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Category: Education

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Food insecurity in Lebanon returns to near pre-conflict levels – but gains remain fragile, new report shows

    Source: World Food Programme

    21 per cent of Lebanon’s population faces acute food insecurity, projected to worsen by the summer.

    BEIRUT – Under the patronage and in the presence of Lebanese Minister of Agriculture Dr. Nizar Hani, and with the participation of WFP Representative and Country Director in Lebanon Mr. Matthew Hollingworth, Acting FAO Representative in Lebanon Ms. Veronica Quattrola and a number of experts and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Lebanon: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report for the period of April to October 2025 was launched at the Ministry’s headquarters in Beirut.

    Link to latest report

    BEIRUT – Under the patronage and in the presence of Lebanese Minister of Agriculture Dr. Nizar Hani, and with the participation of WFP Representative and Country Director in Lebanon Mr. Matthew Hollingworth, Acting FAO Representative in Lebanon Ms. Veronica Quattrola and a number of experts and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Lebanon: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report for the period of April to October 2025 was launched at the Ministry’s headquarters in Beirut.

    The report shows that one in five people in Lebanon – around 1.17 million individuals – are facing crisis or emergency levels of acute food insecurity between April and June 2025. While this figure reflects gradual recovery compared to figures from earlier this year, when 1.65 million people were affected following the conflict, gains remain fragile without sustained support.

    This gradual recovery in food security levels is attributed mainly to the ceasefire agreement, a short-term increase in food assistance, and relative recovery in some local markets. However, the country continues to grapple with major challenges including the deterioration of agricultural infrastructure, rising inflation rates, economic stagnation, and concerning funding gaps in humanitarian programmes.

    The report highlights that the recent conflict caused significant damage to agricultural assets, especially in southern Lebanon, leading to a decline in production and disruption of food sources for many households. Damaged infrastructure – estimated to cost billions of dollars – remains unrepaired, and local economies are recovering at a slow pace. The number of internally displaced persons is estimated at around 100,000 people.

    “What the numbers are telling us is that while immediate and widespread humanitarian support before and throughout the ceasefire have eased pressures, the situation remains precarious,” said Matthew Hollingworth, WFP Lebanon Representative and Country Director. “Many families are one setback away from slipping back into crisis. Predictable, sustained assistance will be crucial to ensure these improvements hold.”

    According to FAO Representative in Lebanon a.i, Veronica Quattrola: “Escalating hostilities and mass displacement have severely disrupted agrifood systems, threatening food security. Agriculture is a vital pillar for resilience and recovery, making urgent, targeted support essential to restore production, stabilize food access, and build long-term resilience in affected communities.”

    The report identifies the highest levels of food insecurity in the governorates of Baalbek-Hermel, Baabda, Bint Jbeil, Marjayoun, Nabatieh, Tyre, and Akkar. According to the data:

    • Around 591,000 Lebanese (15% of Lebanese households),
    • Approximately 515,000 Syrian refugees (37% of Syrian refugees),
    • Nearly 67,000 Palestinian refugees (30% of Palestinian refugees),

    are currently living under crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity and are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

    IPC projections estimate that the number of affected individuals will rise to 1.24 million people – about 23% of the population analysed – between July and October 2025, due to seasonal factors, continued economic contraction (with GDP still 34% below 2019 levels), and a likely decline in humanitarian aid funding.

    During the report launch, Minister of Agriculture Dr. Nizar Hani stressed that Lebanon continues to suffer from the cumulative effects of financial, economic, and social crises since 2019, which have severely impacted living conditions and increased food insecurity. He said:

    “As part of its national responsibilities, the Ministry of Agriculture placed food security at the core of its strategy and requested to join the IPC initiative in 2022 to establish an accurate scientific basis for guiding policy.”

    He highlighted that the analysis results confirmed the urgent need for swift interventions, particularly in areas heavily affected by the hostilities, such as Akkar, Baalbek, Hermel, Bint Jbeil, and Marjayoun.

    The Minister added: “We need to strengthen national partnerships and expand coordination among relevant ministries – including Economy, Health, Environment, Social Affairs, Education, and Energy – to build an integrated national response that supports social safety nets, nutrition, education, and agriculture.” 

    He stressed that boosting sound agricultural production is a key entry point to achieving sustainable food security and noted several ministry initiatives in this regard, including the launch of a “Food Contaminant Observatory” and the reactivation of central laboratories in Kfarshima to ensure food safety and quality.

    In conclusion, Minister Hani thanked the Ministry’s partners – WFP, FAO, the American University of Beirut, the Central Administration of Statistics, and NGOs – for their efforts, stating:

    “Food security is a national responsibility that requires inclusive cooperation and continuous coordination among all stakeholders to build a more resilient society and ensure a fairer, more stable citizenship for everyone living in Lebanon.”

     

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    About the World Food Programme (WFP)

    The United Nations World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

    Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, via @wfp_media

     

    About the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

    The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Our goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. With 195 members – 194 countries and the European Union, FAO works in over 130 countries worldwide.

    Follow us on @FAOLebanon, FAOinLebanon

     

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI Canada: Child care program closed due to non-compliance

    Source: Government of Canada regional news (2)

    MIL OSI Canada News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: SEC Names Erik Hotmire as Chief External Affairs Officer and Director of the Office of Public Affairs

    Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

    The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Erik Hotmire will return to the SEC as Chief External Affairs Officer and Director of the Office of Public Affairs, effective June 16, 2025. 

    “I am delighted that Erik is coming back to the SEC to provide his talents and experience to continue our meaningful outreach to those interested in our activities,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins. “His leadership will be essential for helping market participants and investors clearly understand our priorities and actions, guided by the SEC’s core mission: investor protection; fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and capital formation.”

    Throughout his career, Mr. Hotmire has served in numerous positions in the federal government. He is former Senior Advisor and spokesman to then-SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, and Senior Advisor to the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. He also served as Special Assistant to the President and a White House domestic policy spokesman for President George W. Bush. Earlier, Mr. Hotmire served as spokesman for two U.S. Senators.

    More recently, Mr. Hotmire held senior roles at corporate affairs advisory firms including as partner and co-founder of Watermark Strategies, partner at Brunswick Group where he was global co-lead of the firm’s financial institutions group, senior managing director at Teneo, and partner at FGS Global. Mr. Hotmire began his career in radio and television journalism. He earned a B.A. in political science from Taylor University.

    “I am honored Chairman Atkins asked me to join him and valued SEC colleagues to advance the Commission’s vital work for investors and the capital markets,” said Mr. Hotmire. “I look forward to engaging market participants and the investing public, especially given the nation’s rapidly changing and vibrant financial system.”

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: ICYMI: OPINION | How GOP Governors are Leading the Charge Against Antisemitism — and for Civil Rights

    Source: US State of Arkansas

    ICYMI: OPINION | How GOP Governors are Leading the Charge Against Antisemitism — and for Civil Rights

    The New York Post published “How GOP Governors are Leading the Charge Against Antisemitism — and for Civil Rights,” an op-ed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin on what conservative states are doing to combat hate and antisemitism:

    The heartless execution of a young couple outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum. The terrorist who used a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to injure elderly pro-Israel rally-goers in Boulder, Colo. The arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor.

    These headlines, and many others in recent weeks, brought home a growing threat we governors have been tracking with great alarm: A new generation of Americans has been conditioned to hate Jews with an intense bigotry experienced by no other minority group.

    It’s time for leaders of conscience to draw a bright line, translating rhetoric into robust action to protect all members of the Jewish community from the scourge of antisemitism.

    How did we arrive at today’s disturbing reality — where our nation’s small Jewish population endures 68% of all religion-based hate crimes?

    Jews have long been a convenient scapegoat for extremists of all stripes, but today antisemitism has become an elite phenomenon, erupting with particular vehemence on college and university campuses.

    Antisemitic incidents across the United States spiked by over 600% since September 2023, a recent Combat Antisemitism Movement study found, with most of the increase coming on college campuses.

    Students are not born bigoted. Someone is teaching them to hate.

    Indeed, some teachers have exploited their privileged positions at the front of the classroom to propagandize and manipulate the impressionable young minds in their care.

    Meanwhile, many school administrators have lacked the intellectual and moral clarity to forcefully counter the antisemitism spilling out into the quad and amplified on social media.

    College officials who set aside “safe spaces” and promoted narrow campus speech codes to prevent “micro-aggressions” and “triggers” hypocritically dropped those standards when Jewish students found themselves blocked from classrooms and libraries (or, as at Cooper Union College, trapped within one as a mob raged outside).

    Bigotry that would have been instantly and rightly crushed had it targeted other minorities was instead condoned — and even sometimes celebrated.

    Let us be clear: No student should face threats in the classroom or on campus, nor feel targeted because of their religion or heritage.

    All bigotry, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise, is wrong, absolutely un-American, and cannot be tolerated.

    As governors, we are responsible for the safety of our constituents, especially students in our schools.

    To fight the rising tide of hatred, we have all signed executive orders and legislation in recent months to combat antisemitism.

    Our directives require public schools to tackle antisemitism in the same manner as any other form of discrimination prohibited by state or federal law.

    To help confused school officials, we require student codes of conduct to clearly define antisemitism via the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance standard, and mandate protections guaranteed under Title VI of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

    Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma now designate a Title VI coordinator to monitor, review and investigate antisemitic complaints and incidents of discrimination in public K–12 and post-secondary schools.

    Similarly, Virginia established a cross-government and stakeholder work group to carry out these same responsibilities. The group submits an annual report clearly documenting any antisemitic incidents in the state, ensuring that those affected can pursue the justice they deserve.

    Currently, we are each creating or strengthening statewide oversight mechanisms to ensure all reported antisemitic incidents are investigated and remedied. Accountability reassures victims that their complaints will be met with a vigorous response.

    We are also incorporating and deepening education on antisemitism and Jewish-American history into our K-12 and higher ed classes — desperately needed, as surveys indicate declining knowledge about the Holocaust among American students.

    We have come to see the struggle against antisemitism as a pillar of American civil rights. 

    Just as racial reactionaries once disingenuously invoked “states’ rights” and “majority rule” to impede progress, leftists today cynically and disingenuously invoke “free speech” to justify the deliberate intimidation of Jewish students — a disturbing echo of attempts to drive black students from campuses even after the law compelled desegregation.

    We believe in free speech, but the First Amendment does not protect acts of violence or threats of physical harm.

    Yet standing up to bigotry takes courage. Too many school leaders — and state leaders, too — have become paralyzed by the politicization of antisemitism across our society.

    We, however, are proud to champion this fight, the civil rights movement of our time, and we call upon governors and state legislators across the country to join us.

    Taking firm action against antisemitism can unite all citizens of good will in a righteous effort to restore the American promise for a new generation.

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    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Kids Must Escape the Algorithm. A Phone Ban Does That.

    Source: US State of New York

    oday, the USA Today Network published an op-ed by Governor Kathy Hochul about her commitment as New York’s first Mom Governor to fighting for our kids, including her nation-leading cell phone ban to her work cracking down on addictive social media algorithms and tackling AI threats head on. Text of the op-ed can be viewed online and is available below:

    With the school year quickly coming to an end, many parents will soon exchange the daily battle of getting their kids out the door to school with prying their attention away from phones.

    Smartphones and social media have a stranglehold on our children. They’re spending hours each day on their phones, scrolling instead of socializing, immersed in someone else’s reel instead of living their own lives. And it’s taking a toll. Our kids are lonelier, more anxious and increasingly disconnected.

    We’re in the middle of a youth mental health crisis. The research shows it, but I don’t need another scientific report — I’ve heard directly from parents, teachers and teenagers all across this state about the issue. And everywhere I go, I hear the same thing: addictive technology is hurting our kids.

    As New York’s first Mom Governor, this is personal to me. I’ve raised teenagers. I know the helplessness a parent feels when their child is suffering. It’s the worst feeling in the world. So I knew we had to do something about it.

    I’m not one for half measures. I’m not going to sit back and talk about the problem. I’m going to take action.

    Last year, I took the bold, decisive step to restrict the addictive algorithms that have monopolized our kids’ social media feeds. It wasn’t about telling our teenagers they can’t use social media. It was about saying to social media companies, you cannot profit off of our kids’ wellbeing.

    But social media isn’t the only threat. In this rapidly advancing, technology-driven world, unchecked AI-enabled technology is creating new risks, from AI chatbots that simulate personal relationships to deepfake apps that produce explicit images of minors.

    We saw the tragic consequences of inaction last year when a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after developing an unhealthy relationship with an AI Companion. And we’ve also seen a disturbing rise in AI-enabled “undressing” applications and websites that are being used to create fake nude images of real kids, often targeting teenage girls – in the first half of 2024 alone, 16 of such websites were visited over 200 million times.

    My state budget tackles these digital threats head on. It establishes first-in-the-nation safeguards for AI companions — requiring AI companion operators in New York to implement a safety protocol if a user talks about self harm, like referring users to a crisis hotline. And I am updating our laws to treat AI-generated child sexual abuse material as what it is: child pornography.

    But social media and AI-generated websites are only a couple pieces of the puzzle. What is the vehicle that allows kids to have their lives dominated by these platforms? It’s not just what’s on the screen, it’s the fact the screen is always there. Buzzing in our kids’ pockets, lighting up on their desks, following them from homeroom to the cafeteria.

    This has lasting consequences: Classrooms where kids sit in silence. Hallways without chatter. Lunch tables full of students texting each other instead of talking face to face. When teens spend a quarter of the school day on their phones, they miss out on the essential social development that shapes them into capable, confident adults.

    And the pressure to stay online is relentless. One student told me, “you have to save us from ourselves. We can’t put these phones down because we’ll be out of the loop. We’ll miss out on something.”

    That’s why, starting this fall, I’m taking another bold step to give our children their childhood’s back and banning cell phones in the classroom bell-to-bell. Here’s why: our young people succeed when they’re learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling.

    Think about it — we don’t teach kids to make friends by showing them 100 online videos about friendship. We take them to the playground. We don’t show them how to toss a baseball on YouTube. We play catch with them.

    We need to get our kids back into real life.

    So let’s get back to that throwback time, when we weren’t all sitting indoors, held captive to our phones. That’s the spirit behind my “Get Offline, Get Outside” initiative.

    I’m investing in building and renovating community centers, playgrounds, and swimming pools to give our kids places to enjoy recreation and the outdoors. I’m also dramatically expanding youth programming, helping tens of thousands more kids join the local soccer team or participate in a community theater program. And our Summer Youth Employment Program will help tens of thousands of young people find good summer jobs at places like parks, summer camps, cultural centers, and community-based organizations.

    I’ll never stop fighting for our children’s futures. Because your family is my fight. I said that on day one, and I mean it just as much today.

    Summer is here. Let’s get offline and get outside.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Along the Ancient Silk Road, Xi Jinping Forges New Ties with Central Asia

    Translation. Region: Russian Federal

    Source: People’s Republic of China in Russian – People’s Republic of China in Russian –

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

    BEIJING, June 13 (Xinhua) — In the summer sun-drenched Xi’an, China’s ancient capital, six pomegranate trees stand gracefully near the site of the first China-Central Asia Summit in May 2023, their branches hanging low and laden with fruit.

    Planted two years ago by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the leaders of five Central Asian countries, this living avenue serves as a vivid testimony to the increasingly close and dynamic ties between China and Central Asia.

    Building on past achievements, Xi and his Central Asian counterparts will gather in the Kazakh city of Astana later this month for a second summit to ensure even closer cooperation on trade, security and connectivity in the heart of Eurasia.

    FORMATION OF A NEW PARADIGM

    The Xi’an summit in 2023 was the first ever meeting of heads of state under the China-Central Asia cooperation mechanism. In the embrace of the ancient city, they agreed to hold the summit every two years, alternately in China and Central Asia.

    Last year, the mechanism was further institutionalized with the establishment of a secretariat in Xi’an, the capital of Xi’s home province of Shaanxi.

    The Chinese leader attaches great importance to China’s relations with the region. In his opinion, Central Asia is at a strategic crossroads, linking East and West, North and South.

    “Developing friendly and cooperative relations with Central Asian countries is a priority of China’s foreign policy,” Xi Jinping said during his first visit to Central Asia since being elected as China’s president in 2013.

    Since then, he has visited the region eight times, deepening partnerships bilaterally and through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia.

    Today, Central Asia is the only region in the world where every country is a strategic partner of China. According to Xi Jinping, these partnerships have paved a new path of good-neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation, creating a new paradigm of international relations.

    The main event of the Xi’an summit was the signing of the Xi’an Declaration, in which the Chinese president and the leaders of the five Central Asian countries promised to work together to build a closer China-Central Asia community with a shared future.

    This promise is in line with the core idea of Xiplomacy’s diplomatic strategy: creating a community with a shared destiny for humanity. Notably, this idea has already been fully realized at the bilateral level in Central Asia.

    Sheradil Baktygulov, Director of the Institute of World Politics of Kyrgyzstan, noted that the common political will of Xi Jinping and the leaders of Central Asian countries is the key to the sustainable development of Chinese-Central Asian cooperation.

    “This cooperation not only strengthens bilateral ties, but also lays the foundation for a new model of multilateral cooperation in the Eurasian region,” he added.

    The Chinese leader’s strong personal rapport with Central Asian leaders is helping to strengthen these ties. At the Xi’an summit, Xi Jinping hailed Tajik President Emomali Rahmon as an “old friend.” During talks with Xi, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev called him his “dear brother.”

    Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, also an experienced sinologist, arrived in Xi’an on his 70th birthday. Xi told him: “Your visit on such a special occasion speaks volumes about the strength of our bilateral relations and confirms your unique bond with China.”

    REVIVAL OF THE GREAT SILK ROAD

    “Start loading!” Xi Jinping and K.-Zh. Tokayev jointly gave this command at the launch ceremony of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route China-Europe, which took place in July 2024 in Astana.

    The event marked the formal establishment of a multi-dimensional connectivity network combining roads, railways, airlines and pipelines to better link Asia to Europe via the Caspian Sea. The network is expected to become a vibrant artery under the Belt and Road Initiative.

    While the ancient Silk Road witnessed vibrant trade and cultural exchanges between China and Central Asia, Xi Jinping sees the region as an important partner in modern Belt and Road cooperation.

    In September 2013, also in Astana, the Chinese President gave a historic speech at Nazarbayev University, where he first outlined his vision for the construction of the “Silk Road Economic Belt” – a key component of the Belt and Road Initiative.

    “We can actively discuss the best ways to improve cross-border transport infrastructure,” Xi said, “and work to build a transport network connecting East, West and South Asia to promote economic development and travel in the region.”

    In the years since, the Chinese leader’s vision has steadily been realized. For example, late last year, the Kyrgyz border city of Jalal-Abad hosted a ceremony to mark the start of construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. In a congratulatory message, Xi Jinping called for the railway to become a “new demonstration project” for Belt and Road cooperation.

    The railway will start at the ancient Silk Road junction of Kashgar (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China), pass into Kyrgyzstan via the Torugart Pass, reach Jalal-Abad and end in Andijan in eastern Uzbekistan.

    According to Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, this railway is not just a transport corridor, but an important strategic bridge connecting the countries of the East and West.

    Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative has effectively boosted trade, travel, and exchanges in the region. In 2024, trade between China and Central Asian countries reached a record US$94.8 billion, driven in part by the booming cross-border e-commerce. China is now the region’s top trading partner and a major source of investment.

    In 2014, Tajikistan became the first country to sign a memorandum of understanding with China on the joint development of the Silk Road Economic Belt. Since then, cooperation has yielded tangible results, many of which have been personally supported by Xi Jinping, ranging from the construction of new highways and power plants to new iconic buildings in cities.

    Tajikistan is also home to Central Asia’s first “Lu Ban Workshop” – a Chinese vocational education center that has already trained more than 1,500 students in practical skills in engineering, architecture, water management and environmental protection, cultivating talent for the country’s future development.

    During his state visit to Dushanbe in 2024, Xi Jinping told Emomali Rahmon: “I saw a more prosperous Tajikistan.”

    WEAVING THE “CULTURAL CANVAS”

    In the fall of 2022, during a visit to the legendary Silk Road city of Samarkand, Xi Jinping presented Uzbekistan President Sh. Mirziyoyev with a special gift: a miniature of Khiva, an ancient outpost on the Silk Road.

    Khiva is the first cultural heritage project in Central Asia supported by China. Years of restoration work led by Chinese specialists have given the ancient city a new look.

    “The project to preserve and restore historical monuments in Khiva, launched during my visit to Samarkand in 2013, has been successfully completed, further enhancing the charm of this ancient city,” Xi wrote in an opinion piece ahead of his 2022 visit to Uzbekistan.

    During his previous visit to the country in 2016, Xi met with Chinese experts working on the project. “Make sure the cultural relics are well protected,” he urged them.

    Since then, joint archaeological research by scientists from China and Central Asia has spread across the region, including the ancient city of Rakhat in Kazakhstan and the ancient Buddhist temple at Krasnaya Rechka in Kyrgyzstan.

    Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that the friendship between China and Central Asia has a long history. He has repeatedly referred to the life story of Zhang Qian, the Han Dynasty envoy who traveled west more than 2,100 years ago and opened the way for lasting friendship and exchanges between China and the region. He has also stressed the need to “build on our traditional friendship.”

    During his state visit to Kazakhstan in 2024, Xi, together with President K.-Z. Tokayev, opened the Kazakhstan branch of Beijing Language and Culture University, the same university where the Kazakh president studied Chinese in the 1980s. Xi expressed hope that the establishment of the branch would enhance mutual understanding between the two peoples, especially between the younger generations.

    During his visit, Xi met with a group of schoolchildren who greeted him in Chinese and sang a Chinese song. Some of them spoke of their dream of attending Tsinghua University, the Chinese leader’s alma mater.

    “I also wish with all my heart that you will be able to enter good universities in the future. And we will be glad if you continue your education in China,” the Chinese President said with a smile.

    Commenting on the broader impact of such exchanges, Uzbek political commentator Sharofiddin Tulaganov noted that under the cooperation mechanism between China and Central Asia, mutual learning between civilizations will be greatly expanded.

    In today’s complex international environment, he added, such institutionalized humanitarian exchanges will provide valuable cultural impetus to efforts to maintain regional peace and promote common development. –0–

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Chairman Aguilar Announces House Democratic Caucus Poverty Task Force as House Republicans Slash Basic Needs Programs

    Source: US House of Representatives – Democratic Caucus

    The following text contains opinion that is not, or not necessarily, that of MIL-OSI –

    June 11, 2025

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar announced the re-launch of the Democratic Caucus Task Force on Poverty. Chaired by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12), the Task Force will focus on solutions to help working families meet their basic needs and fight back against the extreme budget cuts passed by House Republicans, which rip away programs that millions of Americans rely on. 

    “House Democrats know that America’s strength comes from the promise that every person has the chance to succeed if they work hard and follow the rules,” said Chairman Aguilar. “Instead of building on those values, House Republicans are pushing an extreme budget that attacks the very programs working families rely on. Slashing food assistance, Medicaid and Social Security—all to give massive tax breaks for billionaires—will only make it harder for families to meet their basic needs at a time when prices are soaring and the economy is crashing. I am grateful to Rep. Watson Coleman’s leadership as our Caucus stands united in our fight against these cruel proposals that will only push more families into poverty.”  

    “In the wealthiest country in the world, there should be a floor beneath which we allow no person, no child, no family to fall. I look forward to working with the Poverty Taskforce to construct this floor and ensure all Americans have the opportunity to thrive,” said Rep. Watson Coleman. “I look forward to working with Caucus Chair Aguilar, our vice chairs, and our entire Democratic Caucus on promoting an economy that works for everyone, not just the ultra-wealthy, and creating an environment of fairness. It’s time we expand the conversation around the term “poverty” beyond just those on or below the federal poverty line. The United States has the resources and opportunity to end poverty once and for all. I’m ready to work with my colleagues towards accomplishing just that.”

    Chair Aguilar and Chair Watson Coleman also announced the Poverty Task Force Vice Chairs, who will focus on the following priorities: 

    • Rep. Sara Jacobs, Vice Chair on Economic Mobility
    • Rep. Jim McGovern, Vice Chair on Hunger
    • Rep. Bobby Scott, Vice Chair on Education and Workforce Development
    • Rep. Sylvia Garcia, Vice Chair on Housing and Transportation
    • Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Vice Chair on Health Care 

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    Previous Article

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: SEC Names Kurt Hohl as Chief Accountant

    Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

    The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Kurt Hohl, with nearly 40 years of accounting and auditing experience, has been named Chief Accountant, effective July 7, 2025. Acting Chief Accountant Ryan Wolfe will return to his role as Chief Accountant in the Division of Enforcement. 

    “Kurt is an experienced accountant with deeply technical knowledge and international experience, and we are lucky he has decided to return to the SEC,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins. “This is an important role. Given that I served with Kurt previously, I know firsthand that his integrity, along with his skills, will benefit our markets and investors.”

    “I want to thank Ryan for his service as Acting Chief Accountant and am pleased that he will continue serving in the Division of Enforcement.”

    Mr. Hohl most recently founded Corallium Advisors, which helps businesses navigate the complexities of auditing, regulatory compliance, risk management, and initial public offerings. Before that, he spent 26 years as a partner at Ernst & Young (EY) in a variety of roles. His final EY role was as global deputy vice-chair of EY’s Global Assurance Professional Practice. In that role he was responsible for the operation and oversight of the technical, regulatory, risk, and quality oversight functions of EY’s global professional practice organization — a team of more than 1,400 professionals. Mr. Hohl previously served at the SEC from 1989 to 1997, rising to Associate Chief Accountant in the Division of Corporation Finance. There he authored what became the Financial Reporting Manual, a primary guide for the SEC accounting staff and practitioners in the application of the federal securities laws. He began his professional career at Deloitte Haskins & Sells.

    Mr. Hohl received a B.B.S. in accounting from James Madison University and is a certified public accountant in Virginia.

    “I’m pleased to come back to the SEC along with Chairman Atkins,” said Mr. Hohl. “This is a pivotal time for our capital markets, and I look forward to working with the dedicated public servants in the Office of the Chief Accountant to advance accounting and auditing policies that reinforce investor confidence, enhance transparency, and support innovation.”

    Mr. Wolfe has served as Acting Chief Accountant since January 2025. He concurrently has been serving as Chief Accountant of the Division of Enforcement and has previously served as Senior Associate Chief Accountant in the Office of the Chief Accountant.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Office of the Provost Honors Two Members of the UConn Law Community

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    Two outstanding members of the UConn Law community received prestigious honors from the provost at the end of the 2024–2025 academic year. The Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community-Engaged Scholarship (PAECES) recognize the outstanding contributions of faculty, staff, students, teams, and community partners who collaboratively address critical societal challenges through the creative and reciprocal exchange of knowledge and resources.

    Jon Bauer, Clinical Professor of Law, Richard D. Tulisano’69 Scholar in Human Rights, and director of the School of Law’s Asylum and Human Rights Clinic received the Distinguished Faculty Instructor Award. Tanya Johnson, Research and Instructional Services Librarian, received the Emerging Staff Award.

    Distinguished Faculty Instructor Award: Jon Bauer

    Jon Bauer has spent more than two decades championing the rights of individuals fleeing persecution while transforming the lives of the students he mentors.

    Since co-founding the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic in 2002, Professor Bauer has led a service-learning program that immerses law students in every aspect of asylum representation. His students have handled 185 asylum cases, securing legal protection for their clients in over 90% of the cases, a grant rate more than twice the national average. These victories have enabled more than 300 clients and members of their families from across the globe to rebuild their lives in safety and dignity.

    “With unwavering dedication and visionary leadership, Professor Jon Bauer has built a legacy of advocacy and education that reaches far beyond the classroom,” says Dean Eboni S. Nelson. “His work through the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic has not only safeguarded the lives of hundreds but also empowered students to lead with empathy, skill, and purpose in the pursuit of justice.”

    The clinic offers a 14-credit, year-long clinical experience where students take primary responsibility for client representation, including fact investigation, legal research, brief writing, and appearing at hearings before the Immigration Court or the U.S. Asylum Office. Clients represented through the clinic have fled persecution based on political beliefs, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Clinic alumni have served in the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security, as well as in public interest law, private firms, and judicial clerkships.

    Beyond the law school, Professor Bauer is an active leader in the community. His advocacy and work on boards spans the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, Connecticut Legal Services, the Hartford Immigration Court’s Pro Bono Committee, and immigrant rights coalitions. In 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office honored him with its Civil Rights Enforcement Award for decades-long advocacy to eliminate discriminatory mental health inquiries from the bar admissions process.

    Emerging Staff Award: Tanya Johnson

    Through visionary leadership and a commitment to equity, Research and Instructional Services Librarian Tanya Johnson has worked to expand access to justice in housing and to reimagine legal education.

    Johnson envisioned and now leads the UConn Law Library Fair Rent Commission Project. She identified a significant challenge in response to a 2022 Connecticut law mandating municipalities to create Fair Rent Commissions (FRCs) to address tenant complaints about excessive rent increases: the lack of public access to FRC documentation and decisions. These materials were inconsistent or unavailable, creating barriers for tenants, attorneys, and advocates navigating the FRC process.

    Her work created a publicly accessible repository within the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA), which offers access to meeting agendas, ordinances, and commission decisions. Johnson is developing a comprehensive research guide and a detailed index of decisions, allowing users to evaluate trends, understand how municipalities interpret the law, and better prepare for hearings.

    “Tanya Johnson brings vision, innovation, and deep compassion to every facet of her work,” says Dean Nelson. “From transforming access to justice through groundbreaking digital archiving to reimagining legal education with creativity and care, she empowers students, strengthens communities, and reshapes the legal landscape with purpose and integrity.”

    Johnson’s impact extends into the classroom, where she incorporates active learning and gamification to enhance legal research instruction. She is co-authoring a book on using games in legal education to make complex legal concepts more accessible and inclusive.

    Her commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and justice (DEIAJ) is evident in her work with the DEIAJ Collection at the Law Library and student organizations. One of her most powerful contributions to these efforts was her 2023 article, “An Autoethnographic Exploration of Fatness in Law Librarianship,” which sparked meaningful conversations about representation, identity, and inclusion in the legal and academic communities.

    Through courses like Diversity & Inclusion in the Legal Profession and Research for Social Justice, she prepares students to engage critically and compassionately with the legal system. Her work ensures that legal education at UConn is rigorous and responsive to the real-world issues that students—and their future clients—will face.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why Israel’s air strikes signal a shifting relationship with the US and a weakening Iran

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Natasha Lindstaedt, Professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex

    The Middle East is undergoing a realignment of power. With Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites and the assassination of at least two of Iran’s senior security officials, Benjamin Netanyahu is showing his willingness to go it alone and ignore pressure from the Trump administration.

    Though Donald Trump sought diplomatic solutions to the growing tensions between Israel and Iran, it appears that the US president, despite his previously strong relationship with the Israeli leader, was unable to restrain Netanyahu.

    The timing of the strikes is important. The Trump administration probably knew that they could not prevent Israel from striking Iran, but they did think they could pressure Israel to hold off launching an attack until after the US had solidified a new nuclear deal with Iran, talks for which were scheduled for June 15.

    Just hours before the air strikes, Trump said: “As long as I think there will be an agreement [with Iran], I don’t want them going in.”

    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.

    Experts had been divided in the past, over how much leverage the US held over Israel.

    Trump, following months of groundwork laid by the Joe Biden administration, managed to secure a ceasefire deal with Israel in January. But as part of the negotiation, Netanyahu succeeded in reversing sanctions on settlers in the West Bank, giving him free rein to act there. Additionally, the US also lifted its freeze on the transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, another concession that benefited Israel.

    The US also proved unwilling or incapable of stopping the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded in Gaza. Washington also appeared powerless to stop Israel’s pounding of Lebanon and its efforts to eradicate the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.

    The US has become more of a spectator than a powerful regional actor. And sources suggest that Washington was not informed in advance of Israel’s airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in October 2024, a sign of Israel’s growing willingness to act without US approval.



    Read more:
    Lethal humanitarianism: why violence at Gaza aid centres should not come as a surprise

    Indeed, the expansion of the war in Gaza to Lebanon was a pivotal moment in the region. With significant Israeli public support to stop Hezbollah (which had been launching rockets towards northern Israel), Israel pounded southern Beirut with airstrikes, killing several high-ranking Hezbollah officials.

    In the aftermath, Hezbollah was unable to replenish itself with younger recruits (it had relied on its charismatic leadership to recruit in the past), and the losses caused Hezbollah’s organisation to implode. By November 2024, Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire brokered by the US.

    Israel announces strikes on Iran.

    Iran’s weaker role

    Hezbollah’s near military and organisational collapse has been a big blow for Iran’s regional power. Hezbollah was at one point the most heavily armed violent non-state actor in the world. It had an army of around 50,000 men and experts speculated that it had as many as 200,000 rockets and missiles of various ranges in its arsenal.

    With the assassination of so many high-level officials in Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which Iran has bankrolled and used in its proxy conflicts with Israel, Iran has been severely weakened. As Iran is in the middle of an economic crisis, it no longer has the financial means to revive these traditional allies.



    Read more:
    Trump’s Middle East pivot aims to counter China’s rising influence

    For decades Iran had tried to gain strategic depth in the Middle East, with the US estimating that Iran spent more than US$16 billion to prop up Bashar al-Assad in Syria from 2012 to 2020. Additionally, with the fall of Assad, Syria can no longer serve as a transit corridor or logistical hub for shipments of arms from Iran to Hezbollah.

    With Turkey’s support for the various armed militias that ousted the Assad regime, it is Ankara, and not Tehran, that sees itself as the big winner in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war.

    US plans for Middle East threatened

    The US, meanwhile, is seeing its influence in the Middle East waning. And Trump’s plan for extending trade in the region, particularly in the Gulf, may also be undermined by the rising regional tension.

    The US had been due to send Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to this weekend’s talks in Oman, with the aim of getting Tehran to agree to stop enriching uranium (which is crucial for creating nuclear weapons) in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Trump had said that he did not want Israel to go ahead with its attack on Iran, and yet these calls went unheeded.

    Some US officials were optimistic that the escalating tensions taking place between Iran and Israel were mere tactics of negotiation amid the important nuclear talks. But, though the US was clearly warned about the attack, Washington was not able to deter Israel.

    Though the US still supplies Israel with US$3.8 billion (£2.8 billion) worth of arms per year, it has had little success in exercising much leverage recently. It remains to be seen if domestic political pressure could halt this US funding.

    International relations experts should not be surprised that Israel went on the offensive in Iran. Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in 2024 were just a precursor to the bigger prize of bringing Iran to its knees.

    For Netanyahu, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the Middle East and shift the regional power dynamics, and he appears to care little about what the US, or the rest of the world, thinks of how he does it.

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

    – ref. Why Israel’s air strikes signal a shifting relationship with the US and a weakening Iran – https://theconversation.com/why-israels-air-strikes-signal-a-shifting-relationship-with-the-us-and-a-weakening-iran-258926

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Douglas Lucas Kivoi, Principal Policy Analyst, Governance Department, The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)

    The recent killing in Kenya of a young man in police detention highlights a string of systemic failures to hold the country’s security officers accountable for their actions. Despite public outrage and protests, Kenyan police officers continue to use inhumane, brutal and sometimes fatal methods with little consequence. Douglas Lucas Kivoi, who has studied policing and police reform in Kenya, unpacks the situation.

    Why is the Kenyan police service given to brutality?

    First, Kenya’s police institution was established as a colonial instrument of oppression. Police reforms since independence in 1963 have had little impact in changing this. Instead, successive governments have used the police to suppress dissent. This has cemented a culture of violence and police impunity. This was seen during former president Daniel arap Moi’s repressive regime, the post-2007 election violence and recent crackdowns on public protests protected under the constitution.

    The reaction to mass mobilisation in June 2024 was violent. This was because the state sees public demonstrations as a threat to its authority.

    Second, police brutality thrives in environments where wrongdoing goes unpunished. Kenya’s police force lacks good internal control mechanisms. A culture of silence and solidarity – the “blue code” – deters whistleblowing. Advancements and rewards are sometimes determined by political allegiances rather than professionalism.



    Read more:
    Kenyan police use excessive force because they’re serving political elites, not the public – policy analyst

    Third, many police officers work in toxic conditions marked by poor pay, limited resources and long shifts. These contribute to feelings of frustration and aggression. The situation is worsened by institutionalised corruption where police officers extort money from citizens and demand bribes. This has contributed to diminished ethical standards.

    What’s in place to punish police excesses?

    Kenya has several formal avenues for holding police accountable. But all are deeply flawed.

    Independent Policing Oversight Authority: This was established in 2011 in light of the post-election violence of 2007-08. Its job was to independently investigate police misconduct. However, underfunding and understaffing has led to delayed investigations.

    There has also been a lack of cooperation from the police. They often fail to provide evidence or deliberately provide misleading information to impede investigations.

    The authority also has limited enforcement power. It has recommended thousands of prosecutions of rogue officers. However, it has seen low conviction rates given the slow processes at the judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

    Internal Affairs Unit: This is a critical oversight body. It’s mandated to provide accountability and professional discipline within the police service. It’s tasked with investigating public complaints and complaints from within the police service against police officers.

    The unit can recommend to the National Police Service Commission disciplinary action – such as prosecution or dismissal – against officers it finds guilty. It also monitors police officers to ensure that ethical conduct and professional standards are maintained.

    However, the unit faces perceptions of a lack of independence and as an internal cover-up tool. In many instances, cases of police misconduct are simply punished by a transfer to another station.

    Judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: Cases take years to move through the judicial system. Convictions are rare. The public prosecutions office has faced accusations of bias, which it exhibits through its reluctance to prosecute high-profile police killings.

    The time it takes to conclude police misconduct cases allows impunity to thrive. Deliberately poor investigations carried out by the police (who are also suspects) have led to collapsed cases.

    National Police Service Commission: This was established by the 2010 Kenyan constitution. The commission recruits and appoints police officers (except the inspector-general of police, who is appointed by the president with parliamentary approval). It also promotes, transfers and disciplines police officers.

    However, the commission has faced claims of being unduly influenced by the inspector-general’s office in recruitment and promotions. This undermines its independence.



    Read more:
    How Nairobi police failures let people get away with murder

    Civil society and the media: Organisations like Amnesty International Kenya and the Kenya Human Rights Commission document police abuses. But their reports rarely, if ever, lead to any real action being taken. The media’s attention and reporting of cases may exert temporary pressure but this doesn’t seem to have any long-term impact.

    Why haven’t these mechanisms worked?

    Firstly, there’s an institutional resistance to reform. Powerful factions in the police and government benefit from the current system. Whenever there is an attempt at enforcing accountability, these senior officials take advantage of bureaucratic delays, and harass investigators and whistleblowers.

    In extreme cases, they enforce the disappearance of witnesses.

    Secondly, a lack of political will creates a favourable environment to circumvent constitutional frameworks. This ultimately weakens any chances of accountability. At best, police in Kenya are used to defend political interests and suppress dissent.

    This emboldens powerful political players who want the police to be controllable. This dissuades them from instituting actual reforms and establishing a humane policing service.

    What will change things?

    Until those in leadership positions genuinely prioritise independent institutions and justice over transient political gains, significant police reform is unlikely to be realised.

    Elements of such reform would include steps to:

    Strengthen police oversight and guarantee independence

    The Independent Policing Oversight Authority Act needs to be amended to enhance autonomy. The current system is easy for the president to manipulate because he gets to appoint the authority’s commissioners.

    There’s also a need to provide the authority with equipment. This includes ballistics analysis, digital forensics and crime scene reconstruction capabilities to combat police cover-ups.

    The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions must also be required to respond to the authority’s recommendations within 30 days. Currently, cases can take years to complete. There have been instances when rogue police have used this window to eliminate witnesses or tamper with evidence.

    Overhaul police training and culture

    There must be a move away from paramilitary-style drills and procedures in training. Instead, officers need to practise de-escalation, communication and problem-solving tactics with the public. What exists within Kenya now is a paramilitary service not a police service.

    Additionally, the police service commission needs to reward professionalism and not cronyism.

    Judicial and prosecutorial reforms

    Ending police impunity in Kenya requires a multi-pronged approach. This involves judicial independence, vigorous prosecution, meaningful oversight, legislative changes and public engagement.

    But this requires meaningful political will.

    Political accountability

    Continued police impunity has eroded public confidence in Kenya’s policing and justice systems. The policing oversight authority needs sufficient funding – free of political interference – to investigate and prosecute police misconduct. Senior officers should be held accountable for not disciplining rogue officers under their charge. The presidency and interior ministry must have a zero-tolerance policy toward police brutality.

    If Kenya doesn’t grapple with police impunity, then the anniversary of the June 2024 protests will be just another date in history when the state brutally attacked, maimed and killed its own citizenry. And still managed to silence them.

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

    – ref. Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people – https://theconversation.com/kenyas-brutal-police-have-been-exposed-again-why-the-system-fails-people-258843

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Sam Fender’s music offers a vision of masculinity that is complex, conflicted and deeply human

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nick Robinson, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds

    By the end of June 2025, Sam Fender will have played four stadium shows to nearly 250,000 people across the UK, with three of those in his native north east. With three albums and over 2 billion streams, his music has earned widespread acclaim. Yet, Fender is no ordinary rock star.

    His songs provide a powerful connection to place and a lens through which to reflect on social, cultural and political dynamics. Deeply rooted in north-east England, Fender’s lyrics reference his hometown of North Shields and use local vernacular.

    As a researcher of the links between popular culture and politics who lives less than a mile from his hometown, I find his work particularly powerful in the way it mobilises emotive issues at scale. Fender explores themes such as masculinity, poverty and everyday struggle, forging a direct emotional connection with his audience.

    This connection is reinforced by his activism. Fender supports local food banks, the Teenage Cancer Trust, and campaigns for poverty reduction and men’s mental health.

    To my mind, this work is not performative celebratory activism, but is grounded in his own community and personal experiences. This combination of commercial success rooted in honesty, vulnerability and community action led to him being named “freeman of North Tyneside” in May 2025.


    Boys and girls are together facing an uncertain world. But research shows they are diverging when it comes to attitudes about masculinity, feminism and gender equality.

    Social media, politics, and identity all play a role. But what’s really going on with boys and girls? Join The Conversation UK and Cumberland Lodge’s Youth and Democracy project at Newcastle University for a discussion of these issues with young people and academic experts. Tickets available here.

    Fender’s teenage years were marked by personal challenges, including his parents’ separation and his mother’s fibromyalgia. These experiences, and the state’s failure to support those in need, are captured in his song Seventeen Going Under (2021): “I came home and you were on the floor / Floored by the letters and the council rigmarole.”

    His latest album, People Watching (2025), continues this critique. The title track, inspired by the death of a close friend in a care home, laments:

    The place was fallin’ to bits

    Understaffed and overruled by callous hands

    The poor nurse was around the clock

    And the beauty of youth had left my breaking heart.

    The music video for People Watching.

    For Fender, these stories reflect a Britain in decline. In Crumbling Empire, he sings: “Road like the surface of the moon / A Detroit neighbourhood left to ruin.” The song further critiques a society that fails to honour those who have given everything:

    My mother delivered most the kids in this town

    My step-dad drove in a tank for the crown

    They left them homeless, down and out

    In their crumbling empire.

    His message is clear: hard work, even by midwives and war heroes, no longer guarantees dignity or reward.

    Fender’s most poignant observations are rooted in his locality. In Nostalgia’s Lie, he sings: “These streets break my heart / There’s pain unfurling and desperate yearning / For all my friends who are gone.”

    North Shields has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the UK. According to the North East Child Poverty Commission (March 2025), 31% of children in the region lived below the poverty line between 2021 and 2024.

    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.

    In this context, Fender places mental health – especially male mental health – at the core of his work, made even more powerful by his honesty about his own struggles.

    Dead Boys reflects both personal loss and the epidemic of male suicide in North Tyneside: “We close our eyes, learn our pain / Nobody ever could explain / All the dead boys in our hometown.”

    In Something Heavy, he adds: “My friends reached for the rope and tied / Oh, God, how can we keep missing signals?”

    Fender performs Dead Boys in Manchester.

    Fender’s engagement with mental health is deeply personal. He wrestles with confusion, despondency, and his own sense of self-esteem: “Though I am a soundboard to some / With myself I am not so forgiving” (Last to Make it Home), and “Sometimes I wanna die, sometimes” (Paradigms).

    In Good Company, he confesses: “Sometimes I cry until there’s no sound,” and in Arm’s Length: “Do you have to know me, know me, inside out / I’m selfish, and I’m lonely.”

    Yet, like many artists, Fender feels guilt that success has uprooted him. In Wild Long Lie, he reflects: “Oh, I’ve got so much pain here, yet so much love / But it’s drownin’ every inch of my soul.” He questions whether he can still authentically raise these issues now that fame has distanced him from his past. As he puts it in Crumbling Empire:

    I’m not preaching, I’m just talking

    I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in

    But I can’t help thinking where I’d be

    In this crumbling empire.

    Fender’s work helps us understand political and social phenomena by reflecting unfolding events. His songs can be seen as giving life and voice to what political theorist Michael Shapiro calls an “aesthetic subject”.

    The characters in his songs, whether autobiographical or imagined, give voice to communities which are so often ignored. They allow exploration of the structures of power that deny working-class people opportunities, contributing to mental health crises, suicide and spiralling drug use within those communities.

    Sam Fender talks about men’s mental health.

    Even though Fender acknowledges he no longer walks in the same shoes, his songs still speak truth to power. They give voice to experiences that are often ignored and expose the increasing struggle of everyday life in the UK and beyond.

    He also offers a nuanced reflection on masculinity. Fender challenges traditional ideals – rational, authoritative, emotionally restrained – while rejecting simplified portrayals of men as weak or unstable. His songs reveal a masculinity that is complex, conflicted and deeply human.

    While Fender is not alone in using music for social commentary, what sets him apart is his ability to channel the spirit of his local community to explore universal themes. His work critiques the failures of contemporary capitalism to provide dignity, respect, and cohesion – issues that resonate deeply amid today’s cultural, political and economic challenges.

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

    – ref. Sam Fender’s music offers a vision of masculinity that is complex, conflicted and deeply human – https://theconversation.com/sam-fenders-music-offers-a-vision-of-masculinity-that-is-complex-conflicted-and-deeply-human-258530

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Marine fungi could help feed the world and fight disease

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Cunliffe, Professor of Marine Microbiology, School of Biological and Marine Sciences, University of Plymouth

    Fungi are nature’s recyclers and chemists, turning waste into useful products and creating an array of enzymes and compounds. By harnessing this potential through fungal biotechnology (using fungi to develop products and technologies for various applications), we can create sustainable materials, food and processes that help solve global challenges like food shortages, pollution and climate change.

    Fungal biotechnology supports a “circular economy”, where resources are reused instead of wasted. Fungi can help make our food supply more stable and eco-friendly, while cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But to fully unlock what is possible, we need to better understand different fungi and develop new tools to work with them to find solutions.

    The marine environment is home to a rich diversity of fungi. However, marine fungi were once overlooked and not widely considered for their biotechnological potential.


    Local science, global stories.

    This article is part of a series, Secrets of the Sea, exploring how marine scientists are developing climate solutions.

    In collaboration with the BBC, The Conversation’s senior environment editor, Anna Turns, travels around the West Country coastline to meet ocean experts making exciting discoveries beneath the waves.

    Now, my team of scientists at the Marine Biological Association, a research institution based in Plymouth on the south-west coast of England, has changed that. By gathering over 500 fungal strains from seawater, sediments and seaweeds, we have created a comprehensive marine fungi culture collection.

    These fungi are stored at -80°C and studied at temperatures similar to the local shoreline they are from. This unique collection is already helping us learn more about marine fungi, including how they grow and adapt to different environments.

    My colleagues and I are now exploring how these marine fungi, especially those from seaweed, can be used in biotechnology to create more useful, sustainable products in the future.

    The European seaweed industry is growing fast and could be worth up to €9.3 billion (£7.8 billion) by 2030. Seaweed farming doesn’t need land, fresh water or fertiliser, and it can support ocean health.

    Marine fungi, especially those originally isolated from seaweed, could recycle seaweed into valuable products.

    At the Marine Biological Association, we are testing many combinations of different seaweeds and fungi to discover new uses. This approach could help make the seaweed industry stronger, more efficient and better for the environment.

    The future is fungal

    Feeding the world’s growing population is a major challenge, especially with nearly a billion people unable to afford nutritious food and the environmental consequences of high meat consumption. One promising alternative protein source involves using seaweed and fermenting it with marine fungi to create a nutritious protein source called mycoprotein – similar to what’s found in some current commercial products.

    Antimicrobial resistance – the development of superbugs that become resistant to antibiotics as a result of their overuse – is a global health threat. This makes it harder to treat infections. Fungi naturally produce chemicals to protect themselves from other microbes, and several antibiotics come from fungi, including penicillin. Marine fungi could be a valuable new source of antibiotics and drug treatments to fight resistant infections and protect public health.

    Pests and the diseases they spread cause major crop losses worldwide, threatening food security. Traditional chemical pesticides are becoming less effective and can harm helpful species like pollinators, while also leading to pest resistance.

    Scientists are now exploring ways to target pests by using microbes without damaging the environment. One promising but unexplored source is marine fungi. Marine fungi and the arsenal of chemical compounds they produce may hold the key to developing new, eco-friendly pest control methods that protect crops while supporting wildlife and sustainable farming practices.

    Our marine fungi culture collection is helping unlock the potential for finding new solutions to many of the world’s biggest challenges.

    Listen to episode four of Secrets of the Sea here on BBC Sounds, presented by Anna Turns for The Conversation.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Michael Cunliffe received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) for the project MYCO-CARB and currently receives funding from the UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee scheme for the projects MARCO-BOLO and BIOcean5D. PhD students in the Cunliffe Group are supported by the UKRI BBSRC/NERC SWBio, ARIES and INSPIRE Doctoral Training Partnerships and the Marine Biological Association.

    – ref. Marine fungi could help feed the world and fight disease – https://theconversation.com/marine-fungi-could-help-feed-the-world-and-fight-disease-251194

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Troops on US streets in more ways than one while Trump considers axing Aukus defence pact

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rachael Jolley, International Affairs Editor

    This article was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email newsletter. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

    It’s Donald Trump’s birthday this weekend, and he is planning a big bash to celebrate. There will be a full-colour parade in the nation’s capital. Expected to attend are a whole bunch of military vehicles, from a second world war bomber to M1 Abrams battle tanks to Paladin self-propelled howitzers.

    The cavalcade will take a route through the grander streets of Washington DC making its way along Constitution Avenue all the way to the Lincoln memorial, with an expected 6,600 soldiers in attendance. The whole thing is estimated by the Associated Press to cost around US$45 million (£33 million).

    This splashy show of Trump’s power and the US’s military strength could serve as a warning to anyone who was thinking of crossing the US right now. Trump is, of course, the commander-in-chief of the US forces. And he was using the full strength of his position, some argue going beyond it, when he sent the national guard and the marines – bypassing the state governor – to the streets of Los Angeles in the past few days.

    There are now, according to ABC News, more US troops on the streets of LA than in Syria and Iraq. This was necessary, Trump claimed, to address protests over immigration raids that broke out around LA. Something that Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesperson, said this week was “exactly what the American people voted for”.

    While Trump is testing how far he can flex his political and military muscle at home, as the Open University’s Sinead McEneaney has detailed, he is also using what some historians have called unprecedented use of power, by sending in the marines to take action against Americans, while California governor Gavin Newsom said the troops were not wanted, or needed.



    Read more:
    Trump’s clash with California governor over LA protests has potential to influence next presidential race

    Newsom is pushing back hard, and publicly, against Trump. Something, that Natasha Lindstaedt at the University of Essex, believes could propel Newsom higher up the Democrat selection list for a presidential nomination.



    Read more:
    Trump’s use of the national guard against LA protesters defies all precedents

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    While signalling his military strength to those on the streets of California, Trump has also been sending a strong message to his erstwhile international allies that he might not be quite as willing to share his military hardware with them as they might have thought they had been promised. The US administration has opened a review of the Aukus (the Australia, UK and US defence pact) and in particular its nuclear submarine deal, to see whether it meets the “America first” criteria. This deal was due to help all three countries scale up their submarine capacity.

    Australia already transferred US$500 million to the US this year, as part of a down payment on the deal, with the expectation of receiving used US submarines in the near future. Canberra and London have been speedily revising their reliance on Trump as a security partner in the past few months. This is yet another signal from Washington that they definitely should.

    John Blaxland , a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, argues that Trump is angling to renegotiate the Aukus deal but won’t scrap it.

    “There are a few key reasons for this. We’re several years down the track already. We have more than 100 Australian sailors already operating in the US system. Industrially, we’re on the cusp of making a significant additional contribution to the US submarine production line. And finally, most people don’t fully appreciate that the submarine base just outside Perth is an incredibly consequential piece of real estate for US security calculations.”



    Read more:
    Trump may try to strike a deal with AUKUS review, but here’s why he won’t sink it

    Meanwhile, Mark Beeson, an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University, believes that Australia is locked into the foreign and strategic policies of “an increasingly polarised, authoritarian and unpredictable regime” and should rethink its international relationships.

    Beeson quotes an essay from another Australian academic, Hugh White, from Australian National University: “It is classic Trump to expect more and more from allies while he offers them less and less.”



    Read more:
    Goodbye to all that? Rethinking Australia’s alliance with Trump’s America

    Russia’s battlefield count

    In a military arena where most of the world would like Trump to apply a little more pressure, he continues to hold back and Vladimir Putin continues not to do a peace deal. Putin showed no sign of calling off his troops (or drones) from attacking Ukraine this week.

    But as the onslaught continued Russia is expected to hit a horrific target this month, 1 million casualties in the war. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have died forcing Putin to get increasingly creative in coming up with ways to fill the gaps on the battlefields.

    According to some reports he is sending the wounded back to fight before they are fully recovered, as well as offering large financial incentives to those who join up, and their families. The conflict continues and the death toll does, too. As Russian politics expert Jenny Mathers at the University of Aberystwyth points out, even before the war the country had a demographic crisis, and now that is even more extreme.

    Russian women who want to earn the newly reinstated “Mother Heroine” award by bearing and raising ten or more children may struggle to find men to father them now, and after the war. Putin, like Trump, is fond of suggesting there is a glowing future for those who support him. The Russian leader has even created a Time of Heroes programme for war veterans who are promised a fast track into an elite career on their return from battle. Whether, of course, they do return when an estimated 53 casualties are being lost per square kilometre of land gained in eastern Ukraine is not a gamble many would like to take.



    Read more:
    Putin forced to send wounded back to fight and offer huge military salaries as Russia suffers a million casualties

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    – ref. Troops on US streets in more ways than one while Trump considers axing Aukus defence pact – https://theconversation.com/troops-on-us-streets-in-more-ways-than-one-while-trump-considers-axing-aukus-defence-pact-258874

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI China: Whoever emboldens “Taiwan Independence” separatist forces to seek secession will get burnt for playing with fire: Defense Spokesperson 2025-06-13 19:07:43 “Any act that emboldens the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces to seek secession will undermine cross-Strait peace and stability, and lead to bitter results or self-inflicted wounds,” said Senior Colonel Jiang Bin, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, at a press briefing on Friday.

    Source: People’s Republic of China – Ministry of National Defense

      BEIJING, June 13 — “Any act that emboldens the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces to seek secession will undermine cross-Strait peace and stability, and lead to bitter results or self-inflicted wounds,” said Senior Colonel Jiang Bin, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, at a press briefing on Friday.

      According to reports, the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science Foundation recently held a civil chief-of-staff level war-gaming under the scenario of “Taiwan Strait crisis” for the first time, involving the former “Chief of the General Staff” of the Taiwan region, the former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the former Chief of Staff of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. In addition, the US and Taiwan held the so-called Defense Industry Forum in Taipei, advocating closer weapon and equipment cooperation.

      When commenting on the above reports, Senior Colonel Jiang Bin slammed that the Taiwan question is purely China’s internal affair, which brooks no external interference. Any act that emboldens the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces to seek secession will undermine cross-Strait peace and stability, and lead to bitter results or self-inflicted wounds.

      “We urge the relevant countries to truly abide by the one-China principle, stop sending any wrong signal to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces,” he continued, adding that in the face of the prevailing trend that China will and must be reunified, any scheme to solicit foreign support for independence and contain China with Taiwan is doomed to fail.

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    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI China: Along ancient Silk Road, Xi cultivates new bonds with Central Asia

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

    BEIJING, June 13 — In the shimmering early summer heat of Xi’an, China’s longest-serving ancient capital, six pomegranate trees stand gracefully near the site of the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit held in May 2023, their branches bowing low with fruit.

    Planted two years ago by Chinese President Xi Jinping and leaders of the five Central Asian nations, this vibrant grove stands as a vivid testament to the increasingly close and dynamic bond between China and Central Asia.

    Building on past achievements, Xi and his Central Asia counterparts are scheduled to gather in Astana, Kazakhstan, later this month for a second summit, where they will weave tighter threads of trade, security and connectivity across the Eurasian heartland.

    FORGING NEW PARADIGM

    The 2023 Xi’an summit marked the first-ever meeting of heads of state under the China-Central Asia cooperation mechanism. In the city’s time-honored embrace, they agreed to host the top-level gathering every two years alternately in China and Central Asia.

    Last year, this mechanism was further institutionalized with the establishment of a secretariat in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi, Xi’s home province.

    Xi places great importance on China’s ties with the region. In his view, Central Asia pulses at a strategic crossroads, linking East and West, North and South.

    “It is a foreign-policy priority for China to develop friendly cooperative relations with the Central Asian countries,” Xi said during his first visit to Central Asia after becoming Chinese president in 2013.

    Since then, he has traveled to the region eight times, deepening partnerships bilaterally as well as through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia.

    Today, Central Asia stands as the only region in the world where every country is a strategic partner of China. These partnerships, Xi said, have forged a new path of good-neighborliness and win-win cooperation, creating a new paradigm for international relations.

    A highlight of the Xi’an summit was the signing of the Xi’an Declaration, in which Xi and the presidents of the five Central Asian countries vowed to work together to build a closer China-Central Asia community with a shared future.

    This pledge aligns with the core idea of what’s known as Xiplomacy: building a community with a shared future for mankind. Notably, the vision has been fully implemented at the bilateral level in Central Asia.

    Sheradil Baktygulov, director of the Institute of World Policy of Kyrgyzstan, said that the shared political will of Xi and the leaders of Central Asia is key to the sustained development of China-Central Asia cooperation.

    “This cooperation not only strengthens bilateral ties, but also lays the foundation for a new model of multilateral collaboration in the Eurasian region,” he added.

    Xi’s strong personal rapport with the leaders of Central Asia fuels these ties. At the Xi’an summit, Xi greeted Tajik President Emomali Rahmon as “my old friend.” In talks with Xi, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev referred to him as his “dear brother.”

    Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, also a seasoned sinologist, arrived in Xi’an on his 70th birthday. Xi told him, “On this special occasion, your visit speaks volumes about the strength of our bilateral ties and reaffirms your unique bond with China.”

    REVIVING SILK ROAD

    “Start the shipment!” With this command, Xi and Tokayev jointly launched the China-Europe Trans-Caspian Express Route at a ceremony held in July 2024 in Astana.

    The occasion marked the formal establishment of a multidimensional connectivity network, integrating highways, railways, airlines and pipelines, to better link Asia with Europe via the Caspian Sea. It is expected to become a vibrant artery of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

    While the ancient Silk Road witnessed robust trade and cultural exchanges between China and Central Asia, Xi sees in the region an important partner in modern-day Belt and Road cooperation.

    Back in September 2013, also in Astana, Xi delivered a landmark speech at Nazarbayev University, where he first laid out his vision for building the Silk Road Economic Belt — a key component of the BRI.

    “We can actively discuss the best way to improve cross-­border transportation infrastructure,” Xi said, “and work toward a transportation network connecting East Asia, West Asia and South Asia to facilitate economic development and travel in the region.”

    Over the years since then, that vision has steadily become a reality. In a recent instance, a commencement ceremony for the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway project was held late last year in the Kyrgyz border city of Jalalabad. Xi, in a congratulatory letter, called for building the railway into a “new demonstration project” under Belt and Road cooperation.

    The line will originate from the ancient Silk Road hub of Kashgar, in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, cross the Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan, proceed westward through Jalalabad, and reach the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan.

    This railway, said Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, is not merely a transport corridor, but serves as an important strategic bridge connecting countries of the East and the West.

    Belt and Road cooperation has effectively boosted trade, travel and exchanges in the region. In 2024, China’s trade with Central Asia reached a record 94.8 billion U.S. dollars, fueled in part by a booming cross-border e-commerce sector. China now stands as Central Asia’s top trading partner and major investment source.

    Tajikistan became the first country to sign a memorandum of understanding with China regarding the Silk Road Economic Belt in 2014. Collaboration has since produced tangible outcomes, ranging from new highways and power plants to new city landmarks, many of which have been personally championed by Xi.

    Tajikistan is also home to the first Luban Workshop in Central Asia — a Chinese vocational training center that has already equipped more than 1,500 students with practical skills in engineering, architecture, water management and environmental protection, preparing talent for the nation’s future development.

    In a state visit to the country in 2024, Xi said to Rahmon: “I have seen a more prosperous Tajikistan.”

    WEAVING CULTURAL TAPESTRIES

    In the autumn of 2022, while visiting the storied Silk Road city of Samarkand, Xi presented Uzbek President Mirziyoyev with a special gift: a miniature of Khiva, a historic Silk Road outpost.

    Khiva is China’s first cultural heritage preservation project in Central Asia. Thanks to years of restoration led by Chinese experts, the ancient town has taken on a new look.

    “The preservation and restoration of historical sites in Khiva, a project launched during my visit to Samarkand in 2013, has been successfully concluded, further augmenting the charm of this ancient city,” Xi wrote in a signed article ahead of his 2022 visit to Uzbekistan.

    During an earlier trip to the country in 2016, Xi met with the Chinese experts working on the project. “Be sure to protect the cultural relics well,” he urged them.

    Over the years, joint archaeological efforts between Chinese and Central Asian scholars have expanded across the region, including the ancient city of Rahat in Kazakhstan and an ancient Buddhist temple of Krasnaya Rechka in Kyrgyzstan.

    Xi has repeatedly stressed that the China-Central Asia friendship is one steeped in history. On multiple occasions, he invoked the legacy of Zhang Qian, the Han Dynasty envoy who traveled westward more than 2,100 years ago and opened the door to enduring friendship and exchanges between China and the region. He has also emphasized the need to “carry forward our traditional friendship.”

    During his state visit to Kazakhstan in 2024, Xi, together with Tokayev, unveiled the Kazakhstan branch of Beijing Language and Culture University, the very institution where the Kazakh president studied Chinese in the 1980s. Xi expressed his hope that the new school would enhance mutual understanding between the two peoples, especially the young generation.

    As part of the visit, Xi met a group of schoolchildren who greeted him in Mandarin and sang a Chinese song. Some among them expressed their dream of one day studying at Tsinghua University, Xi’s alma mater.

    “I also wish, with all my heart, that you will be able to attend good universities in the future. And you are very welcome to pursue your studies in China,” the Chinese president smiled.

    Commenting on the broader impact of such exchanges, Uzbek political observer Sharofiddin Tulaganov noted that under the China-Central Asia cooperation mechanism, mutual learning among civilizations will be significantly enhanced.

    In today’s complex international environment, he added, institutionalized people-to-people exchanges like these will inject valuable cultural momentum into efforts at safeguarding regional peace and promoting shared development.

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: NIH researchers identify brain circuits responsible for visual acuity

    Source: US Department of Health and Human Services – 2

    Wednesday, June 4, 2025

    Studies demonstrate the effect of retinal injury on visual processing pathways, providing insights for the development of vision restoration therapies.

    Visual processing involves interactions between neurons in the eye and brain allowing us to see the world around us. These pathways originate in the retina, which converts light energy into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain’s visual processing centers. Axons from retinal ganglion cells form the optic nerve, which connects to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, a relay center in the brain that transmits signals to the visual cortex – a part of the brain that processes those signals into images.

    Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have identified which brain circuits are vital for visual acuity and how they are affected by damaged retinal cells. While vision restoration therapies, such as stem-cell and gene therapies, aim to replace or repair damaged cells in the eye, it is critical to understand how brain circuits involved in vision are affected by retinal cell loss. Study results suggest that targeting these circuits may be necessary to achieve optimal recovery of visual function, and have significant implications for the development of future vision restoration therapies that address visual pathways beyond the retina. The study published today in The Journal of Neuroscience.
    “A huge amount of progress has been made in repairing the eye, however little attention has been paid to the functional consequences beyond the eye,” said the study’s lead investigator, Farran Briggs, Ph.D., senior investigator at NIH’s National Eye Institute (NEI). “Brain circuits downstream of damaged or dying retinal cells in the eye may also undergo some loss of function following changes to their retinal inputs.”
    Visual processing involves interactions between neurons in the eye and brain allowing us to see the world around us. These pathways originate in photoreceptor cells in the retina that convert light energy into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain’s visual processing centers. When retinal cells become damaged due to injury or disease, vision is often impaired. In a process known as neuroplasticity, the brain undergoes functional changes to adapt to a retinal injury or disease/degeneration. A person who experiences vision loss, for example, may have a resulting “blind spot” in a portion of their field of view.
    Current therapies target retinal cells, however, retinal cells represent just the initial stage in a multi-step pathway that converts light into the complex images we perceive.
    Scientists aimed to understand how neurons downstream of the retina are affected by damage to retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which receive signals from other retinal cells and transfer to the brain. RGCs connect to neurons in a relay center in the brain, known as the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), that transmits signals to the visual cortex, where those signals are processed into images. The study examined two types of LGN cells that respond to different types of visual information and form parallel processing pathways: X-LGN neurons, which contribute to visual acuity, and Y-LGN neurons, which contribute to motion perception.
    Investigators examined the effects of retinal cell loss on the X and Y visual processing pathways by using an animal model in ferrets. Following injury to the RGCs in the retina, recordings of LGN neuronal responses were conducted to evaluate the impact on X and Y pathways. They found that X-LGN neurons didn’t respond properly to visual stimuli, whereas Y-LGN neuron responses remained largely intact. These findings suggest that retinal cell loss affects downstream visual pathways differently, with the X pathway being notably impacted while the Y pathway remains relatively unaffected, suggesting higher sensitivity of visual acuity pathways to degeneration of the retina.
    “Vision restoration therapies may need to target circuits that are responsible for visual acuity in addition to the retina. Such therapies could include training therapies, such as video games, that provide interactive feedback or other vision behavioral therapies,” Briggs said.
    Future studies could use the model of RGC loss to investigate retinal degeneration and visual deficits in neuropsychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia. The research group aims to understand the marked changes in visual perception that occur during this disease.
    This work was supported by the in-house research program at NIH/NEI.
    About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
    NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®
    Reference
    Yang, J., et al. (2025). “Differential impact of retinal lesions on visual responses of LGN X and Y cells.” The Journal of Neuroscience: DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0436-25. 2025.

    Institute/Center

    National Institutes of Health (NIH)

    Contact

    NIH Office of Communications
    301-496-5787

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: NIH researchers conclude that taurine is unlikely to be a good aging biomarker

    Source: US Department of Health and Human Services – 2

    Thursday, June 5, 2025

    Findings show this amino acid did not longitudinally decline with age
    Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that levels of circulating taurine, a conditionally essential amino acid involved in multiple important biological functions, is unlikely to serve as a good biomarker for the aging process. In blood samples from humans, monkeys, and mice, scientists found that circulating taurine levels often increased or remained constant with age. Analysis of longitudinal data showed that within individual differences in taurine levels often exceeded age-related changes. Researchers also found that taurine levels were inconsistently associated with health outcomes across age, species, and cohorts, suggesting that declining taurine is not a universal marker of aging. Instead, its impact may depend on individual physiological contexts shaped by genetic, nutritional, and environmental factors. Results are published in Science.
    Taurine recently gained popularity as dietary supplement due to recent research that found supplementation with taurine improved multiple age-related traits and extended lifespan in model organisms (worms and mice). However, there is no solid clinical data that shows its supplementation benefits humans.
    “A recent research article on taurine led us to evaluate this molecule as a potential biomarker of aging in multiple species,” said Rafael de Cabo, Ph.D., study co-author and chief of the Translational Gerontology Branch at NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA).
    Researchers measured taurine concentration in longitudinally collected blood from participants in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (aged 26-100), rhesus monkeys (aged 3-32 years) and mice (aged 9-27 months). Taurine concentrations increased with age in all groups, except in male mice in which taurine remained unchanged. Similar age-related changes in taurine concentrations were observed in two cross-sectional studies of geographically distinct human populations, the Balearic Islands Study of Aging (aged 20-85) from the Balearic region of Mallorca, and the Predictive Medicine Research cohort (aged 20-68) from Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in the cross-sectional arm of the Study of Longitudinal Aging in Mice.
    “We used longitudinal, cross-species data across the lifespan under normal conditions aimed to clarify how taurine levels change with age as a biomarker for aging, a key advance for aging research,” added Maria Emilia Fernandez, Ph.D., study co-author and postdoctoral fellow of the Translational Gerontology Branch at NIA.
    Researchers also found that the relation between taurine and muscle strength or body weight was inconsistent. For example, analyses of gross motor function highlight the limitations of considering solely circulating taurine changes as indicative of biological aging, as comparatively low motor function performance can be associated either with high or low concentrations of taurine, whereas in other cases, no relation at all is found between these variables.
    “Identifying reliable biomarkers to predict the onset and progression of aging and functional decline would be a major breakthrough, enabling more effective, personalized strategies to maintain health and independence into old age,” emphasized Luigi Ferrucci, M.D., Ph.D. study co-author and scientific director at NIA.
    This study was funded by the in-house research program at NIH/NIA.
    About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
    NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®
    References
    R. de Cabo, M. E. Fernandez, et al. Is taurine an aging biomarker? Science. 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adl2116.

    Institute/Center

    National Institute on Aging

    Contact

    NIH Office of Communications and Public Liaison
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    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Africa: Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Douglas Lucas Kivoi, Principal Policy Analyst, Governance Department, The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)

    The recent killing in Kenya of a young man in police detention highlights a string of systemic failures to hold the country’s security officers accountable for their actions. Despite public outrage and protests, Kenyan police officers continue to use inhumane, brutal and sometimes fatal methods with little consequence. Douglas Lucas Kivoi, who has studied policing and police reform in Kenya, unpacks the situation.

    Why is the Kenyan police service given to brutality?

    First, Kenya’s police institution was established as a colonial instrument of oppression. Police reforms since independence in 1963 have had little impact in changing this. Instead, successive governments have used the police to suppress dissent. This has cemented a culture of violence and police impunity. This was seen during former president Daniel arap Moi’s repressive regime, the post-2007 election violence and recent crackdowns on public protests protected under the constitution.

    The reaction to mass mobilisation in June 2024 was violent. This was because the state sees public demonstrations as a threat to its authority.

    Second, police brutality thrives in environments where wrongdoing goes unpunished. Kenya’s police force lacks good internal control mechanisms. A culture of silence and solidarity – the “blue code” – deters whistleblowing. Advancements and rewards are sometimes determined by political allegiances rather than professionalism.

    Read more: Kenyan police use excessive force because they’re serving political elites, not the public – policy analyst

    Third, many police officers work in toxic conditions marked by poor pay, limited resources and long shifts. These contribute to feelings of frustration and aggression. The situation is worsened by institutionalised corruption where police officers extort money from citizens and demand bribes. This has contributed to diminished ethical standards.

    What’s in place to punish police excesses?

    Kenya has several formal avenues for holding police accountable. But all are deeply flawed.

    Independent Policing Oversight Authority: This was established in 2011 in light of the post-election violence of 2007-08. Its job was to independently investigate police misconduct. However, underfunding and understaffing has led to delayed investigations.

    There has also been a lack of cooperation from the police. They often fail to provide evidence or deliberately provide misleading information to impede investigations.

    The authority also has limited enforcement power. It has recommended thousands of prosecutions of rogue officers. However, it has seen low conviction rates given the slow processes at the judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

    Internal Affairs Unit: This is a critical oversight body. It’s mandated to provide accountability and professional discipline within the police service. It’s tasked with investigating public complaints and complaints from within the police service against police officers.

    The unit can recommend to the National Police Service Commission disciplinary action – such as prosecution or dismissal – against officers it finds guilty. It also monitors police officers to ensure that ethical conduct and professional standards are maintained.

    However, the unit faces perceptions of a lack of independence and as an internal cover-up tool. In many instances, cases of police misconduct are simply punished by a transfer to another station.

    Judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: Cases take years to move through the judicial system. Convictions are rare. The public prosecutions office has faced accusations of bias, which it exhibits through its reluctance to prosecute high-profile police killings.

    The time it takes to conclude police misconduct cases allows impunity to thrive. Deliberately poor investigations carried out by the police (who are also suspects) have led to collapsed cases.

    National Police Service Commission: This was established by the 2010 Kenyan constitution. The commission recruits and appoints police officers (except the inspector-general of police, who is appointed by the president with parliamentary approval). It also promotes, transfers and disciplines police officers.

    However, the commission has faced claims of being unduly influenced by the inspector-general’s office in recruitment and promotions. This undermines its independence.

    Read more: How Nairobi police failures let people get away with murder

    Civil society and the media: Organisations like Amnesty International Kenya and the Kenya Human Rights Commission document police abuses. But their reports rarely, if ever, lead to any real action being taken. The media’s attention and reporting of cases may exert temporary pressure but this doesn’t seem to have any long-term impact.

    Why haven’t these mechanisms worked?

    Firstly, there’s an institutional resistance to reform. Powerful factions in the police and government benefit from the current system. Whenever there is an attempt at enforcing accountability, these senior officials take advantage of bureaucratic delays, and harass investigators and whistleblowers.

    In extreme cases, they enforce the disappearance of witnesses.

    Secondly, a lack of political will creates a favourable environment to circumvent constitutional frameworks. This ultimately weakens any chances of accountability. At best, police in Kenya are used to defend political interests and suppress dissent.

    This emboldens powerful political players who want the police to be controllable. This dissuades them from instituting actual reforms and establishing a humane policing service.

    What will change things?

    Until those in leadership positions genuinely prioritise independent institutions and justice over transient political gains, significant police reform is unlikely to be realised.

    Elements of such reform would include steps to:

    Strengthen police oversight and guarantee independence

    The Independent Policing Oversight Authority Act needs to be amended to enhance autonomy. The current system is easy for the president to manipulate because he gets to appoint the authority’s commissioners.

    There’s also a need to provide the authority with equipment. This includes ballistics analysis, digital forensics and crime scene reconstruction capabilities to combat police cover-ups.

    The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions must also be required to respond to the authority’s recommendations within 30 days. Currently, cases can take years to complete. There have been instances when rogue police have used this window to eliminate witnesses or tamper with evidence.

    Overhaul police training and culture

    There must be a move away from paramilitary-style drills and procedures in training. Instead, officers need to practise de-escalation, communication and problem-solving tactics with the public. What exists within Kenya now is a paramilitary service not a police service.

    Additionally, the police service commission needs to reward professionalism and not cronyism.

    Judicial and prosecutorial reforms

    Ending police impunity in Kenya requires a multi-pronged approach. This involves judicial independence, vigorous prosecution, meaningful oversight, legislative changes and public engagement.

    But this requires meaningful political will.

    Political accountability

    Continued police impunity has eroded public confidence in Kenya’s policing and justice systems. The policing oversight authority needs sufficient funding – free of political interference – to investigate and prosecute police misconduct. Senior officers should be held accountable for not disciplining rogue officers under their charge. The presidency and interior ministry must have a zero-tolerance policy toward police brutality.

    If Kenya doesn’t grapple with police impunity, then the anniversary of the June 2024 protests will be just another date in history when the state brutally attacked, maimed and killed its own citizenry. And still managed to silence them.

    – Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people
    – https://theconversation.com/kenyas-brutal-police-have-been-exposed-again-why-the-system-fails-people-258843

    MIL OSI Africa –

  • MIL-OSI Africa: Youth entrepreneurship key to SA’s sustainable economic growth, says Mashatile

    Source: South Africa News Agency

    Youth entrepreneurship key to SA’s sustainable economic growth, says Mashatile

    Equipping young people with the skills necessary to become entrepreneurs is essential for the success of society and for overturning the post-apartheid laws that prevented the majority from engaging in the economy. 

    This is according to Deputy President Paul Mashatile, who was speaking during the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator event in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, on Friday.

    Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator is a not-for-profit social enterprise that works with partners to find solutions for the challenge of youth unemployment.

    Deputy President Mashatile cited the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, which indicated that the youth unemployment rate has now reached 56.3% in the first quarter of 2025. 

    This figure represents 9.2 million youths, who are not engaged in education, employment, or training.

    “Most of you gathered here today know all too well what it means to be without work, locked out of the economy and unable to earn an income. It is disheartening; it is discouraging, and it takes resilience and an enduring sense of hope to overcome.

    “Most importantly, it requires support from family, government, the private sector and other stakeholders,” he told attendees. 

    To address the nation’s youth economic crisis, Mashatile believes that initiatives to support young entrepreneurs are critical.

    “As government, we are fully aware that this is not just a labour market issue but a social and moral emergency.

    “I am encouraged by many of you in the audience today who remain hopeful about yours and the country’s future.”

    The country’s second-in-command said he was encouraged by the several interventions currently underway in partnership with stakeholders from across society.

    He also touched on the R100 billion — through the Transformation Fund — to support black-owned businesses and historically disadvantaged groups. 

    “These funds will act as a catalyst to attract other funds and make more funding available to support micro, small and medium enterprises.”

    The other key initiatives include the Spaza Shop Support Fund, which has allocated R500 million to revitalise township and rural economies. 

    In addition, the SAYouth.mobi platform has processed 17.9 million online applications, and the Basic Education Employment Initiative has provided first jobs for 205 000 young people.

    READ | Presidential Youth Initiative continues to empower SA’s most excluded youth

    Government also offers various programmes to support young entrepreneurs, including financial assistance, business development services, and skills training.

    Other initiatives include the National Youth Development Agency’s grant programme and the Youth Challenge Fund. 

    “To ensure increased access to funding, we have the Innovation Fund, which has already supported over 96 start-ups since 2020,” said the Deputy President. 

    He announced that these strategies focus on expanding digital infrastructure, developing digital skills, and fostering digital innovation.

    Deputy President Mashatile stressed that these were not handouts, but strategic investments in youth potential. 

    Meanwhile, he said new legislation, such as the Public Procurement Act and National Small Enterprise Amendment Bill, aims to create an enabling environment for young entrepreneurs by simplifying regulations and improving market access.

    In addition, he stated that government was working with the private sector and civil society to scale up enterprise support, open procurement pathways, and remove red tape.

    “As we look ahead, let us imagine a world in which every young person can make their ambitions a reality, where entrepreneurship is more than a slogan but a way of life.”

    Mashatile also took the time to wish everyone a wonderful National Youth Day celebration on Monday, 16 June. The national celebration will be held in Potchefstroom, North West. – SAnews.gov.za
     

    Gabisile

    MIL OSI Africa –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Plymouth to be national centre for marine autonomy

    Source: City of Plymouth

    Plymouth is to be the national centre for marine autonomy, the Defence Minister has announced in a keynote address at a major networking event in the city today.

    The city is already making waves in this area of marine technology, but the announcement made by the Right Honourable Maria Eagle, Minister of State (Defence Procurement and Industry) will catapult the city and its expertise into the spotlight.

    The timing of the news could not have been better – it came as the Plymouth City Council in partnership with the South West Regional Defence and Security Cluster, hosted an event in Devonport involving key figures from the world of marine and defence connecting with local companies to explore opportunities for future projects and investment.

    Council Leader Tudor Evans OBE said: “This is superb news. We knew Plymouth was creating something special in the blue/green skills sector, but it is always great to see others endorse what you believe.

    “We have some extraordinary businesses and organisations here in Plymouth who are at the cutting edge of this incredibly exciting sector. The world is waking up to all the possibilities marine autonomy offers and we are very keen indeed to help connect Plymouth businesses to the right people and the right organisations.

    “Investing in Plymouth’s businesses for testing and developing marine autonomy will enable UK PLC to build sovereign capabilities and secure a significant share in this growing market, particularly in the fields of defence, renewables, and oil and gas.”

    MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport Luke Pollard told the delegates that the nature of defence is changing. He said: “We have a strategic defence review that sets out that we will have fighting structure which includes marine autonomy.

    “Defence is an engine for growth. This an opportunity to develop, scale up and test marine autonomy. This sector is incredible, innovative and the work we are doing in the city is cutting edge.

    “There is a place for investment and that’s Plymouth.”

    Professor Richard Davies, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Plymouth, said: “This acknowledges the key role Plymouth is already playing in the development and delivery of marine autonomy.

    “But being recognised as the national centre of excellence represents a once in a lifetime opportunity that will open new doors for the University and our partners.

    “Working across existing and new collaborations, we can now push forward with ambitious plans to grow a sector that is critical to our nation’s defence and security, and has the potential to benefit the environment, business, health and much more besides. Together, we have the skills and expertise to deliver on those ambitions, fostering new opportunities that benefit the city, region and country in the long-term.”

    Plymouth and its surrounding area has a rich ecosystem of private sector businesses and world-renowned research capabilities across marine autonomy.

    It is a global centre of excellence for marine science and technology, with one of the largest clusters of expertise in the world and over 7,100 skilled people in marine manufacturing. Blue tech/marine sector accounts for 21 per cent of the national employment in this field and 11.3 per cent of the city’s total employment.

    Global research partners include Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Marine Biological Association, the University of Plymouth and marine autonomy companies already based in Plymouth include Thales, M Subs, Oshen, Zero USV, Sonardyne and Fugro.

    In 2020 M Subs successfully sailed the first autonomous vessel across the Atlantic.

    The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS400) was the world’s first full-sized, fully autonomous, unmanned ship to cross the ocean. The revolutionary vessel set sail from Plymouth and arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts via a pit stop in Halifax in Nova Scotia.

    The industry predicts a global marine autonomy market worth £103 billion by 2030, with the UK adopting a 10 per cent market share.

    Key speakers at the event included Sir Chris Gardner KBE Chief Executive Officer of the Submarine Delivery Agency and the Royal Navy’s Vice Admiral Andrew Burns.

    There were also representatives from Thales, Atlas Electronics as well as a themed discussion on advanced marine technology and how Plymouth will drive innovation in dual-use technology for UK Security by representatives from the University of Plymouth and PML.

    Over 170 people attended the event today Friday 13 June at the Market Hall in Devonport, UK.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: ‘Can you see me?’ Health and Care Jersey’s Community Learning Disability Service are partnering with local organisations for Learning Disability Awareness Week13 June 2025 To celebrate Learning Disability Awareness Week, Monday 16 June to Friday 20 June, Health and Care Jersey’s Adult Learning Disability Service are partnering with Mencap, Haute Vallée School and other… Read more

    Source: Channel Islands – Jersey

    13 June 2025

    To celebrate Learning Disability Awareness Week, Monday 16 June to Friday 20 June, Health and Care Jersey’s Adult Learning Disability Service are partnering with Mencap, Haute Vallée School and other organisations to highlight the support available for adults with a Learning Disability. 

    There are approximately 280 Islanders with a learning disability known to the Adult Learning Disability Service with the level of support dependent on their individual needs. With the right support, tailored education plans, assistive technology and understanding environments, people with learning disabilities can lead rewarding, fulfilling and independent lives in areas such as: 

    • Household tasks 
    • Managing time and organisation 
    • Social skills and communication 
    • Making decisions 
    • Understanding information 
    • Independent living 
    • Managing finances. 

    To help increase awareness of the services available in Jersey, the Learning Disability Service will be hosting a number of sessions within the week as follows: 

    • Monday 16 June – offering a drop-in session at the Enid Quenault Health and Wellbeing reception for the public to find out more about the Learning Disability Service and what support is available on-Island. 
    • Wednesday 18 June – adults with a Learning Disability join pupils at Haute Valleé School to participate in a joint art class. 
    • Thursday 19 June – partnering with Jersey Mencap at the Radisson Blu Waterfront Hotel to meet with parents of adults with a Learning Disability for a workshop focusing on the new Sexuality and Relationships Policy and Guidelines. Information will be provided on services that support parents to better understand relationships and sexuality. 
    • Friday 20 June, from noon – celebratory picnic at Howard Davis Park. There will be music, and an opportunity for Islanders to come together to celebrate Learning Disability Awareness Week with a Zumba session led by Jersey Mencap. 

    Also, the Learning Disability Physiotherapist Team along with AquaSplash, provide small group exercise sessions for individuals with learning disabilities. Each session promotes exercise adapted to meet individual goals with the aim to improve physical mobility, boost confidence, improve wellbeing and promote social inclusion through the therapeutic benefits of aquatic exercise. 

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Pupils learn about consequences of knife crime

    Source: Scotland – City of Perth

    Perth became the first city in Scotland to host the Knife Angel at the end of 2024 and since then Perth and Kinross Council has been working with partner agencies including the Scottish Prison Service, charity Aid and Abet and Police Scotland to raise awareness of the issues around knife crime.

    On Wednesday 11 June, Perth Grammar School became the latest venue to host a workshop following successful events in Bertha Park High School and St John’s Academy in May.

    As well as presentations from Perth and Kinross Council’s Community Justice Team and Aid and Abet, staff and prisoners from HMP Perth and HMYOI Polmont have also participated by sharing videos and recordings for use in the sessions, detailing their own personal experiences of knife crime and its consequences.

    Councillor Tom McEwan, convener of Perth and Kinross Council’s Housing and Social Wellbeing Committee, said: “Although there has been an overall reduction in knife crime over the past 15 years, recent tragedies have shown this is not a problem that has gone away.

    “It is important that young people realise that there are very real consequences for using a knife, or other blade.

    “The simple truth is that every injury, every death is one too many.”

    Perth and Kinross Learning and Families convener Councillor John Rebbeck said: “Knife crime can take lives and destroy families – both of the victim and the perpetrator who is likely to end up behind bars for several years.

    “Hearing these stories first-hand leaves a powerful impression and I thank everyone who has worked hard to run these workshops. I’m sure our children and young people will take a great deal from these workshops.”

    Bailie Chris Ahern, chair of the Perth and Kinross community justice and safety partnership added: “These are really powerful events and show children and young people the damage knives can cause to victims and the people who use them.

    “Young people are disproportionately affected by knife crime so it is important we all work together to reduce knife crime as much as we can.”

    Tom Martin, Head of Offender Outcomes at HMP Perth said: “We are committed to doing all we can to support people, reduce the risk of crime, and help build safer communities.

    “We were delighted to work with partners in Perth and Kinross Council and Police Scotland on this important initiative, and particularly pleased that some those in our care had an opportunity to share their stories, so young people can learn from their experiences.”

    Police Scotland Sergeant Allan Neary, of Partnerships, Interventions and Preventions, said: “Recently, we supported in various engagements around knife crime awareness, along with our partners at Perth and Kinross Council, Scottish Prison Service and Aid and Abet.

    “Working closely together ensures that we get the message across about the dangers of carrying knives and the impact this has. We know the effect that violent crime has on individuals, families, and local communities, and we remain commitment to keeping our communities safe.”

    The Knife Angel, also known as the National Monument Against Violence & Aggression, was on display on King Edward Street throughout December.

    Created by the British Ironwork Centre, the statue is made up of 100,000 seized weapons.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Ratho nursery pupils enjoy Julia Donaldson adventure

    Source: Scotland – City of Edinburgh

    Ratho primary and nursery pupils were treated to a special reading from Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated Axel Scheffler at Ratho Library on Wednesday (11 June).

    The children were also each gifted a copy of the classic story, which has inspired a special artwork inside the new Ratho Library. This was unveiled when the library opened its doors in March.

    A quote from the book was chosen by the local community in 2023, when a public vote was held to select words for the artwork from a range of beloved children’s books. The winning quote is now displayed above the children’s library section, alongside illustrations of Rowena frog and other characters from the book.

    Each child who attends the early years centre adjacent to the new library was given a copy of Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book by publishers Macmillan Children’s Books to celebrate its opening.

    Culture and Communities Convener Councillor Margaret Graham said:

    It’s wonderful to see some of our youngest library-goers enjoying the new space at Ratho, and even better, their very own copies of Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book!

    I recently visited the library and was really impressed with all that’s on offer, including this striking artwork, which clearly has the community at its heart. Their involvement, along with our dedicated team at the library and Macmillan Children’s Books, has helped to create a design which will inspire young minds for years to come.

    Thanks to Julia Donaldson, Axel Scheffler and Macmillan for their support throughout this process, including the gift of these books to our local nursery pupils, which I know will be well-loved.

    Julia Donaldson said:

    I have long campaigned on the valuable role that public libraries play in communities and in developing a love of books, and I am very pleased that there is now this new library in Ratho. I want to thank everyone who voted to see ‘Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book’ featured on the walls in the children’s area and I hope this joyful space introduces a new generation of readers to stories they will treasure for life.

    Axel Scheffler said:

    It is an honour to know that ‘Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book’ was chosen by the local community in Ratho to feature in their new library. I would like to thank them all and also the librarian team who have worked so hard to make this happen. I am so pleased that Rowena frog and Charlie will welcome young readers into the children’s area and I hope they will inspire families to discover great new books together.

    On Wednesday, pupil librarians from Ratho Primary School helped publishers Macmillan Children’s Books to gift a copy of the book to a small group of nursery children to then take back to share with the other children at the nursery.

    Ratho Library offers a broad range of services to customers, including access to a wide variety of digital and printed books, free public access to computers, free public Wi-Fi, collection of NHS hearing Aid batteries, support with National Entitlement Cards alongside an exciting programme of events and activities for children and adults.

    The library will host Tech Donation Boxes later in the year where everyday tech devices can be upcycled.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Brian Daly Named Director of Division of Investment Management

    Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

    The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that investment management industry leader Brian T. Daly will become the new Director of the Division of Investment Management, effective July 8.

    Mr. Daly brings decades of experience serving in prominent roles at global law firms and investment management firms while advising fund managers and sponsors on regulatory compliance.

    For the past four years, he has been a partner in the investment management practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in New York, where he has guided investment advisers and other clients on their legal and compliance programs, policies, and procedures as well as counseling on fund and management company formation, operational and trading issues, contentious matters, and management company transactions.

    “Brian has deep familiarity with all levels of the investment management industry, and I look forward to working with him as we address smart, effective oversight of the industry and its relationships with investors,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins. “I am looking forward to working with Brian on common-sense regulation that does not impose unnecessary burdens and genuinely embraces the public comment process.”

    Mr. Daly said, “I’ve long respected and appreciated the SEC’s commitment to regulatory oversight while advising clients on compliance and providing public comment from the investment management point of view during agency rulemaking. I am optimistic about this new day at the SEC and eager to get to work with Chairman Atkins and my new colleagues to ensure regulatory compliance by investment advisers and fund managers while tailoring rulemakings within our statutory authority.”

    Prior to Akin, Mr. Daly spent nearly a decade as a partner in the investment management group of Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, advising investment advisers and fund managers on legal, compliance, and operational issues and matters. He was also a founding equity partner of Kepos Capital, a quantitative investment management company, while he served as chief legal and compliance officer. Among other prior positions, Mr. Daly served in general counsel and chief compliance officer positions at Millennium Partners, a Carlyle Group liquid markets fund manager, and Raptor Capital Management. He also taught legal ethics at Yale Law School and served on the board of directors of the Managed Funds Association.

    Mr. Daly earned his J.D., with distinction, from Stanford Law School, where he was an associate editor on the Stanford Law Review and the editor-in-chief of the Stanford Journal of International Law. He received his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Catholic University and his M.A. from the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Southern Baptists’ call for the US Supreme Court to overturn its same-sex marriage decision is part of a long history of opposing women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Susan M. Shaw, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University

    A worship session at the 2025 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 10, 2025, in Dallas. AP Photo/Richard W. Rodriguez

    The Southern Baptist Convention has lost 3.6 million members over the past two decades and faces an ongoing sexual abuse crisis. At its June 2025 annual meeting, however, neither of those issues took up as much time as controversial social issues, including the denomination’s stance on same-sex marriage.

    The group called for the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges – the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage – and the creation of laws that “affirm marriage between one man and one woman.”

    Messengers – Southern Baptists’ word for delegates from local churches – also asked for laws that would “reflect the moral order revealed in Scripture and nature.”

    They also decried declining fertility rates, commercial surrogacy, Planned Parenthood, “willful childlessness,” the normalization of “transgender ideology,” and gender-affirming medical care.

    This detailed list targeting women’s and LGBTQ+ rights was justified by an appeal to a God-ordained created order, as defined by Southern Baptists’ interpretation of the Bible.

    In this created order, sex and gender are synonymous and are irrevocably defined by biology. The heterosexual nuclear family is the foundational institution of this order, with the father dominant over his wife and children – and children are a necessity if husbands and wives are to be faithful to God’s design for the family.

    The resolution, On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family, passed easily in a denomination that was taken over from more moderate Southern Baptists by fundamentalists in the early 1990s, largely in response to women’s progress in society and in the denomination.

    Southern Baptists were always conservative on issues of gender and sexuality. As I was entering a Southern Baptist seminary in the early 1980s, the denomination seemed poised to embrace social progress. I watched the takeover firsthand as a student and then as a professor of women and gender studies who studies Southern Baptists. This new resolution is the latest in a long history of Southern Baptist opposition to the progress of women and LGBTQ+ people.

    Opposing LGBTQ+ rights

    Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Southern Baptists began to embrace the women’s movement. Women started to attend Southern Baptist seminaries in record numbers, many claiming a call to serve as pastors. While Southern Baptist acceptance of LGBTQ+ people lagged far behind its nascent embrace of women’s rights, progress did seem possible.

    Then in 1979, a group of Southern Baptist fundamentalists organized to wrest control of the denomination from the moderates who had led it for decades.

    Any hope for progress on changes regarding LGBTQ+ rights in the denomination quickly died. Across the next two decades, advances made by women, such as being ordained and serving as senior pastors, eroded and disappeared.

    The SBC had passed anti-gay resolutions in the 1970s defining homosexuality as “deviant” and a “sin.” But under the new fundamentalist rule, the SBC became even more vehemently anti-gay and anti-trans.

    In 1988, the SBC called homosexuality a “perversion of divine standards,” “a violation of nature and natural affections,” “not a normal lifestyle,” and “an abomination in the eyes of God.”

    In 1991, they decried government funding for the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference as a violation of “the proper role and responsibility of government” because of its encouragement of “sexual immorality.”

    Predictably, across the years, the convention spoke out against every effort to advance LGBTQ+ rights. This included supporting the Boy Scouts’ ban of gay scouts, opposing military service by LGBTQ+ people, boycotting Disney for its support of LGBTQ+ people, calling on businesses to deny LGBTQ+ people domestic partner benefits and employment nondiscrimination to protect LGBTQ+ people, and supporting the Defense of Marriage Act that limited marriage to a woman and a man.

    Targeting same-sex marriage

    The gender and sexuality topic, however, that has received the most attention from the convention has been marriage equality. Since 1980, the SBC has passed 22 resolutions that touch on same-sex marriage.

    The SBC passed its first resolution against same-sex marriage in 1996 after the Hawaii Supreme Court indicated the possibility it could rule in favor of same-sex marriage. The court never decided the issue because Hawaii’s Legislature passed a bill defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

    In 1998, the convention amended its faith statement, the Baptist Faith and Message, to define marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment.”

    The denomination passed its next resolution in 2003 in response to the Vermont General Assembly’s establishment of civil unions. The resolution opposed any efforts to validate same-sex marriages or partnerships, whether legislative, judicial or religious.

    In 2004, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court allowed same-sex marriages in that state, the convention called for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. It reiterated this call in 2006.

    When the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the SBC passed another resolution in 2008 warning of the dire consequences of allowing lesbians and gay men to marry, as people from other states would marry in California and return home to challenge their states’ marriage bans.

    In 2011, the convention offered its support for the Defense of Marriage Act, followed in 2012 by a denunciation of the use of civil rights language to argue for marriage equality.

    Delegates at a Southern Baptist Convention meeting in 2012 in New Orleans.
    AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

    The resolution argues that homosexuality “does not qualify as a class meriting special protections, like race and gender.”

    When Obergefell was before the Supreme Court, the SBC called on the court to deny marriage equality. After Obergefell was decided in favor of same-sex marriage, the convention asked for Congress to pass the First Amendment Defense Act, which would have prohibited the federal government from discriminating against people based on their opposition to same-sex marriage. That same resolution also offers its support to state attorneys general challenging transgender rights.

    Opposing transgender people

    Messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention listen to remarks by its president, Clint Pressley, during the 2025 SBC annual meeting in Dallas.
    AP Photo/Richard W. Rodriguez

    This was not the first time the SBC had spoken about transgender issues. As early as 2007, the denomination expressed its opposition to allowing transgender people to constitute a protected class in hate crimes legislation.

    In 2014, the convention stated its belief that gender is fixed and binary and subsequently that trans people should not be allowed gender-affirming care and that government officials should not validate transgender identity.

    In 2016, the denomination opposed access for transgender people to bathrooms matching their gender identities. In 2021, the convention invoked women’s rights – in a denomination famous for its resistance to women’s equality – as a reason to undermine trans rights.

    In its resolution opposing the proposed Equality Act, which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classifications, the SBC argued, “The Equality Act would undermine decades of hard-fought civil rights protections for women and girls by threatening competition in sports and disregarding the privacy concerns women rightly have about sharing sleeping quarters and intimate facilities with members of the opposite sex.”

    This most recent resolution from June 2025 returns to the themes of fixed and binary gender, a divinely sanctioned hierarchical ordering of gender, and marriage as an institution limited to one woman and one man. While claiming these beliefs are “universal truths,” the resolution argues that Obergefell is a “legal fiction” because it denies the biological reality of male and female.

    Going further, this resolution claims that U.S. law on gender and sexuality should be based on the Bible. The duty of lawmakers, it states, is to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law – about marriage, sex, human life, and family – and to oppose any law that denies or undermines what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

    By taking no action on sexual abuse while focusing its efforts on issues of gender and sexuality, the convention affirmed its decades-long conservative trajectory. It also underlined its willingness to encourage lawmakers to impose these standards on the rest of the nation.

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

    – ref. Southern Baptists’ call for the US Supreme Court to overturn its same-sex marriage decision is part of a long history of opposing women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights – https://theconversation.com/southern-baptists-call-for-the-us-supreme-court-to-overturn-its-same-sex-marriage-decision-is-part-of-a-long-history-of-opposing-womens-and-lgbtq-peoples-rights-258883

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Protecting the vulnerable, or automating harm? AI’s double-edged role in spotting abuse

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Aislinn Conrad, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Iowa

    AI can help maximize resources in strapped systems trying to protect vulnerable people – but it can also risk replicating harm or privacy violations. Courtney Hale/E+ via Getty Images

    Artificial intelligence is rapidly being adopted to help prevent abuse and protect vulnerable people – including children in foster care, adults in nursing homes and students in schools. These tools promise to detect danger in real time and alert authorities before serious harm occurs.

    Developers are using natural language processing, for example — a form of AI that interprets written or spoken language – to try to detect patterns of threats, manipulation and control in text messages. This information could help detect domestic abuse and potentially assist courts or law enforcement in early intervention. Some child welfare agencies use predictive modeling, another common AI technique, to calculate which families or individuals are most “at risk” for abuse.

    When thoughtfully implemented, AI tools have the potential to enhance safety and efficiency. For instance, predictive models have assisted social workers to prioritize high-risk cases and intervene earlier.

    But as a social worker with 15 years of experience researching family violence – and five years on the front lines as a foster-care case manager, child abuse investigator and early childhood coordinator – I’ve seen how well-intentioned systems often fail the very people they are meant to protect.

    Now, I am helping to develop iCare, an AI-powered surveillance camera that analyzes limb movements – not faces or voices – to detect physical violence. I’m grappling with a critical question: Can AI truly help safeguard vulnerable people, or is it just automating the same systems that have long caused them harm?

    New tech, old injustice

    Many AI tools are trained to “learn” by analyzing historical data. But history is full of inequality, bias and flawed assumptions. So are people, who design, test and fund AI.

    That means AI algorithms can wind up replicating systemic forms of discrimination, like racism or classism. A 2022 study in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, found that a predictive risk model to score families’ risk levels – scores given to hotline staff to help them screen calls – would have flagged Black children for investigation 20% more often than white children, if used without human oversight. When social workers were included in decision-making, that disparity dropped to 9%.

    Language-based AI can also reinforce bias. For instance, one study showed that natural language processing systems misclassified African American Vernacular English as “aggressive” at a significantly higher rate than Standard American English — up to 62% more often, in certain contexts.

    Meanwhile, a 2023 study found that AI models often struggle with context clues, meaning sarcastic or joking messages can be misclassified as serious threats or signs of distress.

    Language-processing AI isn’t always great at judging what counts as a threat or concern.
    NickyLloyd/E+ via Getty Images

    These flaws can replicate larger problems in protective systems. People of color have long been over-surveilled in child welfare systems — sometimes due to cultural misunderstandings, sometimes due to prejudice. Studies have shown that Black and Indigenous families face disproportionately higher rates of reporting, investigation and family separation compared with white families, even after accounting for income and other socioeconomic factors.

    Many of these disparities stem from structural racism embedded in decades of discriminatory policy decisions, as well as implicit biases and discretionary decision-making by overburdened caseworkers.

    Surveillance over support

    Even when AI systems do reduce harm toward vulnerable groups, they often do so at a disturbing cost.

    In hospitals and elder-care facilities, for example, AI-enabled cameras have been used to detect physical aggression between staff, visitors and residents. While commercial vendors promote these tools as safety innovations, their use raises serious ethical concerns about the balance between protection and privacy.

    In a 2022 pilot program in Australia, AI camera systems deployed in two care homes generated more than 12,000 false alerts over 12 months – overwhelming staff and missing at least one real incident. The program’s accuracy did “not achieve a level that would be considered acceptable to staff and management,” according to the independent report.

    Surveillance cameras in care homes can help detect abuse, but they raise serious questions about privacy.
    kazuma seki/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Children are affected, too. In U.S. schools, AI surveillance like Gaggle, GoGuardian and Securly are marketed as tools to keep students safe. Such programs can be installed on students’ devices to monitor online activity and flag anything concerning.

    But they’ve also been shown to flag harmless behaviors – like writing short stories with mild violence, or researching topics related to mental health. As an Associated Press investigation revealed, these systems have also outed LGBTQ+ students to parents or school administrators by monitoring searches or conversations about gender and sexuality.

    Other systems use classroom cameras and microphones to detect “aggression.” But they frequently misidentify normal behavior like laughing, coughing or roughhousing — sometimes prompting intervention or discipline.

    These are not isolated technical glitches; they reflect deep flaws in how AI is trained and deployed. AI systems learn from past data that has been selected and labeled by humans — data that often reflects social inequalities and biases. As sociologist Virginia Eubanks wrote in “Automating Inequality,” AI systems risk scaling up these long-standing harms.

    Care, not punishment

    I believe AI can still be a force for good, but only if its developers prioritize the dignity of the people these tools are meant to protect. I’ve developed a framework of four key principles for what I call “trauma-responsive AI.”

    1. Survivor control: People should have a say in how, when and if they’re monitored. Providing users with greater control over their data can enhance trust in AI systems and increase their engagement with support services, such as creating personalized plans to stay safe or access help.

    2. Human oversight: Studies show that combining social workers’ expertise with AI support improves fairness and reduces child maltreatment – as in Allegheny County, where caseworkers used algorithmic risk scores as one factor, alongside their professional judgment, to decide which child abuse reports to investigate.

    3. Bias auditing: Governments and developers are increasingly encouraged to test AI systems for racial and economic bias. Open-source tools like IBM’s AI Fairness 360, Google’s What-If Tool, and Fairlearn assist in detecting and reducing such biases in machine learning models.

    4. Privacy by design: Technology should be built to protect people’s dignity. Open-source tools like Amnesia, Google’s differential privacy library and Microsoft’s SmartNoise help anonymize sensitive data by removing or obscuring identifiable information. Additionally, AI-powered techniques, such as facial blurring, can anonymize people’s identities in video or photo data.

    Honoring these principles means building systems that respond with care, not punishment.

    Some promising models are already emerging. The Coalition Against Stalkerware and its partners advocate to include survivors in all stages of tech development – from needs assessments to user testing and ethical oversight.

    Legislation is important, too. On May 5, 2025, for example, Montana’s governor signed a law restricting state and local government from using AI to make automated decisions about individuals without meaningful human oversight. It requires transparency about how AI is used in government systems and prohibits discriminatory profiling.

    As I tell my students, innovative interventions should disrupt cycles of harm, not perpetuate them. AI will never replace the human capacity for context and compassion. But with the right values at the center, it might help us deliver more of it.

    Aislinn Conrad is developing iCare, an AI-powered, real-time violence detection system.

    – ref. Protecting the vulnerable, or automating harm? AI’s double-edged role in spotting abuse – https://theconversation.com/protecting-the-vulnerable-or-automating-harm-ais-double-edged-role-in-spotting-abuse-256403

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Colorado’s fentanyl criminalization bill won’t solve the opioid epidemic, say the people most affected

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Katherine LeMasters, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Boulder

    The people most impacted by Colorado’s fentanyl criminalization bill have divergent views on the role of the legal system in curbing the opioid epidemic. Erik McGregor/GettyImages

    Colorado passed the Fentanyl Accountability and Prevention Bill in May 2022. The legislation made the possession of small amounts of fentanyl a felony, rather than a misdemeanor.

    Felonies are more likely than misdemeanors to result in a prison sentence.

    Time in prison is associated with an increased risk of fatal overdose in the year after release. People with felonies on their record often struggle to find a job or rent an apartment.

    In 2023, lawmakers in 46 states passed legislation similar to Colorado’s. They introduced more than 600 bills related to fentanyl criminalization and enacted over 100 other laws to attempt to curb the opioid epidemic.

    Possession of small amounts of ketamine, GHB and other criminalized drugs is also a felony in Colorado.

    I’m an assistant professor of medicine, social epidemiologist and community researcher who studies mass incarceration as a public health threat. I am a member of the Right Response Coalition, which advocates for community rather than criminal-legal responses to behavioral health needs in Colorado. Recently, my work has focused on how increasing criminal penalties for fentanyl possession in Colorado affects the individuals and communities most impacted by such laws.

    Our team conducted 31 interviews with Colorado policymakers, peer support specialists, law enforcement, community behavioral health providers and people providing behavioral health in prisons and jails to explore a variety of perspectives on Colorado’s Fentanyl Accountability and Prevention Bill and the role of the criminal-legal system in addressing substance use and overdose.

    Most of our interviewees agreed that criminalization alone wouldn’t solve the opioid epidemic.

    “You can’t incarcerate yourself to sobriety,” said a rural law enforcement officer. “You can’t incarcerate yourself out of the drug problem in America.”

    Criminalization of drug use

    Incarceration and substance use are deeply intertwined. The U.S. houses one-quarter of the world’s incarcerated population – largely due to policies created during the “war on Drugs” of the 1980s. The war on drugs included mandatory minimum sentencing for drug-related charges and “three strikes” laws that lengthened sentences after multiple charges.

    Today, one-fifth of the U.S. incarcerated population has a drug-related charge.

    People recently released from incarceration are more likely to overdose than the general public because their tolerance is greatly reduced following forced abstinence and there are not enough community-based treatment options.
    Erik McGregor/GettyImages

    Incarceration is often seen as a deterrent, but research shows it is not actually associated with reduced drug use. Instead, people recently released from incarceration are more likely to die of a fatal overdose and face a high likelihood of reincarceration.

    Perspectives of front-line workers

    All 31 of the participants in our study supported policies to prevent fentanyl overdoses. However, most thought that use of police and incarceration as avenues to do so was misguided.

    We spoke to some individuals who felt the bill was appropriate, but most felt that increased criminalization perpetuates stigma against people who use drugs. They also saw the law as ignoring the root causes of the opioid epidemic, which include a lack of voluntary community-based treatment options. They also said the law creates stressful law enforcement encounters that can perpetuate drug use as a coping mechanism.

    “It just seems like there’s no getting away from [the police], they’re everywhere,” said an urban peer support specialist. “I got arrested by the same cops, I don’t know how many times. And then it makes you want to try to be avoidant or run because they’re not going to help you.”

    Participants worried that the policy has an inadvertent chilling effect, deterring individuals from calling 911 when an overdose occurs.

    “Most people with substance abuse are not trying to report anything or get help for fear of going to jail,” one rural provider said. “It’s so stigmatized that everyone’s just scared to do that.”

    Study participants worried that the Colorado fentanyl criminalization bill will deter people from reporting an overdose for fear of being arrested.
    Spencer Platt/GettyImages

    Participants largely thought that counties were using incarceration as a default treatment setting and that it wasn’t an ideal solution.

    “[I] don’t want to see [people] incarcerated, but I don’t want ‘em to die either,” said an urban peer support specialist.

    The people we interviewed pointed to a lack of community-based care options that could come before people are incarcerated. Those options include substance use treatment centers, mental health services and community health centers.

    Substance use treatment

    Colorado’s fentanyl bill did more than just increase penalties. It also provided additional funding for a state naloxone program and required that all jails provide medications for opioid use disorder.

    Along with increasing penalties, Colorado’s bill increased access to naloxone, an opioid-reversal drug.
    Hyoung Chang/GettyImages

    These medications include methadone, buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone. All are part of an established public health strategy shown to reduce overdose deaths and opioid use. They’re also shown to increase engagement with non-jail-based treatment and reduce reincarceration.

    However, jail capacity and the lack of treatment options based in one’s community play a large role in which medications are offered and to whom. For example, only 11 out of Colorado’s 46 counties with a county jail have an opioid treatment program in the community that can dispense methadone. Therefore, some facilities do not offer all medications, or only offer medications to individuals with an active prescription or to certain populations such as pregnant people.

    Investing in community solutions

    Based on our study’s findings, my study co-authors and I believe increased criminal penalties should not be the solution for linking individuals to treatment. Instead, there should be more investment in long-term community solutions.

    One such solution is Denver’s Substance Use Navigation Program. The program sends behavioral health specialists to emergency calls to prevent legal involvement when someone is experiencing distress related to mental health, poverty, homelessness or substance use. In many cases, those individuals are then routed to services rather than jails.

    Our findings also lead us to believe there is a need for more participatory policymaking processes when it comes to fentanyl legislation, and that policymakers should more closely work with the people who will be most impacted by new legislation. Most of our participants agree.

    “[I] don’t think that [the] state realized how difficult it is,” said a rural provider about giving medication-assisted treatment in jail, an increasing need as more people are arrested for fentanyl possession. “They probably should come here and visit us.”

    Katherine LeMasters received funding from the Colorado Department of Human Services, Behavioral Health Administration. Katherine LeMasters is part of the Right Response Coalition.

    – ref. Colorado’s fentanyl criminalization bill won’t solve the opioid epidemic, say the people most affected – https://theconversation.com/colorados-fentanyl-criminalization-bill-wont-solve-the-opioid-epidemic-say-the-people-most-affected-256661

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Data on sexual orientation and gender is critical to public health – without it, health crises continue unnoticed

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By John R. Blosnich, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Southern California

    As part of the Trump administration’s efforts aimed at stopping diversity, equity and inclusion, the government has been restricting how it monitors public health. Along with cuts to federally funded research, the administration has targeted public health efforts to gather information about sexual orientation and gender identity.

    In the early days of the second Trump administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and documents that included sexual orientation and gender identity from its webpages. For example, data codebooks for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System were replaced with versions that deleted gender identity variables. The Trump administration also ordered the CDC to delete gender identity from the National Violent Death Reporting System, the world’s largest database for informing prevention of homicide and suicide deaths.

    For many people, sexual orientation and gender identity may seem private and personal. So why is personal information necessary for public health?

    Decades of research have shown that health problems affect some groups more than others. As someone who has studied differences in health outcomes for over 15 years, I know that one of the largest health disparities for LGBTQ+ people is suicide risk. Without data on sexual orientation and gender identity, public health cannot do the work to sound the alarm on and address issues that affect not just specific communities, but society as a whole.

    Clinicians are concerned about the purging of health data that is essential to patient care.

    Alarms and benchmarks

    Health is determined by the interplay of several factors, including a person’s genetics, environment and personal life. Of these types of health information, data on personal lives can be the most difficult to collect because researchers must rely on people to voluntarily share this information with them. But details about people’s everyday lives are critical to understanding their health.

    Consider veteran status. Without information that identifies which Americans are military veterans, the U.S. would never have known that the rate of suicide deaths among veterans is several times higher than that of the general population. Identifying this problem encouraged efforts to reduce suicide among veterans and military service personnel.

    Studying the rates of different conditions occurring in different groups of people is a vital role of public health monitoring. First, rates can set off alarm bells. When people are counted, it becomes easier to pick up a problem that needs to be addressed.

    Second, rates can be a benchmark. Once the extent of a health problem is known, researchers can develop and test interventions. They can then determine if rates of that health problem decreased, stayed the same or increased after the intervention.

    My team reviewed available research on how sexual orientation and gender identity are related to differences in mortality. The results were grim.

    Of the 49 studies we analyzed, the vast majority documented greater rates of death from all causes for LGBTQ+ people compared with people who aren’t LGBTQ+. Results were worse for suicide: Nearly all studies reported that suicide deaths were more frequent among LGBTQ+ people. A great deal of other research supports this finding.

    Without data on sexual orientation and gender identity, these issues are erased.

    Lost data costs everyone

    Higher death rates among LGBTQ+ people affect everyone, not just people in the LGBTQ+ community. And when suicide is a major driver of these death rates, the costs increase.

    There are societal costs. Deaths from suicide result in lost productivity and medical services that cost the U.S. an estimated $484 billion per year. There are also human costs. Research suggests that for every suicide death, about 135 people are directly affected by the loss, experiencing grief, sadness and anger.

    President Donald Trump’s targeting of research on sexual orientation and gender identity comes at a time when more Americans than ever – an estimated 24.4 million adults – identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. That’s more than the entire population of Florida.

    LGBTQ+ people live in every state in the country, where they work as teachers, executives, janitors, nurses, mechanics, artists and every other profession or role that help sustain American communities. LGBTQ+ people are someone’s family members, and they are raising families of their own. LGBTQ+ people also pay taxes to the government, which are partly spent on monitoring the nation’s health.

    Stopping data collection of sexual orientation and gender identity does not protect women, or anyone else, as the Trump administration claims. Rather, it serves to weaken American public health. I believe counting all Americans is the path to a stronger, healthier nation because public health can then do its duty of detecting when a community needs help.

    John R. Blosnich receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. He is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however all time and effort into writing this piece was done outside of his work with the VA. The opinions expressed are those of Dr. Blosnich and do not necessarily represent those of his institution, funders, or any affiliations.

    – ref. Data on sexual orientation and gender is critical to public health – without it, health crises continue unnoticed – https://theconversation.com/data-on-sexual-orientation-and-gender-is-critical-to-public-health-without-it-health-crises-continue-unnoticed-255380

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Education superstars shine bright at Teach Portsmouth Awards 2025

    Source: City of Portsmouth

    The city’s school and college staff were recognised at an awards ceremony for the profession at Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday 12 June.

    The Teach Portsmouth Awards celebrated outstanding achievements across 12 categories, while also recognising dedicated professionals who have worked in education for over 20 years.

    Councillor Nick Dorrington, Cabinet Member for Children, Families and Education at Portsmouth City Council said:

    “The Teach Portsmouth Awards are a fantastic opportunity to celebrate excellence in education, highlight best practice, and recognise the incredible staff who make a real difference to the lives of children and young people.

    “This year, we placed a special emphasis on community engagement, inviting parents and carers to nominate staff. Their overwhelming response led to a record number of entries in the people’s choice category. Alongside this, senior school leaders shared powerful stories of colleagues going above and beyond to support their communities.”

    The ceremony was hosted by local headteachers, Ashley Howard from Mayfield School and Zoe Killick from St Paul’s Catholic School and Nursery.

    The winners were announced at the awards ceremony in the following categories:

    Teaching and learning support award – Sponsored by the University of Chichester Academy Trust
     Emilie Howard-Angreville – The Portsmouth Academy

    Early career teacher award – Sponsored by University of Portsmouth
     Lucy Bleach – Court Lane Infant Academy

    People’s choice award – Sponsored by The News
     Hannah Powell – New Horizons Primary School

    Innovation award – Sponsored by City of Portsmouth College
    Chris Furnell -Trafalgar School

    Early years and childcare award – Sponsored by Home-Start Portsmouth
     Lisa Harris – Little Creators Pre School

    Inclusion and diversity award – Sponsored by Salterns Academy Trust
    Kate Donovan – Ark Dickens Primary Academy

    Community award –  Sponsored by Comserv Property Services
     City of Portsmouth College – ESOL team

    Unsung hero award – Sponsored by Humly
     Tracy Barker – Priory School

    Volunteer award – Sponsored by Nation Radio
     Andrew Beecher – Admiral Lord Nelson School

    Wellbeing award – Sponsored by My Happy Minds
     Sharon Hartt and Jasmine Hewett – Highbury Primary School

    Outstanding contribution award – Sponsored by HSDC
     Llewela Ann Thomas – Court Lane Infant School

    In addition, 43 people received long service awards for 20 years of service to the city. There is no overall winner in this category and everyone receives a trophy.

    Two new categories were introduced to recognise different initiatives that enable pupils to thrive.

    The volunteer award category showcased individuals who give their time for free using their own life experiences to support pupils in different ways. The community award highlighted partnership working between schools, colleges and other organisations.

    (Left to right – Ashley Howard, Stewart Dennis (Nation Radio), Andrew Beecher and Zoe Killick). 

    Andrew Beecher won the volunteer award supporting pupils in gardening club at Admiral Lord Nelson School.

    The judges said that he enables pupils to learn new life skills and helps foster self-belief. Andrew said:

    “I was blown away when I was nominated as it was unexpected. The journey from being shortlisted to winning has been a rollercoaster ride but one I have enjoyed immensely.

    “Winning the award is also a recognition for the pupils I work with. Their efforts are my successes too. I would like to thank everyone who put me forward for the award – it has given me a real boost.”

    (Left to right – Ashley Howard, Sharon Hartt, Jasmine Hewett, Tom Black (MyHappyMind) and Zoe Killick)

    Sharon Hartt and Jasmine Hewett were joint winners for the wellbeing award for their work supporting families with bereavement. As a result of their efforts, Highbury Primary School is one of only three schools in Hampshire to be awarded ‘Simon Says Champion Status.’

    The shortlisting panel said their efforts to train staff to help bereaved families was inspirational. Sharon said:

    “It was an honour to win the award on the night. Wellbeing in schools has become more important.

    “Our work as Simon Says Champions has been a collaborative effort with staff across the school. Winning the award showcases the impact this is having across our community.”

    The Teach Portsmouth website has been updated to include information on the winners and shortlist. Visit: www.teachportsmouth.co.uk/awards

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –