who rip heads from the living and dangle their severed spines.
An ode to COVID
Talking about how the pandemic inspired 28 Years Later, Boyle told Sky News:
Suddenly everybody’s capital city, everywhere around the world was the same. And what was incredible about it was obviously just this idea which had previously only really belonged to films, like our film, where culture is suddenly just stopped dead.
Danny Boyle speaks about 28 Years Later.
The film’s stars, Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor Johnson, meanwhile have both said that they drew from their real-life experiences of pandemic isolation for their roles as Spike’s Geordie parents. As Taylor explained:
My son was 13, the same age as Alfie was when we were making this movie. I know what it was like to protect your family but also to not understand what was happening around us. And I thought it was interesting whilst reading this that an audience is going to understand that journey […] I drew upon a lot of those scenarios.
The film ushers in a new age of “Vi-Fi” without succumbing to pulpy pandemic storytelling. Boyle gives us an antidote to cultural amnesia around the pandemic through Dr Kelson, the mad doctor played by Ralph Fiennes.
Dr Kelson pushes against cultural erasure through his construction of a temple of bones: totems of tibias and a spire of skulls that honour the virus victims.
The trailer for 28 Years Later.
He touchingly explains that we are to remember death and remember love: “Every skull is a set of thoughts, these sockets saw, and these jaws swallowed.” Fiennes is adept at rendering this “crazy” loner character who has a knack for turning up at the right time; the effortlessness of his humanity is a pleasure to watch.
Boyle explained: “The COVID memorial wall opposite parliament is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … it sort of inspired Ralph Fiennes’ character and what he’s building as a gesture towards remembering everyone as a way of actually looking forwards, not a way of looking back.”
After the creative inertia brought on by the COVID lockdowns, I’ve detected tectonic shifts in pandemic storytelling in my interviews with COVID authors.
Stories like 28 Years Later that “quietly” insert the pandemic and push COVID into the background are considered the easiest to digest. These stories are part of a new, radical literary avant-garde that has emerged in contemporary literature to chronicle the COVID era.
Pandemic fiction has become an oft-maligned genre; conversations on my podcast, Pandemic Pages, with emergency planner Professor Lucy Easthope and horror author Kylie Lee Baker confirm that literary festivals and agents have expressed reluctance to read or publish COVID fiction. Professor Easthope explained that many people just don’t feel ready to read about the pandemic.
For Baker, it’s that many people simply find the associations too traumatic. However, judging from the reactions of cinema-goers when I saw 28 Years Later, there is an audience hungry for another serving of Boyle’s insatiable trilogy.
Lucyl Harrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As the days stretch long and the sun lingers late into the evening, most of us welcome summer with open arms. Yet for a surprising number of people, this season brings an unwelcome guest: insomnia.
For these people, summer is a time of tossing and turning, early waking – or simply not feeling sleepy when they should. Far from just being a nuisance, this seasonal insomnia may chip away at mood, concentration and metabolic health.
But why does insomnia spike in summer — and more importantly, what can be done about it? The answer lies in the light.
Every tissue in the body owns a molecular “clock”. However, these clocks take their cue from a central timekeeper – the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus. This cluster of about 20,000 neurons synchronises the myriad cellular clocks to a near 24-hour cycle.
It uses the external light detected by the eyes as a cue, driving the release of two different hormones: melatonin, which makes us sleepy and a pre-dawn surge cortisol to help us wake.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
In winter, this light cue is short and sharp. But in June and July, daylight can stretch on for 16 or 17 hours in the mid‑latitudes. That extra dose matters because evening light is the most potent signal for pushing the central timekeeper later. In summer melatonin shifts by roughly 30 minutes to an hour later, while dawn light floods bedrooms early and kills the hormone off sooner.
This can have a big effect on the amount of sleep we get. One study monitored the sleep of 188 participants in the lab on three nights at different times of the year. The researchers found that total sleep was about an hour shorter in summer than winter.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — the sleep stage most strongly linked to emotional regulation and the consolidation of emotionally charged memories — accounted for roughly half the sleep loss in summer.
The same team later tracked 377 patients over two consecutive years and showed that sleep length and REM sleep began a five‑month decline soon after the last freezing night of spring. Sleep length shrank by an average of 62 minutes, while REM decreased by about 24 minutes. Slow-wave sleep – the phase most critical for tissue repair, immune regulation and the consolidation of factual memories – reached its annual low around the autumn equinox.
Both studies took place in a city bathed in artificial light – suggesting that even in modern environments our sleep remains seasonally affected.
Big population surveys echo these findings. Among more than 30,000 middle‑aged Canadians, volunteers interviewed in midsummer said they slept eight minutes less than those interviewed in midwinter. The summer interviewees also reported greater insomnia symptoms in the fortnight after the autumn clock change – suggesting the abrupt time shift exacerbates underlying seasonal misalignment.
One study also compared the effect of summer sleep in people living at very different latitudes – such as near the equator, where there’s little change in day length in the summer, and near the Arctic circle, where the differences are extreme. The study found that for people living in Tromsø, Norway, their self-reported insomnia and daytime fatigue rose markedly in summer. But for people living in Accra, Ghana (near the equator), these measures barely budged.
This show just how strongly daylight – and the amount of daylight hours we experience – can affect our sleep quality. But it isn’t the only culprit of poor summertime sleep.
Temperature is another factor that can spoil sleep during the summer months.
Just before we fall asleep, our core body temperature begins a steep descent of roughly 1°C to help us fall asleep. It reaches its lowest point during the first half of the night.
On muggy summer nights this can make falling asleep difficult. Laboratory experiments show that even a rise from 26°C to about 32°C increases wakefulness and reduces both slow-wave and REM sleep.
Different people are also more vulnerable to summer insomnia than others. This has to do with your unique “chronotype” – your natural preference to rise early or sleep late.
Evening chronotypes – “night owls” – already lean towards later bedtimes. They may stay up even later when it stays bright past ten o’clock. Morning chronotypes, on the other hand, may find themselves waking up even earlier than they normally do because of when the sun rises in the summer.
Mood can amplify the effect. Research found people who suffered with mental health issues were more likely to experience difficulty sleeping in summer.
Get some morning sunshine. Try to step outside within an hour of waking up – even if it’s just for 15 minutes. This tells the clock that the day has begun and nudges it to finish earlier that evening.
Create an artificial dusk. Around two hours before bed, close the curtains, turn off the lights and reduce the intensity of your phone screen’s blue light to help your melatonin rise on time.
Don’t let the dawn light in. Being exposed to the dawn light too early will wake you up. Blackout curtains or a contoured eye-mask can ensure you don’t wake before you’re rested.
Keep things cool. Fans, breathable cotton or linen sheets or a lukewarm shower before bed all help the body to achieve that crucial one-degree drop in core temperature needed to get a good night’s sleep.
The deeper lesson here from chronobiology is that humans remain, biologically speaking, seasonal animals. While our industrialised lives flatten the calendar, our cells still measure day length and temperature just as plants and migratory birds do.
By adapting and aligning our habits with those light signals, we might just be able to recapture some sleep – even during the warmer months.
Timothy Hearn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As the days stretch long and the sun lingers late into the evening, most of us welcome summer with open arms. Yet for a surprising number of people, this season brings an unwelcome guest: insomnia.
For these people, summer is a time of tossing and turning, early waking – or simply not feeling sleepy when they should. Far from just being a nuisance, this seasonal insomnia may chip away at mood, concentration and metabolic health.
But why does insomnia spike in summer — and more importantly, what can be done about it? The answer lies in the light.
Every tissue in the body owns a molecular “clock”. However, these clocks take their cue from a central timekeeper – the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus. This cluster of about 20,000 neurons synchronises the myriad cellular clocks to a near 24-hour cycle.
It uses the external light detected by the eyes as a cue, driving the release of two different hormones: melatonin, which makes us sleepy and a pre-dawn surge cortisol to help us wake.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
In winter, this light cue is short and sharp. But in June and July, daylight can stretch on for 16 or 17 hours in the mid‑latitudes. That extra dose matters because evening light is the most potent signal for pushing the central timekeeper later. In summer melatonin shifts by roughly 30 minutes to an hour later, while dawn light floods bedrooms early and kills the hormone off sooner.
This can have a big effect on the amount of sleep we get. One study monitored the sleep of 188 participants in the lab on three nights at different times of the year. The researchers found that total sleep was about an hour shorter in summer than winter.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — the sleep stage most strongly linked to emotional regulation and the consolidation of emotionally charged memories — accounted for roughly half the sleep loss in summer.
The same team later tracked 377 patients over two consecutive years and showed that sleep length and REM sleep began a five‑month decline soon after the last freezing night of spring. Sleep length shrank by an average of 62 minutes, while REM decreased by about 24 minutes. Slow-wave sleep – the phase most critical for tissue repair, immune regulation and the consolidation of factual memories – reached its annual low around the autumn equinox.
Both studies took place in a city bathed in artificial light – suggesting that even in modern environments our sleep remains seasonally affected.
Big population surveys echo these findings. Among more than 30,000 middle‑aged Canadians, volunteers interviewed in midsummer said they slept eight minutes less than those interviewed in midwinter. The summer interviewees also reported greater insomnia symptoms in the fortnight after the autumn clock change – suggesting the abrupt time shift exacerbates underlying seasonal misalignment.
One study also compared the effect of summer sleep in people living at very different latitudes – such as near the equator, where there’s little change in day length in the summer, and near the Arctic circle, where the differences are extreme. The study found that for people living in Tromsø, Norway, their self-reported insomnia and daytime fatigue rose markedly in summer. But for people living in Accra, Ghana (near the equator), these measures barely budged.
This show just how strongly daylight – and the amount of daylight hours we experience – can affect our sleep quality. But it isn’t the only culprit of poor summertime sleep.
Temperature is another factor that can spoil sleep during the summer months.
Just before we fall asleep, our core body temperature begins a steep descent of roughly 1°C to help us fall asleep. It reaches its lowest point during the first half of the night.
On muggy summer nights this can make falling asleep difficult. Laboratory experiments show that even a rise from 26°C to about 32°C increases wakefulness and reduces both slow-wave and REM sleep.
Different people are also more vulnerable to summer insomnia than others. This has to do with your unique “chronotype” – your natural preference to rise early or sleep late.
Evening chronotypes – “night owls” – already lean towards later bedtimes. They may stay up even later when it stays bright past ten o’clock. Morning chronotypes, on the other hand, may find themselves waking up even earlier than they normally do because of when the sun rises in the summer.
Mood can amplify the effect. Research found people who suffered with mental health issues were more likely to experience difficulty sleeping in summer.
Get some morning sunshine. Try to step outside within an hour of waking up – even if it’s just for 15 minutes. This tells the clock that the day has begun and nudges it to finish earlier that evening.
Create an artificial dusk. Around two hours before bed, close the curtains, turn off the lights and reduce the intensity of your phone screen’s blue light to help your melatonin rise on time.
Don’t let the dawn light in. Being exposed to the dawn light too early will wake you up. Blackout curtains or a contoured eye-mask can ensure you don’t wake before you’re rested.
Keep things cool. Fans, breathable cotton or linen sheets or a lukewarm shower before bed all help the body to achieve that crucial one-degree drop in core temperature needed to get a good night’s sleep.
The deeper lesson here from chronobiology is that humans remain, biologically speaking, seasonal animals. While our industrialised lives flatten the calendar, our cells still measure day length and temperature just as plants and migratory birds do.
By adapting and aligning our habits with those light signals, we might just be able to recapture some sleep – even during the warmer months.
Timothy Hearn 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.
MPs have voted to introduce assisted dying, almost seven months after this bill was first debated in the House of Commons. The proposal – a backbench private member’s bill promoted by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater – would allow terminally ill people in England and Wales to receive assistance to end their lives.
That the bill has completed its House of Commons passage is an important milestone. Its success is perhaps also surprising given that private members’ bills face a precarious route through that chamber. Even a small number of determined opponents is often enough to derail them.
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But that has not materialised in this case. MPs on all sides of the debate deserve credit for enabling the bill to be decided on its merits rather than by procedural subterfuge and political game-playing.
Even so, the bill’s passage into law is not yet assured. It must now go through an equivalent series of legislative stages in the House of Lords. If the Lords makes any changes, these must in turn be agreed to by MPs – potentially setting off a process of compromise known as “ping-pong” – before the bill can enter the statute book.
Stereotypes of the Lords as a holdout of social conservatism are now largely out of date. Indeed it is the Lords that has, to a large extent, kept the issue of assisted dying on the political agenda. Prior to Leadbeater’s bill, peers proposed a series of private members’ bills on this topic – including in 2014, 2020, 2021 and 2024. None, however, made it through the chamber.
Despite this recent history, it is difficult to predict exactly how the Lords will respond to this assisted dying bill. As an unelected and largely appointed chamber, the Lords contains many members with expertise directly relevant to the bill, including medical, legal and disability rights. For many peers, the Lords’ central constitutional purpose is to subject proposals to in-depth scrutiny – and they will surely want to do so here.
In principle, it would be possible for the Lords to reject the assisted dying bill outright. The often-cited Salisbury convention, which states that peers should not block any proposal in the governing party’s election manifesto, would clearly not apply to this backbench measure.
Yet such an outcome would appear unlikely. In practice, it is exceptionally rare for any bill to be rejected outright by peers. This is in large part because the chamber recognises that it should be for the elected House of Commons to set the direction of policy, with the Lords playing a supporting scrutiny role.
Whatever the chamber’s balance of opinion on assisted dying – and some peers may well be individually willing to vote it down – the chamber as a whole seems likely to conclude that they would be playing with constitutional fire to reject such a high-profile bill that has been passed on a free vote by MPs.
In-depth scrutiny
What is more difficult to call is whether the bill could run out of time before it has completed its passage. The last time an assisted dying bill made significant progress in the Lords, a decade ago, it became mired in hundreds of amendments and never made it out of committee stage.
Given the gravity of this bill, and the degree of Lords expertise, there is likely to be significant demand to conduct in-depth scrutiny and to make amendments to the legislative text. Unlike in the House of Commons – where only a small number of amendments are selected by the speaker for a decision – in the Lords, every proposed amendment can be moved and spoken to. All of this will require parliamentary time.
It is also theoretically possible that a small number of opponents could deliberately propose large numbers of amendments purely to gum up proceedings. Most of the time, peers act with restraint – and they would probably do so here too, given the high risk of generating backlash against the chamber. But the combination of strong feelings with a “free-vote” conscience issue makes this harder to definitively rule out.
Adding to the unpredictability is that the timetables available remain uncertain. If the Lords makes any changes to the bill these would need to return to MPs for approval before the bill can pass into law. As things stand, the last available Commons sitting Friday – by default there are only 13 each session, when private members’ bills are considered – is July 11. There is now next to no chance of this deadline being met.
A tight timetable
It is possible in principle for the Lords to expedite scrutiny of the bill. But House of Lords procedures recommend observing minimum periods between bill stages. This ensures there is time, for example, to consider the issues raised at one stage before deciding whether to pursue them further at the next.
Departing from these conventions would be politically unthinkable on a bill criticised by many – largely unfairly – for inadequate parliamentary scrutiny.
Yet it is straightforward for ministers to grant additional time in the Commons. Indeed, it would arguably break with recent practice for time to not be provided. In both cases since 2010 where a regular private member’s bill required additional Commons time for Lords amendments – in 2019 and 2023 – this was provided by the then Conservative governments.
This means that the second key deadline is the end of the current parliamentary session, at which point most outstanding legislation automatically falls. Sessions typically last around one year, and some had expected this one to end sometime in the autumn.
But the length of sessions is elastic – within the control of ministers – and it is not unusual for those immediately after a general election to last significantly longer.
Nor does the Lords operate the same system of private members’ bill Fridays as the Commons, though it would be unusual to schedule substantive debates on them earlier in the week. Either way, there would surely be pressure for sufficient parliamentary time to be found.
Ultimately, one of the stories of this bill’s passage to date has been that the constraints of an often-inadequate parliamentary process have not been allowed to prevent MPs from expressing their will. Many in the Lords will recognise the risks of any situation in which they are now seen to stand in its way.
Daniel Gover 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.
When Nato leaders meet for their annual summit in The Hague on Wednesday June 25, all eyes will be on Donald Trump. Not only is the 47th president of the United States less committed to the alliance than any of his predecessors in Nato’s 76-year history. But he has also just joined Israel’s war with Iran and seems to have given up his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
Leaders of Nato’s 32 member states should therefore have had a packed agenda. Although there are several meetings and a dinner planned for June 24, the actual summit – which has tended usually to stretch out over several days – has been reduced to a single session and a single agenda item. All of this has been done to accommodate the US president.
A single session reduces the risk of Trump walking away from the summit early, as he did at the G7 leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16.
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Trump has frequently complained, and not without justification, that European members of the alliance invested too little in their defence and were over-reliant on the US. A draft summit declaration confirming the new spending target has now been approved after Spain secured an opt-out.
Even accounting for Trump’s notorious unpredictability, this should ensure that Nato will survive the Hague summit intact. What is less clear is whether Nato’s members can rise to the unprecedented challenges that the alliance is facing.
These challenges look different from each of the member states’ 32 capitals. But, for 31 of them, the continued survival of the alliance as an effective security provider is an existential question. Put simply, they need the US, while the US doesn’t necessarily need to be part of the alliance.
The capability deficit that Canada and European member states have compared to the US was thrown into stark relief by Washington’s airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. This is not simply a question of increasing manpower and to equip troops to fight. European states also lack most of the so-called critical enablers, the military hardware and technology required to prevail in a potential war with Russia.
This includes, among other things, intelligence capabilities, heavy-lift aircraft to quickly move troops and equipment and command and control structures that have traditionally been provided by US forces. These will take significant time and resources to replace.
For now, Russia is tied down in Ukraine, which will buy time. And the 5%-commitment – even if not all member states will get there quickly or at all – is likely to go some way towards to mobilise the necessary resources for beefing up Europe’s defences. But time and resources are not limitless. And is not yet clear what the American commitment to Europe will be in the future and when and how it will be reduced.
A new type of war
Nor is it completely obvious what kind of war Europe should prepare for. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is both a very traditional war of attrition and a very modern technological showdown.
A future confrontation with the Kremlin is initially likely to take the form of a “grey-zone” conflict, a state of affairs between war and peace in which acts of aggression happen but are difficult to attribute unambiguously and to respond to proportionately.
This has arguably already started with Russian attacks on critical infrastructure. And as the example of Ukraine illustrates, grey-zone conflicts have the potential to escalate to conventional war.
In February 2022, Russia saw an opportunity to pull Ukraine back into its zone of influence by brute force after and launched a full-scale invasion, hoping to capture Kyiv in a matter of a few days. This turned out to be a gross misjudgement on the Kremlin’s part. And three years on from that, if frequent Russian threats are to be believed, the possibility of a nuclear escalation can no longer be ruled out either.
Key members of the alliance are unequivocal in their assessment of Russia as an existential threat to Europe. This much has been made clear in both the UK’s strategic defence review and the recent strategy paper for the German armed forces.
Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of The Netherlands, gives a press conference before the Nato summit.
Yet, this is not a view unanimously shared. Trump’s pro-Putin leanings date back to their now infamous meeting in Helsinki when he sided with the Russian president against his own intelligence services.
In Europe, long-term Putin supporters Victor OrbanOrbán and Robert Fico, the prime ministers of EU and Nato members Hungary and Slovakia, have just announced that they will not support additional EU sanctions against Russia.
Hungary and Slovakia are hardly defence heavyweights, but they wield outsized institutional power. Their ability to veto decisions can disrupt nascent European efforts both within the EU and Nato to rise to dual challenge of an increasingly existential threat to Europe from Russia and American retrenchment from its 80-year commitment to securing Europe against just that threat.
What will, and more importantly what will not, happen at the Nato summit in The Hague will probably be looked back on as another chapter in the remaking of the international order and the European security architecture. A Nato agreement on increased defence spending should be enough to give the organisation another lease of life. But the implicit inability to agree on what is the main threat the alliance needs to defend itself against is likely to put a short expiration date on that.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
Obesity remains one of the most pressing, and preventable, health challenges of our time. The UK is one of a number of countries undoubtedly struggling with it.
It affects nearly every organ system in the body, contributing to cardiovascular conditions like coronary heart disease; musculoskeletal issues such as osteoarthritis and gout; and even the development of certain cancers, including of the breast, uterus and colon. Its impact on mental health is also significant.
A few years ago, injectable weight-loss drugs entered clinical use and quickly captured public attention for their ability to promote rapid fat loss. Ozempic is available on the NHS, but only for managing type 2 diabetes. Wegovy is authorised for weight loss and cardiovascular risk reduction and is also available on the NHS, though access is currently limited to specialist weight management services.
Now, a new option has emerged: Mounjaro, which is approved for both type 2 diabetes and weight loss. This dual-purpose drug is now available on the NHS, offering another potential tool in the fight against obesity.
Demand is expected to be high. However, access will be limited at first, with strict eligibility criteria for NHS prescriptions.
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What is Mounjaro?
Mounjaro (tirzepatide) is a once weekly injectable medication designed to help control blood-sugar levels. It works by boosting the secretion and effects of insulin, improving glycaemic control in people with Type 2 diabetes. It also slows gastric emptying — the process by which food leaves the stomach — and enhances feelings of fullness by acting on the brain. This combined effect reduces appetite and helps support weight loss.
Compared to similar medications like Ozempic and Wegovy (both brand names for semaglutide), clinical trials found Mounjaro more effective, with some participants losing up to 20% of their body weight over a 72-week period.
First, patients need a BMI of 40 or more (classified as morbid obesity). People from certain ethnic backgrounds, such as South Asian communities, may be eligible at a lower BMI due to higher clinical risk of health conditions.
Second, at least four obesity-related health conditions must be diagnosed, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), dyslipidaemia (abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels), cardiovascular disease and obstructive sleep apnoea. (Some of these conditions often occur together; for example, high blood pressure and cholesterol.)
Patients are encouraged to check their BMI and confirm their diagnoses before contacting a GP. This helps ensure appointments are used effectively and discussions remain focused.
While the current criteria are strict, there is optimism that eligibility will broaden in the coming years to include people with lower BMIs and fewer co-morbidities.
Not eligible? Don’t despair
The NHS continues to offer a comprehensive weight-loss programme, tiered according to BMI and previous attempts at weight loss. Don’t underestimate the value of group-based programmes or community referrals – when a healthcare professional refers a patient to a community-based health service for further care or support – many of which can be accessed via your GP.
These services, such as the NHS digital weight management programme, support both individuals and families and can be highly effective for sustainable fat loss.
GPs may also refer patients to online courses and structured exercise programmes. Lifestyle interventions, including increased physical activity and healthier eating, remain cornerstones of obesity treatment and are critical for long-term success, even when medications are used.
Higher tier interventions may be considered if lifestyle changes fail or if the patient has significant co-morbidities. This is where medications like Mounjaro, or private prescriptions, may become relevant – albeit that the cost of the latter may be a limiting factor for some.
Other treatments include Orlistat, a medication that reduces fat absorption in the gut. This can be effective for some but often causes unpleasant side effects, such as oily stools and gastrointestinal upset
Gastric banding or surgery may also result in significant, sustained weight loss, but they come with risks, can lead to surgical complications, and recovery can be demanding
It’s also important to recognise that drugs like Mounjaro aren’t suitable for everyone. They can cause side effects significant enough for people to stop using them, and in some cases, they may not work at all.
In this new era of faster, medication-assisted weight loss, we must remember that long-term change is about more than quick fixes. Sustainable success comes from consistent effort, willingness to change and methods that are both practical and lasting.
Medications can help, sometimes dramatically, but they’re not the only answer. A return to basics, with tailored support and realistic goals, remains as relevant as ever.
So whether you qualify for Mounjaro, are trying lifestyle changes, or are exploring other options, remember this: the journey to better health is personal, gradual and worth it.
Dan Baumgardt 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.
MPs voted to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales on June 20 after the third reading of the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill. The bill has been heavily contentious, both in terms of ethics and the technical aspects of the parliamentary process, with many feeling the legislation was rushed.
This was the final vote in the House of Commons on the bill, which now moves to the House of Lords before becoming legislation.
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The bill passed with 314 votes to 291 – a majority of 23. This was a smaller margin of victory than the previous occasion MPs voted on the legislation in October 2024, when a majority of 55 supported its passage. The question, therefore, is: “who switched?”
Excluding the speaker, the SNP MPs, who typically do not vote on issues specific to England and Wales, Sinn Fein MPs, who cannot vote because they do not take their seats, and the new Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby, Sarah Pochin, who replaced former Labour MP Mike Amesbury between the second and third reading of this bill, we are left with 632 MPs to study.
Characteristic
Overall (N = 632)
Yes (N = 313)
No (N = 292)
Abstain (N = 27)
Female
260 (100%)
136 (52%)
110 (42%)
14 (5.4%)
Ethnic MP
90 (100%)
26 (29%)
59 (66%)
5 (5.6%)
LGBT
70 (100%)
50 (71%)
19 (27%)
1 (1.4%)
Elected As
Labour
410 (100%)
229 (56%)
165 (40%)
16 (3.9%)
Conservative
121 (100%)
20 (17%)
94 (78%)
7 (5.8%)
Liberal Democrat
72 (100%)
55 (76%)
14 (19%)
3 (4.2%)
Independent
6 (100%)
0 (0%)
6 (100%)
0 (0%)
Democratic Unionist Party
5 (100%)
0 (0%)
5 (100%)
0 (0%)
Reform UK
5 (100%)
1 (20%)
4 (80%)
0 (0%)
Green Party
4 (100%)
4 (100%)
0 (0%)
0 (0%)
Plaid Cymru
4 (100%)
3 (75%)
1 (25%)
0 (0%)
Social Democratic & Labour Party
2 (100%)
1 (50%)
0 (0%)
1 (50%)
Alliance
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
Traditional Unionist Voice
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
Ulster Unionist Party
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
MP Religious
Not Religious
228 (100%)
173 (76%)
48 (21%)
7 (3.1%)
Religious
404 (100%)
140 (35%)
244 (60%)
20 (5.0%)
MP Religion
None
228 (100%)
173 (76%)
48 (21%)
7 (3.1%)
Christian
313 (100%)
117 (37%)
181 (58%)
15 (4.8%)
Catholic
34 (100%)
7 (21%)
27 (79%)
0 (0%)
Muslim
25 (100%)
2 (8.0%)
22 (88%)
1 (4.0%)
Jewish
13 (100%)
7 (54%)
4 (31%)
2 (15%)
Sikh
12 (100%)
6 (50%)
4 (33%)
2 (17%)
Hindu
6 (100%)
1 (17%)
5 (83%)
0 (0%)
Buddhist
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
1 (100%)
0 (0%)
In total, 56 MPs changed position between the second and third reading. The no vote was stickier than the yes vote. Of those who voted no for the second reading, 97% did so in the third reading, and just one MP went from the no to the yes camp (Jack Abbott, the Labour MP for Ipswich).
On the other hand, 14 MPs went from yes to no, and a further 15 went from yes to abstaining. Of the MPs who abstained for the second reading, ten later voted yes and ten voted no. This was not, however, enough for the bill to be blocked.
How religion affected the vote
It was [already clear](https://theconversation.com/assisted-dying-bill-religious-mps-were-more-likely-to-oppose-law-change-in-first-round-of-voting-256503](https://theconversation.com/assisted-dying-bill-religious-mps-were-more-likely-to-oppose-law-change-in-first-round-of-voting-256503) that support and opposition to the bill was linked to not only political party but religious outlook. And there is some evidence that religion played a role in motivating switchers.
Apart from Labour, which broke 56% to 40% in favour of assisted dying, most other parties leant heavily in one direction or the other. This mirrors the divide along religion, where non-religious MPs were more likely to back the bill (76% to 21%) compared to religious MPs, who were half as likely to support it (35% to 60%).
If we compare religious MPs to non-religious MPs, the former were more likely to switch to no (45% of religious MPs who switched did so to no, compared to 38% of non-religious MPs) than yes (18% against 25%). In both groups, 38% abstained in the third round.
This pattern continues across parties too – all the Conservative MPs who changed position were religious (although more than 90% of the Conservative Party are religious, so we shouldn’t read too much into this).
Among Labour MPs, who obviously make up the bulk of any parliamentary vote, there was a striking similarity in switching between religious and non-religious MPs. Of the switchers, 29% of Labour’s religious and non-religious MPs switched to yes, whilst 38% of religious and 36% of non-religious MPs switched to no.
The effects of religion also play out within parties. Of the 11 MPs who switched to yes, seven were Labour Christian MPs, and the other four were non-religious Labour MPs.
Two MPs elected under Reform’s banner – Lee Anderson and the now-independent Rupert Lowe – switched from yes to no, the former being non-religious and the latter a Christian. No Liberal Democrat MP switched to a yes vote, but the four who switched to no were religious – the one non-religious switcher abstained.
Overall, it is clear that while religion is still important in structuring how MPs voted on assisted suicide, the role of party cannot be ignored – even in a free vote like on assisted dying.
David Jeffery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin
On Sunday June 22, Donald Trump announced that several of Iran’s most important nuclear facilities had been “completely obliterated” and that the country’s nuclear weapons programme had been crippled. Iran denied this and vowed to retaliate. The Iranian parliament has already given approval to closing the strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil transits en route to customers all over the world.
Initially the US government insisted that the objective was simply to halt Iran’s nuclear programme. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said several times that he wanted to topple Iran’s theocratic regime. And the day after the US bombing raids, Donald Trump also began to talk of regime change in Iran.
We asked Middle East expert Scott Lucas how the situation might develop.
How might this now escalate?
Iran’s leadership has no good military options, just as it has had limited capabilities in the nine days since Israel launched its missile strikes and targeted assassinations across the country. In theory, it could target US forces, with up to 40,000 in the region within range of missiles and drones. Iran-backed militias in Iraq could also attack US personnel on bases in the country.
But the Biden administration showed that it would hit these back hard. When the militias in Iraq and the Assad regime’s Syria killed troops and a contractor, Washington pummelled the groups with airstrikes. Iran’s Quds Force, responsible for operations outside the Islamic Republic, told the militias to stop.
Iran could target the US fleet in the Persian Gulf. It has also threatened to close the vital strait of Hormuz. But given that 20% of the world’s oil goes through the waterway, those operations would incur the wrath not only of Washington but of other countries. The Gulf states, whose support Tehran desperately wants and needs, would be angered.
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Iranian hybrid attacks, through cyber-warfare and assassination plots, are also a possibility. But the US and other states have clamped down on those activities in recent years with toughened surveillance, enforcement and sanctions on Iran, making their achievement of results more difficult.
So while Iran continues to launch a dwindling stock of missiles at Israel, I think that its strategy beyond that is political. Play the victim and try to encourage other states, including the Gulf countries and the Europeans, to distance themselves from the Trump administration.
What does this tell us about the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu?
Benjamin Netanyahu has played Trump to ensure the success of Israel’s war. It’s as simple as that. As recently as February 4, Trump came close to humiliating the Israeli prime minister when he visited Washington to ask for the administration’s support for strikes on Iran. As Netanyahu sat uncomfortably in the White House press briefing, Trump declared that the US was going to open negotiations with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Netanyahu told the Trump administration in mid-May that it was intending to go ahead with strikes on Iran, even without US approval. There was some manoeuvring over the next three weeks, as the US and Iran went through five sets of talks. But on June 8, Trump met his national security advisors at Camp David in Maryland, where the CIA director John Ratcliffe and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dan Caine, briefed him on the threat from Iran.
The next day Netanyahu told Trump over the phone that Israel was going ahead with its attacks, which it launched four days later. The US duly cancelled the sixth set of peace talks in Oman. Now Trump, with the Orwellian cry of “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”, has blown up those negotiations for the foreseeable future.
Both countries are watching closely and calculating their response. On May 22, Beijing condemned “a reckless escalation and a flagrant violation of international law”. But its response will largely be rhetorical, avoiding any military or even political entanglement. If the US deepens its involvement in Iran’s war, including with any further strikes, China will step up the rhetoric while seeking advantage from the instability. It will play the responsible power, pursuing peace and progress, in contrast to a destructive and unreliable Trump administration. That would be a certain diplomatic win for Beijing.
Russia is in a trickier position because of its 40-month full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has no end in sight. Iran has been an essential part of the military campaign, providing thousands of drones for Moscow’s daily attacks on military and civilian sites. As recently as April, the two countries signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement, pledging closer cooperation in trade, defence, energy, and regional infrastructure projects. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi has flown to Moscow for “serious consultations” with Russian “friends”, including Vladimir Putin.
But Russia’s scope for intervention could be limited. Just before the US attacks the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he might mediate between Israel and Iran. Trump immediately slapped him down. And the Kremlin will not want to commit military resources to what might be a prolonged conflict, since it is already stretched – maybe overstretched – in Ukraine both on the battlefield and on the economic front.
What will the Arab world be thinking?
Perhaps the most important reaction to the strikes is coming from the Gulf states, in particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. Only a few weeks ago Trump was in the Gulf signing deals on trade and arms. But Gulf leaders are rattled by what might be an expanding, destructive conflict with the prospect of a power vacuum in Tehran.
For months, they have manoeuvred against that instability in discussions with the Islamic Republic as well as with Washington. With its open-ended war in Gaza, Israel has already shattered the economic and political prospects of “normalisation” (establishing diplomatic relations and trade partnerships). Now the Gulf states are worried how far Israel and Iran will carry out their confrontation across the Middle East.
There had been hints that they might come off the fence between flattering Trump and pushing back against Washington, and this now appears to have happened – to an extent anyway. Without naming the US, Saudi Arabia “condemned and denounced” the violation of Iran’s sovereignty. Qatar said the US strikes would have “catastrophic repercussions”. The UAE warned all parties to avoid those “serious” repercussions, and Oman went farther by criticising the breaking of international law.
Trump ignored his own intelligence. So who is helping him game out this situation?
That’s a great question with no clear answer. It is clear that it’s not the director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, reportedly out of favour because she dared to publicise the assessment of US intelligence agencies that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But with other cabinet members all proclaiming that this was Donald Trump’s “brilliant” plan, it is hard to see who led in pushing him away from negotiations and into the strikes.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is little more than a hyperactive cheerleader. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is balancing between promoting the strikes and urging Iran to return to negotiations. The US vice-president, J.D. Vance, was central last week in efforts to persuade Republican legislators to back the strikes, amid the split in the Trumpist bloc over attacks.
In the end, much of the impetus for this comes from Israel. Netanyahu has been careful to lavish praise on the US president for his “bold decision”, which he said would “change history”. With encouragement from a roll call of his Republican party admirers, Trump appears to have eagerly taken this up as his “victory”, claiming to have achieved “peace through strength”.
Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, Director of Centre for AI Futures, SOAS, University of London
While there’s been much negative discussion about AI, including on the possibility that it will take over the world, the public is also being bombarded with positive messages about the technology, and what it can do.
This “good AI” myth is a key tool used by tech companies to promote their products. Yet there’s evidence that consumers are wary of the presence of AI in some products. This means that positive promotion of AI may be putting unwanted pressure on people to accept the use of AI in their lives.
AI is becoming so ubiquitous that people may be losing their ability to say no to using it. It’s in smartphones, smart TVs, smart speakers like Alexa and virtual assistants like Siri. We’re constantly told that our privacy will be protected. But with the personal nature of the data that AI has access to in these devices, can we afford to trust such assurances?
Some politicians also propagate the “good AI” promise with immense conviction, mirroring the messages coming from tech companies.
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My current research is partly explained in a new book called the The Myth of Good AI. This research shows that the data feeding our AI systems is biased, as it often over-represents privileged sections of the population and mainstream attitudes.
This means that any AI products that don’t include data from marginalised people, or minorities, might discriminate against them. This explains why AI systems continue to be riddled with racism, ageism and various forms of gender discrimination, for instance.
The speed with which this technology is impinging on our everyday life, makes it very hard to properly assess the consequences. And an approach to AI that is more critical of how it works does not make for good marketing for the tech companies.
Power structures
Positive ideas about AI and its abilities are currently dominating all aspects of AI innovation. This is partly determined by state interests and by the profit margins of the tech companies.
These are tied into the power structures held up by tech multi-billionaires, and, in some places, their influence on governments. The relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, despite its recent souring, is a vivid manifestation of this.
And so, the public is at the receiving end of a distinctly hierarchical top-down system, from the big tech companies and their governmental enablers to users. In this way, we are made to consume, with little to no influence over how the technology is used. This positive AI ideology is therefore primarily about money and power.
As it stands, there is no global movement with a unifying manifesto that would bring together societies to leverage AI for the benefit of communities of people, or to safeguard our right to privacy. This “right to be left alone”, codified in the US constitution and international human rights law, is a central pillar of my argument. It is also something that is almost entirely absent from the assurances about AI made by the big tech companies.
Yet, some of the risks of the technology are already evident. A database compiling cases in which lawyers around the world used AI, identified 157 cases in which false AI-generated information – so called hallucinations – skewed legal rulings.
Some forms of AI can also be manipulated to blackmail and extort, or create blueprints for murder and terrorism.
Tech companies need to programme the algorithms with data that represents everyone, not just the privileged, in order to reduce discrimination. In this way, the public are not forced to give into the consensus that AI will solve many of our problems, without proper supervision by society. This distinction between the ability to think creatively, ethically and intuitively may be the most fundamental faultline between human and machine.
It’s up to ordinary people to question the good AI myth. A critical approach to AI should contribute to the creation of more socially relevant and responsible technology, a technology that is already trialled in torture scenarios, as the book discusses, too.
The point at which AI systems would outdo us in every task is expected to be a decade or so away. In the meantime there needs to be resistance to this attack on our right to privacy, and more awareness of just how AI works.
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam 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.
Today marks more than five decades since the passage of Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education.
Only 37 words long, Title IX has advanced equal opportunity in admissions, financial aid, athletics, and more in educational settings across the United States. At its core, the law operates as a contract between the federal government and educational institutions. It conditions the acceptance of federal funding to schools on the agreement to comply with not discriminating on the basis of sex in their programs and activities.
Equality under Title IX was also built on the understanding that physical differences between men and women matter, particularly in athletics and private spaces. Whether in the locker room, on the playing field, or in college dorms, women and girls fought for the right to fair educational and athletic opportunities.
Protecting fairness today means meeting one of the most pressing challenges that Title IX faces: the inclusion of males in women’s single-sex spaces and activities.
“The recent cultural movement to erase biological distinctions has metastasized into misguided policies across our country,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, “This Division will continue to stand firmly in defense of the immutable biological reality of sex in preserving the fairness, safety, privacy, and speech of all Americans.”
The Civil Rights Division is committed to continuing the legacy and original intent of Title IX, and we will not back down.
Earlier this month, we warned California Public School Districts that they may be violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution for allowing males to compete against females in high school sports. The state of California has pre-emptively sued the Department of Justice over this warning, and we are now in active litigation. We also opened an inquiry into concerns raised to us about similar issues in the state of Oregon.
In another case, we opened an investigation into a Virginia school, arising from three male students who raised concerns — partially based on faith — about a girl in their locker room. The boys were then subjected to Title IX investigations, which may have been potentially retaliatory.
The Department of Justice celebrates the protections afforded by Title IX today, and the Civil Rights Division will continue to uphold its responsibility by enforcing the equality and justice it has provided to generations of Americans.
