Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Juan Ciscomani (Arizona)
Safford, AZ – U.S. Congressman Juan Ciscomani told Graham County ranchers that they should receive full compensation for cattle killed by Mexican gray wolves.
“Ranchers in Arizona and other western states face an intolerable situation,” said Ciscomani. “Their livelihood is directly threatened by an animal that the federal government has reintroduced into our communities. Yet when a wolf kills their cattle, they can’t get full compensation. This just isn’t right.”
Ciscomani told ranchers he’s a co-sponsor of the Wolf and Livestock Fairness (WOLF) Act (H.R. 2227) to fully reimburse ranchers for any livestock killed or harmed by endangered Mexican gray wolves. Currently, ranchers are compensated for 75 percent of the value of livestock killed by gray wolves. This bill increases compensation for ranchers to 100 percent of the value of cattle loss and compensates them for decreased herd sizes.
“Government bureaucracy cannot stand between ranchers and their way of life,” said Ciscomani.
The Congressman’s meeting with ranchers in Safford was part of a day spent in Graham County. He also provided a congressional update to elected officials, students, business leaders, educators, and community members at Eastern Arizona College. Here is some of the legislation he has introduced and cosponsored to support students, veterans, and workers across Arizona’s 6th District:
TheSecure our Rural Schools Act(H.R. 1383) which provides funding to rural counties and schools that are impacted by federal land management, particularly those with large areas of federally owned, tax-exempt forests.
TheVeterans Education and Technical Skills (VETS) Opportunity Act (H.R. 1458), would expand veterans’ access to educational opportunities in high-demand skill and vocation programs, whether in-person or partially online.
The Creating Opportunities for New Skills Training at Rural and Underserved Colleges and Trade Schools (CONSTRUCTS) Act (H.R. 1055) would create a grant program to fund and develop residential construction education and certification programs at community colleges, junior colleges, and trade schools
“I am committed to making sure that rural communities, which are often overlooked by the federal government, have a seat at the table,” said Ciscomani. “I spent the day in Graham County, where I met with ranchers to talk about my efforts to strengthen water security, the problem posed by Mexican gray wolves, and my support of a bipartisan bill to provide full reimbursement to ranchers when livestock are killed or harmed by these wolves. Afterwards, I had an engaging meeting with local leaders and community members where I provided an update on my work in Congress and reiterated my ironclad support of Pell Grants, protecting Medicaid, and next steps in reconciliation process. As I always say, you never have to wonder what people in rural Arizona think, and today’s dialogue equips me to better deliver for all of my constituents.”
Maria (Marysia) Szuster, Gabrijela Papec, Linn Junge, Fanny Burdin-Egloffe, Tatiana Van den Haute
Each year, the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition brings together thousands of law students from across the globe, challenging them to tackle the most complex and contested issues in public international law.
For five first-year students at Sciences Po Law School, the 2025 edition was more than just a competition — it was an intense, transformative experience that pushed them to their intellectual and personal limits.
From winning the French national rounds to representing France on the world stage in Washington D.C., this remarkable team not only proved their legal acumen but also exemplified resilience, teamwork, and passion. In this article, they reflect on what it took to get there, the lessons they learned along the way, and the advice they would give to those ready to take on the Jessup challenge.
«The Sciences Po Law School warmly thanks Clifford Chance for its valuable support in the 2025 Jessup Moot Court Competition. This contribution helped our team reach the top 16 worldwide, a remarkable achievement. It reflects both the talent of our students and the value of strong academic-professional partnerships.»
Sébastien Pimont, Dean, and Julie Babin d’Amonville, Executive Director
Can you introduce yourself?
Linn Junge, a first-year student in Economic Law, did Jessup for the second time this year, having won the French championship and advanced to the round of 16 in 2023 with Sciences Po Reims. Hailing from Germany but having also lived in the US, Linn was the team’s captain, and oralist for both Respondent and Applicant.
Gabrijela Papecfrom Croatia was a world-renowned debater in high school and during the undergraduate degree, skills she leveraged to the best effect in her role as oralist for the Applicant. She is in the English track, alongside Linn and Maria.
Tatiana Van den Hauteis a Lebanese first year law student in Droit Économique. After completing her undergraduate degree at Sciences Po, Campus du Havre with an exchange in Taipei, she spent another year working there as a policy analyst. She was able to apply her analytical and public speaking experiences in her role as an oralist for Respondent.
Fanny Burdin-Egloffeis a French student in the first year of the French track in Droit Économique. After a year as a research assistant at the University of Sydney, she brought her analytical and legal research skills to her role as of counsel for this year’s Jessup team.
Maria (Marysia) Szusteris a Polish fist year student in Economic Law with a particular passion for human rights and refugees’ access to education. The skills she gained as a research assistant at Yale University and a writer for the American Bar Association on grave human rights violations she applied in research and finding arguments in Jessup this year.
What motivated you to participate in the 2025 Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition?
For many of us, law and politics are equal passions and two sides of the same coin. International law as a field combines these two disciplines like perhaps no other arena—international law is most closely based on, after all, the political decisions of states. The Jessup Competition perfectly embodies this intersection, standing as the world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious moot court competition.
What makes Jessup particularly valuable is the opportunity it provides students to spend eight months conducting deep research on widely debated and unresolved topics in international law. Beyond being a rare luxury within our fast-paced curriculum, this extended engagement allows participants to dive autonomously into aspects of public international law that fall outside the ordinary courses, exploring issues we would otherwise never encounter. The challenge of doing that in itself while going through our first year of law school called to all of us. Along with this intellectual challenge, participating in the Jessup opens doors to connecting with a community of like-minded people in all stages of their careers who share a passion for the competition and public international law as a whole.
Can you tell us about your preparation process for the competition?
Our first major task was learning how to balance our considerable coursework with researching public international law and this year’s problem, from scratch. The first phase of research culminated in the memorial writing phase, which was all the more complicated given that our team was spread across the world when the deadline came nearing in January 2025 during our Winter break. Nevertheless, we managed to submit two excellent memorials before returning to Paris, where we earnestly began preparing for the oral rounds.
Knowing how much effort it takes to learn, within a month, to become distinguished oralists and researchers, we met and practiced our pleading between three and five times a week until the national rounds at the end of February.
To our immense joy, we were crowned French national champions of the Jessup on March 1, having gone undefeated throughout all of the rounds. Despite the stress and fatigue that had worn on us over the course of the rounds, we managed to convince a unanimous jury to send us to Washington as the French representative team—a privilege that Sciences Po Law School has not been able to enjoy in seven years.
With that in mind, the preparation period for Washington was, if anything, even more intense than that for the nationals. On the one hand, we knew competition would be even more stiff, seeing that only the best of the best would be in Washington, and on the other, we had to arrange travel, accommodation, and funding in close collaboration with the Sciences Po Law School. All along, however, we continued to reach out to countless professors, friends, and connections whose advice and critiques were absolutely invaluable in continuously augmenting the quality of our performance as a team. The reward was significant. We advanced to the Octofinals in Washington, putting us within the 16 best teams in the world out of the more than 800 that competed this year. Only once in Jessup history has France advanced further than this.
Gabrijela Papec, Linn Junge received awards during the national rounds. Could you tell us more about that experience and what it meant to your team?
Jessup is 100% a team effort, but watching two of our team members get the recognition they deserve for all their hard work and talent was incredibly satisfying. The fact that both of the top speaker awards at the national rounds went to our team demonstrated what a resounding victory our team collectively enjoyed. So while Gabrijela and Linn are undoubtedly deserving of this award individually, we all felt it was more of a collective accolade.
Gabrijela also got 17th best oralist in the world at the international rounds, which is an incredible achievement in itself and felt like a validation both of her exceptional performance and all of our efforts.
Do you have any advice for future students who might want to participate in the next edition of the Jessup Moot?
When starting out, read and re-read the problem at length – then make sure you understand how international law works. Read commentaries on treaties and cases, know the histories of the institutions, conventions and treaties that you’re dealing with and why they are relevant. The issues that the Jessup will throw at you are qualified as ‘hard problems’ in international law, meaning that they are by nature unresolved and can be argued both ways. Stand on the shoulders of those who studied those problems in depth before you, in order to gain as holistic an understanding as possible of what they represent and the implications your arguments have.
Be passionate about it. This competition will take a big part of your life for 8 months, so might as well be obsessed with it. On this note, the team dynamic is everything. It starts on a personal level: because of the intensity, it is imperative that you get along with your team members. Knowing each other well will be invaluable in understanding how to best support one another over the course of the journey—from initial research to competing. From there, you need to stay accountable to one another, because everyone has to do their job, especially in the written drafting phase. And lastly: open communication is key. Again, the timeframe of the competition is too large to let slight frustrations and issues between team members fester until they become proper problems. If you accept the intensity and commitment, it will be a ride that you will be forever grateful for!
Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Donald Norcross (1st District of New Jersey)
CHERRY HILL, NJ — Today, the office of Congressman Donald Norcross issued an update about his condition and treatment.
“Congressman Norcross’ health has continued to improve and he was transferred out of the Intensive Care Unit on Friday. He has been successfully treated for his infection and has completed his course of antibiotic. The Congressman is on his way to making a full recovery.”
The Congressman and his family are grateful for the well wishes and prayers he has received. Among the many people they’d like to thank are his incredible medical team, including the nurses and staff at Cooper University Health Care.
The IAM Union is proving that workers in the South are building a resurgence of working people power.
The IAM’s Tennessee/Kentucky State Council recently brought member-activists across the two states to Gatlinburg, Tenn., for the council’s annual meeting. The councils, led in Tennessee by District 1888 Directing Business Representative Bill Benson and in Kentucky by District 1888 Business Representative and Organizer Ryan McCarthy, are focusing on fighting and winning for working families in states that are often thought to be unfriendly to workers’ rights.
View state council photos here.
International President Brian Bryant and Southern Territory General Vice President Craig Martin helped inspire delegates to continue to push for pro-worker policies in both states.
“Our members across Tennessee and Kentucky are rising up and fighting back,” said IAM International President Brian Bryant. “We see it in strong contracts, engaged members and the activism right here in the Tennessee and Kentucky State Council.”
IAM Local 1296 members at Trane in Clarksville, Tenn., recently ratified a strong contract with 9% first-year raises. IAM members in Kentucky recently advocated for pro-worker legislation at a lobby day at the state capitol.
“This is how we show our strength and solidarity,” said IAM Southern Territory General Vice President Craig Martin. “We need to bring more pride and dignity to workers across Tennessee and Kentucky. We’re willing to strike, and we’re willing to take to the halls of state capitols. We’re here to remind politicians where their power comes from.”
Other speakers included:
Paul Kendall, Assistant Secretary to the General Secretary-Treasurer
Carla Siegel, General Counsel
Shaun Junkins, Southern Territory International Representative
Ty Richardson, Assistant Political and Legislative Director
Juan Eldridge, Assistant Organizing Director
Tim Hight, Winpisinger Center Education Representative
Jonathan Battaglia, Communications Director
Former Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service employees
HARRISONBURG, Va., April 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pope Francis died April 21 at the age of 88. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in Argentina, he was the first pope from Latin America. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis was elected as his successor on March 13, 2013.
James Madison University’s Jennifer Aycock, an assistant professor of religion, is available to discuss the life and legacy of Pope Francis and next steps for the Vatican as they begin the mourning process and prepare the conclave to elect the next pope.
“Pope Francis likened the church to a field hospital, a place of care and presence for the disenfranchised, poor and marginalized,” said Aycock. “Migrants, as well as young adults living in zones of conflict such as in South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo where the pope intentionally visited, held a primary place in his vision of the church and of the ministry of Christ.”
“As the first pope from the Jesuit order, Francis pastorally opened the door of the church, shifting perceptions as well as ministry foci from rules to presence, from hierarchy to being with the people as he and so many Catholics understand Christ was and is. He repeatedly spoke moral truth to power rooted in a vision of the church and Christ, who stands with the poor and those living on the margins of political power,” added Aycock.
To arrange interviews with Aycock, please contact Chad Saylor, saylorcx@jmu.edu.
Source: United States Senator for Illinois Dick Durbin
April 21, 2025
CHICAGO – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) along with U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Edward J. Markey (D-MA) today slammed the Trump Administration for staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that will devastate tobacco use prevention efforts across America.
“Dozens of staffers at the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) have been placed on administrative leave, including the Center’s director, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) has been gutted. These actions risk undermining progress that has been made in reducing the death, disease, and addiction caused by tobacco use,” the Senators wrote. “Without these critical staff, we are concerned that more youth will start using tobacco products, fewer people will quit, and more people will become ill and die from tobacco-caused disease.”
The Senators stressed the impacts of these staffing cuts on the federal government’s ability to protect kids from nicotine addiction and reduce chronic diseases caused by tobacco use, which remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and creates billions of dollars of health care related costs every year.
“We cannot make a serious effort to reduce chronic disease and protect children’s health without addressing the harm caused by tobacco,” the Senators continued. “Yet the drastic reductions in force at HHS has led to the removal of key officials at the CTP, a center at the FDA created by Congress under the bipartisan Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Without adequate personnel, CTP will not be able to meet its statutory requirement to enforce the law and effectively conduct premarket reviews of new tobacco products and prevent the entry of products that will increase youth tobacco use.”
The Senators warned,“The firing of thousands of staff at HHS also effectively eliminates CDC’s OSH, which plays a critical role in preventing youth tobacco use and helping adult tobacco users to quit. Eliminating this office will deprive states of the only dedicated source of federal funding for state tobacco prevention and cessation programs. It also means the end of its national public education campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, which helped about one million people to quit, prevented an estimated 129,100 smoking-related deaths, and saved about $7.3 billion in health care costs from 2012 through 2018. Eliminating OSH will not improve efficiency. Instead, it will only cost lives and increase health care expenses.”
In addition to Durbin, Merkley, Blumenthal, and Markey, the letter was signed by U.S. Senators Tina Smith (D-MN), Jack Reed (D-RI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Patty Murray (D-WA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The letter was also endorsed by the American Cancer Society Action Network, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Lung Association, National LGBTQI+ Cancer Network, Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, and The Fenway Institute.
Full text of the letter can be found by clicking here and follows below:
Dear Secretary Kennedy, Acting Director Monarez, and Commissioner Makary,
We write to express deep concerns regarding the impact your drastic staffing cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have on efforts to reduce smoking and other tobacco use. Dozens of staffers at the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) have been placed on administrative leave, including the Center’s director, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) has been gutted. These actions risk undermining progress that has been made in reducing the death, disease, and addiction caused by tobacco use. Without these critical staff, we are concerned that more youth will start using tobacco products, fewer people will quit, and more people will become ill and die from tobacco-caused disease.
Tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and is responsible for about $240 billion in health care costs every year. More than 16 million Americans are currently living with a tobacco-caused disease, including chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, and diabetes. Nearly 500,000 Americans die each year from tobacco use, making up one in every five deaths in the United States.
Tobacco use has been described as a pediatric disease because almost all tobacco use begins during adolescence. Tobacco companies have a long history of making and marketing products that appeal to kids. E-cigarettes, for example, come in a wide variety of kid-attracting flavors and expose users to high doses of nicotine and other harmful substances. In fact, e-cigarettes have been the most popular tobacco product among youth since 2014. Last year, 1.6 million middle school and high school students were e-cigarette users with many of them using e-cigarettes frequently or daily, an alarming sign of addiction.
We cannot make a serious effort to reduce chronic disease and protect children’s health without addressing the harm caused by tobacco. Yet the drastic reductions in force at HHS has led to the removal of key officials at the CTP, a center at the FDA created by Congress under the bipartisan Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Without adequate personnel, CTP will not be able to meet its statutory requirement to enforce the law and effectively conduct premarket reviews of new tobacco products and prevent the entry of products that will increase youth tobacco use. CTP already has an extensive backlog of premarket applications and has had difficulty stopping unauthorized e-cigarettes from entering the market. Fewer employees will only make matters worse. Severe reductions in regulatory personnel also will cripple FDA’s ability to establish product standards to reduce the appeal, addictiveness, and harm of tobacco products.
The firing of thousands of staff at HHS also effectively eliminates CDC’s OSH, which plays a critical role in preventing youth tobacco use and helping adult tobacco users to quit. Eliminating this office will deprive states of the only dedicated source of federal funding for state tobacco prevention and cessation programs. It also means the end of its national public education campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, which helped about one million people to quit, prevented an estimated 129,100 smoking-related deaths, and saved about $7.3 billion in health care costs from 2012 through 2018. Eliminating OSH will not improve efficiency. Instead, it will only cost lives and increase health care expenses.
Given the significant ramifications of the HHS proposed reorganization on the federal government’s ability to protect kids from nicotine-addiction and to reduce chronic diseases caused by tobacco use, we request responses to the following questions by Friday, April 25, 2025.
How many total FDA CTP employees have lost their jobs? How many have lost their jobs as a result of:
The recent reductions in force announced by the Department on March 27, 2025 (including transfers to other federal agencies)?
The termination of probationary employees?
Other Administration efforts to reduce the federal workforce (e.g., early retirement and Fork in the Road)?
For each office within FDA CTP (e.g., Office of the Director, Office of Management, Office of Regulations, Office of Science, Office of Health Communications and Education, and Office of Compliance and Enforcement), how many people have been removed from their positions and how many remain?
Which directors of offices within FDA CTP have been removed from their positions, placed on administrative leave, or transferred to other federal agencies?
Does FDA CTP intend to spend the $712 million in tobacco user fees authorized under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and included in the FY 2025 Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act (P.L. 119-4)? Please indicate how CTP intends to spend its tobacco user fees for FY 2025, including, but not limited to, dollars spent on premarket review, enforcement of marketing and sales of illegal products, and Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science.
What functions of CTP have been transferred to other offices at FDA or to other agencies? To which offices or agencies were they transferred?
What functions of CTP have been eliminated?
How many employees does CDC OSH currently have? What are their roles and functions?
Have any of the programs and activities, including data collection, previously run by CDC OSH been transferred to other agencies? To what other offices or agencies were they transferred to?
The FY 2025 Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act (P.L. 119-4) allocated $125.85 million from the Prevention and Public Health Fund to CDC OSH. How does the Department plan to spend this money if CDC OSH has been eliminated?
Will states no longer receive federal grants from the National and State Tobacco Control Program (NTCP) to support state and local tobacco control programs? If so, when will states be notified of this loss in federal funding?
Does the proposed elimination of CDC OSH mean that the highly effective media campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, will end? What about Tips ads for which air time has already been purchased? When do you anticipate the current Tips ad buy (both on Over-the-Top [OTT] and Over-the-Air [OTA] platforms) will conclude?
Will the proposed elimination of CDC OSH eliminate federal funding for quitlines and cause state quitlines to reduce the services they can provide and the number of people they can serve?
Source: Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Victoria Vinogradova, Evgeny Enokaev, Maxim Nechiporenko, Nikolay Samopal, Valery Uskov and Alexander Grimitlin
The VIII International Scientific and Practical Conference “Information Modeling in Construction and Architecture Problems” (BIMAC-2025) has begun its work at SPbGASU. The large-scale event was organized as part of the implementation of the Innovative Educational Project “Innovative Methodology for Forming Digital Professional Competencies of Students and Specialists in the Construction Industry”.
As noted by Denis Nizhegorodtsev, Deputy Director of the Educational Center for Digital Competencies at SPbGASU, the conference will include eight scientific and practical sections, round tables, master classes, and an exhibition area where partners will present their developments. Over the course of four days, representatives of industry companies and educational institutions will discuss current issues related to information modeling technologies in construction and architecture, estimates, the use of artificial intelligence in the construction industry, training of engineering personnel for the digitalization of construction, visual programming, and software development. In addition, they will hear reports from young scientists. Opening the conference, Konstantin Mikhailik, Deputy Minister of Construction and Housing and Communal Services of Russia, in particular, emphasized that the task of the industry is to improve its efficiency by increasing labor productivity and reducing costs using digital technologies.
“The BIMAC conference allows us to gather the scientific community, government bodies and representatives of specialized companies on one platform, who can openly discuss in order to subsequently develop an effective set of solutions for the development of the industry. The sooner we jointly define the necessary plane for the latest developments, the more high-quality solutions we will receive. Integration of information modeling into construction processes, design and estimate documentation are important tasks that are also submitted for wide discussion at the conference. The quality and timing of construction, and the import substitution process in general, depend on their high-quality implementation and execution,” noted Konstantin Mikhailik.
Deputy Chairman of the St. Petersburg Construction Committee Valery Uskov emphasized that the construction industry is actively implementing information modeling technologies: the city administration is implementing projects using such technologies. Thus, in 2024, 118 projects were implemented, 20 of which were completed using information modeling technologies. This year, 124 projects are planned, and at the moment, nine of them are already being implemented using these technologies.
“The relevance of this conference is primarily due to the development of information technologies that are being actively implemented in the construction industry. I have identified three important areas in the work of the conference. The first concerns the implementation of information modeling technology, the integration of sensors in construction projects that allow analyzing the condition of an object, which, in turn, has a positive effect on the operation of the object and leads to a decrease in the costs of its maintenance. The second important area is related to security. Considering that cloud storage and servers are used today, we need to closely monitor this area and actively develop methods for increasing their safety in order to prevent failures. The third area, as a civil servant, I highlight is the improvement of the regulatory framework and its implementation. I am sure that all conference participants will gain good experience, make new contacts, and meet leading specialists in this industry. The industry needs personnel, and this kind of event is one of the steps in solving this issue,” Valery Uskov emphasized.
The President of the Association “AVOK SEVERO-ZAPAD” Alexander Grimitlin specified that the conference is dedicated to such an important issue as digitalization of the construction industry. Because it is a necessity, without which the movement will simply slow down.
“I consider the digitalization of the industry in two directions. Firstly, it is the solution of complex engineering problems of information modeling, which allow us to use a huge number of factors. We will not be able to take them into account in other ways. A lot of work is being done in this direction at the university. The second line is standard design. We need to do it in such a way as to exclude errors in construction processes,” noted Alexander Grimitlin.
First Deputy Chairman of the Leningrad Region Construction Committee Evgeny Enokaev emphasized that information modeling technologies are developing very quickly, and now the construction management system as a whole is changing, so, of course, it is necessary to be aware of the latest developments and emerging experience.
“The conference is an effective platform for exchanging experience, an opportunity for software manufacturers to demonstrate their latest developments, and for builders to adopt them and talk about their application based on their own practice. This is especially important: after the departure of foreign vendors, a serious niche has formed, and we need to give Russian software developers the opportunity to fill it. I think that this will be possible to do, and in the near future. In addition, partnership with universities allows us to train and attract personnel to the industry,” believes Evgeny Enokaev.
Advisor to the Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of Russia, Deputy CEO of Renga Software Maxim Nechiporenko believes that now there is no need to discuss how promising information modeling is – this should have been done earlier. At the moment, it is important to discuss how to interact.
“The only relevant standard of work in the design and construction industry is working with digital information models. They are the only reliable source of information. This is not a panacea and not a solution to all problems in construction, but you can reduce their number by providing reliable information. One thing remains unchanged – the need and focus of the construction industry on working with reliable information. This contributes to increased transparency in the construction industry,” emphasized Maksym Nechyporenko.
Deputy General Director for Development of ZAO “WIZARDSOFT” Nikolay Samopal recalled that the company “Wizardsoft” has been cooperating with SPbGASU for many years: they started as software suppliers, and over time, the cooperation expanded. The company takes part in various events, and this year it became the general partner of the conference.
“Close cooperation between a software developer and an educational institution allows not only to improve digital tools, but also to train specialists who are proficient in modern tools. We provide an opportunity to hone their skills and bring to the market employees who are ready to use modern tools,” concluded Nikolai Samopal.
Vice-Rector for Continuing Education at SPbGASU Victoria Vinogradova emphasized that the university always keeps up with the times. Today, the construction industry is undergoing a profound transformation under the influence of digital technologies, in which the university is also participating. “Information modeling, process automation, interdisciplinarity have become part of modern design, and not just a prospect. For eight years now, our conference has served as an open platform where government agencies, scientific and educational organizations, and professional communities can exchange best practices. We are working to improve work processes, educational programs, and software functionality,” Victoria Vinogradova said.
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Lori Trahan (D-MA-03)
Today, Congresswoman Lori Trahan (MA-03) delivered a keynote speech at the Concord 250 celebrations marking the semiquincentennial of the start of the Revolutionary War in Concord, Massachusetts. “What began here in Concord became ‘the shot heard round the world.’ It was more than the start of a war – it was the beginning of an idea. That liberty is worth defending. That government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That even the smallest towns in the smallest colonies could stir the conscience of a world,” said Congresswoman Trahan. CLICK HERE to view the full speech. A transcript is embedded below.
The Concord 250 ceremony was hosted at the Old North Bridge in Minute Man National Historical Park, home to the first serious battle of the Revolutionary War. The shots fired in the Battle of Concord were later described by American author Ralph Waldo Emerson as the “shot heard round the world.” “In every generation, there have been bridges like this one in Concord and like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where brave Americans marched for civil rights and faced down brutality in the name of justice. Moments that demand to know who we are and what we stand for,” Congresswoman Trahan continued. “So let us meet our moment today. Let us be citizens worthy of this history, and ancestors worthy of remembrance. And let us ensure that two hundred and fifty years from now, when future generations gather at this bridge, they won’t just hear the echo of that first shot – they’ll hear the echo of our voices, rising to say: we carried the promise of a stronger America forward.” ———————————— Congresswoman Lori Trahan Remarks as Delivered Concord 250 Ceremony April 19, 2025
Good morning. Two hundred and fifty years ago, right here at the Old North Bridge, ordinary people faced an extraordinary choice: monarchy or democracy. They could remain subjects of a distant crown, or risk everything for the idea of self-government. They chose freedom. Farmers and blacksmiths, shopkeepers and ministers, teachers and mothers, everyday citizens who had no guarantee of success stood their ground. And when the smoke cleared on that April morning, the first shots of a revolution had been fired. What began here in Concord became “the shot heard round the world.” It was more than the start of a war – it was the beginning of an idea. That liberty is worth defending. That government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That even the smallest towns in the smallest colonies could stir the conscience of a world. But it was never inevitable. The men and women who gathered here were not professional soldiers or political elites. They were neighbors and parents. Workers and worshippers. People with families to protect, farms to tend, and lives to live. And yet, when the moment came, they answered history’s call. Today, as we mark the 250th anniversary of that defining moment, we gather not just to honor their courage, but to reckon with the responsibility they left us. Because we are the stewards now. Every generation inherits the promise made here in Concord. And every generation must choose what echoes we will send forward. Will we echo courage or complacency? Unity or division? Will we, like those early patriots, rise together to meet the challenges of our time? Even our founders knew that the greatest threat to this fragile experiment wouldn’t come from abroad – it would come from within. In fact, when George Washington agreed to attend the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he explained why in a letter to a friend. He warned of “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.” Washington wasn’t worried about the jeweled crowns of foreign kings – he was worried about the domestic ones, those who drape themselves in flags while declaring themselves above the Constitution. That remains our charge today. To ensure that in America, no one, no matter how loud, how wealthy, or how powerful, stands above the law. Because in a democracy, the law, not a single man, is sovereign. Our union is still imperfect. Our freedoms still tested. But the story of America has always been one of progress – not because the path was easy, but because courage found its way into common hands. In every generation, there have been bridges like this one in Concord, like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma where brave Americans marched for civil rights and faced down brutality in the name of justice. Moments that demand to know who we are and what we stand for. So let us meet our moment today. Let us be citizens worthy of this history, and ancestors worthy of remembrance. And let us ensure that two hundred and fifty years from now, when future generations gather at this bridge, they won’t just hear the echo of that first shot – they’ll hear the echo of our voices rising to say: we carried the promise of a stronger America forward. Thank you. ###
Richard G. Frohling, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, announced that on April 21, 2025, United States District Judge Brett Ludwig accepted the guilty plea of James Morgan (formerly Karactus Blome) to one count of possession of chemical weapon precursors—chemicals that combine to create chlorine and chlorine gas—not intended for peaceful purposes, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 229(a).
According to court documents, on December 21, 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed a search warrant at Morgan’s storage unit and found the precursor chemicals. Morgan had studied chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and had described himself as a weapon designer who did not need a conventional weapon. In a video, Morgan displayed the chemicals and said they were for making a lot of chlorine very quickly. In messages in 2022, he said that what he had was “scary,” and that the chemicals react to produce a lot of chlorine gas, which can be “effective if your enemy is not ready for it.” He sent links for purchasing the chemicals and discussed the amounts needed to make a lot of chlorine gas really fast. In messages in 2023, Morgan discussed a plan to defeat the government, if it came for his guns, by producing a large amount of chlorine that he claimed could be used against approximately twenty government agents. The FBI Laboratory determined that the chemicals Morgan possessed could produce a large amount of chlorine that could result in rapid, serious health effects, including death.
Sentencing is scheduled for August 1, 2025, before Judge Ludwig. Morgan faces up to life in prison, a $250,000 fine, and five years of supervised release after any period of imprisonment.
The FBI, the Janesville Police Department, and the Whitewater Police Department investigated the case, which also resulted in Morgan’s conviction for possession of destructive devices in the Western District of Wisconsin.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Scully is prosecuting the case in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Assistant U.S. Attorney Meredith Duchemin prosecuted the case in the Western District of Wisconsin, and Trial Attorney Justin Sher of the National Security Division, Counterterrorism Section, assisted on both prosecutions.
Canada’s major political parties have been pledging support for the manufacturingsector ahead of next week’s election, but Canada’s working class is much broader than just manufacturing.
Canadians are on edge because as many as 600,000 jobs are at stake due to tariffs levied by United States President Donald Trump.
But the focus on manufacturing obscures what truly ails the working class in an advanced economy like Canada’s. Manufacturing’s share of employment hovers at around 8.9 per cent, while nearly 80 per cent of Canadians work in the service sector.
A recent report from the non-partisan Cardus think tank notes that Canada’s working class today is “likely to be a female, recently immigrated worker in the services-producing sector. The new working class, in other words, is now more personified by a Walmart cashier or an Amazon delivery driver than a General Motors factory worker or a Domtar mill hand.”
It’s easy to understand. Manufacturing has been essential to industrialization, from the British Empire to China’s unprecedented growth in recent years.
The late British-Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor argued that manufacturing is the engine of growth due to increasing returns to scale, strong links to other sectors and its role in technological development.
Labour-intensive sectors like clothing cannot compete with Bangladeshi wages, but discussions about manufacturing jobs in Canada and other advanced economies too often focus on wage competition instead of job losses through automation and increasing productivity.
There were losers when the globalization era began, but countries like Canada and the U.S. are wealthier today than they were in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. As American economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, governments have failed to redistribute the wealth created by gains from trade to those at the bottom of the income scale.
With Canada on track to experience a surge of its elderly population, long-term care also needs to be a focus. Personal support workers must earn a living wage and must have better working conditions. Canada’s aging population is also why decreased immigration is a bad idea.
These policies are generally not implemented in liberal market economies like Canada and the U.S.
But in countries like Sweden with active labour market policies in place, 80 per cent of the population has a favourable opinion of robots and AI compared to two-thirds of Americans who are concerned about technological job loss. The state’s ability — or lack of it — to provide social protections and job re-training has real impacts on how people perceive technological change.
Canada also needs to recognize foreign credentials. Its reluctance to do so has had a negative impact on the economic prospects of immigrants. Canada should also consider making higher education free.
Apart from the public sector, Canadian unions have not fared well organizing in service industries. Unions need to make a serious effort to organize in retail, food service, the gig economy and logistics, despite the challenges. Canadian unions may find that they have little choice but to do so, as their presence in the private sector continues to decline.
The most significant barrier of these four policy proposals is that most require an increased redistribution of wealth. Canada over the past several decades has retreated from wealth redistribution and as a result, economic inequality has surged.
These policies are not easy to achieve, but there are few other options for Canada if it wants to be carbon-free, open to the world and more equal. Canada’s economic nostalgia for manufacturing is ultimately strange given it’s also a common talking point of Trump, a politician who’s wildly unpopular in Canada.
Gerard Di Trolio 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.
PHOENIX, April 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — DataGlobal Hub, a leading global media company focused on Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), is thrilled to announce the Phoenix Tech Festival, an in-person technology conference designed to bring together data professionals, business leaders, tech enthusiasts, and researchers for an unforgettable experience of learning, connection, and growth.
Phoenix Tech Festival will take place on May 10, 2025, at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona. Spotlighting how AI is driving innovation and reshaping the future of business, featuring the brightest minds in the industry.
This immersive evening event will offer attendees a chance to engage in insightful AI discussions, hands-on tech showcases, and real conversations on the evolving digital landscape. From expert panels to dynamic exhibitions, the festival provides a space where ideas ignite, knowledge flows, and valuable connections are made.
The event is scheduled to run from 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM, beginning with exclusive tech discussions, panel sessions, and live showcases, followed by a vibrant afterparty between 11:00 PM — 2:00 AM offering a relaxed setting for deeper networking and celebration.
Whether you’re a seasoned technologist, an emerging entrepreneur, or simply curious about the possibilities of AI, Phoenix Tech Festival offers the clarity, perspective, and opportunities you need to move forward.
Conference Highlights
Keynote Speakers:
Jarrett Albritton – Vice President of Sales and Strategy at WriteSea and host of the Big Tech Energy Podcast, with over $40 million in sales-driven results and a mission to uplift diverse tech talent.
Richard H. Miller – AI and Design Strategy Consultant and former Senior Director at Oracle, recognized for his leadership in conversational AI and global UX design.
Bill Swartz – Founder and Director of AIVN, with over 23 years of executive search experience at Swartz Executive Search, drives Arizona’s AI and deep tech startup ecosystem through innovation and networking.
Seyi Ogebule Ph.D. – Product Lead for Edge GPU, Network & Edge at Intel with over 11 years of experience, specializes in AI, graphics, and media workloads, driving innovation in edge computing
Professor Matthew Prater – Professor of Robotics and Embedded Systems at UAT. With over 15 years in pharmaceuticals, he led robotic synthesis innovations and recently guided the UAT Robotics Team to victory at the 2025 VEX U Judges Award.
Professor Brant Becote, PhD, CISSP, PMP – Cybersecurity Professor at UAT and former Director of International Relations for the US Navy. Brings 22+ years of experience in cybersecurity, diplomacy, and strategic leadership.
Workshop
PJ W. – Advisor at Pixel Palette Nation and Partner at AnChain.AI, focused on ethical tech deployment in Web3, blockchain, and digital ecosystems.
Matt Burkett – Director at CEOPro.ai, a visionary in AI integration with over 14 years in R&D and innovation at companies such as Neuro AI and Preferred Tactical.
Panelists: Panel Topic: The Future of Technology, AI and Innovation
Stephanie Orji, CPACC – Senior ADA Analyst and Director of Digital Accessibility, an advocate for inclusive digital solutions and equal access across the web.
Jarrett Albritton – Vice President of Sales and Strategy at WriteSea and host of the Big Tech Energy Podcast, with over $40 million in sales-driven results and a mission to uplift diverse tech talent.
Dr. Matteo Genna – Chief Product Officer at Lunasonde and former CTO of World View Enterprises, with over two decades of experience in engineering, remote sensing, and aerospace innovation.
Tim Taylor – Patent Attorney at Garlick & Markison, specializing in litigation-grade patent portfolio development with over 15 years of experience.
Kent Gibson – Chief Technology Officer at REVOBOT and former Head of Science at Ocado Technology, known for pioneering advancements in mechatronics and robotics innovation.
Professor Matthew Prater – Professor of Robotics and Embedded Systems at UAT. With over 15 years in pharmaceuticals, he led robotic synthesis innovations and recently guided the UAT Robotics Team to victory at the 2025 VEX U Judges Award.
Professor Brant Becote, PhD, CISSP, PMP – Cybersecurity Professor at UAT and former Director of International Relations for the US Navy. Brings 22+ years of experience in cybersecurity, diplomacy, and strategic leadership.
Panel Topic: Beyond the Buzz: Real-World Content Creation with AI Tools
Brandon Falk – Short Form Video Ad Campaign Creator with over 11 years of experience in creative production, specializing in 15-second videos that enhance brand identity and growth.
PJ W. – Advisor at Pixel Palette Nation and Partner at AnChain.AI, focused on ethical tech deployment in Web3, blockchain, and digital ecosystems.
Featured Exhibitors:
DataRango – A gamified learning platform designed to make data and AI education more engaging and accessible.
CEOPro.ai – An AI-powered business consulting solution offering fast, actionable insights for decision-makers.
REVOBOTS – Showcasing TaskBot, a hyper-humanoid 3D printed platform powered by agentic AI and built to operate seamlessly in real-world environments.
OPNRS – A Berlin-based boutique agency specializing in supporting disruptive companies and brands through creative events, media, and team-building initiatives.
Interview Buddy – A virtual interview platform connecting users with elite professionals across disciplines, including machine learning, UI/UX, product management, and more.
AIVN Showcase Success
Following our participation in the AIVN AI/ML & Robotics Startup & Innovation Showcase on April 17, masterfully organized by the Artificial Intelligence Venture Network in partnership with REVOBOT, DataGlobal Hub proudly presented DataRango, our gamified learning platform, alongside over 15 leading tech exhibitors. The event, brought to life under the visionary leadership of Bill Swartz, was more than a showcase; it was a catalyst for connection, learning, and innovation. With tech experts, thought leaders, and enthusiasts in attendance, it marked a significant milestone in our journey. We also hosted open mentoring sessions in collaboration with Innov8ive Academy, equipping attendees with actionable insights for breaking into top global tech roles. Bill’s dedication to building a vibrant, inclusive tech ecosystem continues to inspire and drive meaningful impact across the industry.
About DataGlobal Hub
DataGlobal Hub is a trusted global media organization focused on news, analysis, and resources in the world of Data and Artificial Intelligence. Our mission is to empower individuals and organizations to thrive in the digital era through high-quality content, thought leadership, and community engagement. With a growing network of global experts and contributors, we remain committed to making AI knowledge practical, inclusive, and impactful.
Community sport and activity providers in Plymouth will gather for a conference later this week to find out more about the support and opportunities available to them.
The conference, organised by the Council and Active Devon, will bring grassroots clubs and organisations together with regional and national sports bodies to share knowledge on key issues such as sustainability, funding and partnership working.
It is being held at the new Hub at Foulston Park on the evening of Thursday 24 April and will focus on the themes of participation, places and pride. There will be presentations, seminars and workshops led by the Council, Active Devon and Plymouth Marjon University, as well as Argyle Community Trust, YMCA Plymouth and Sport England.
They will cover topics including:
co-designing facilities with the community
supporting community activities through health, education and events
supporting grassroots clubs
upcoming Sport England investment in Plymouth
identifying and applying for local funding support
improving sustainability and governance
safeguarding, welfare and supporting diverse groups
rehab and pre-hab opportunities for club athletes
recognising and celebrating the social value of sport.
Councillor Sue Dann, Cabinet Member with responsibility for sport and leisure, will open the conference. She said: “As part of the city’s Active to Thrive plan, we have a shared vision for Plymouth to be the most physically active coastal city in England by 2034.
“To do this we need quality clubs, top class facilities, active schools and accessible community opportunities for sport and physical activity. This can only be achieved through collaboration between local clubs and other providers.
“The conference will be a chance for those providers to come together, share their knowledge and experiences and look at ways to build on existing strengths, as well as tackle challenges. It will also be an opportunity to connect directly with organisations that can help them develop and thrive.”
The community sport conference will start at 5.30pm and finish at 8.30pm. A limited number of tickets are still available. To view the agenda and book your place visit the Eventbrite website.
Headline: Mpox Found in Wastewater in North Carolina, NCDHHS Urges Public and Providers to Be on Alert
Mpox Found in Wastewater in North Carolina, NCDHHS Urges Public and Providers to Be on Alert stonizzo
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is asking people and providers to be on alert for mpox cases following the detection of mpox particles in multiple sewage samples found through routine wastewater testing. This year there have been two cases of mpox in North Carolina and the new wastewater detections were determined to be another type, clade I, not previously found in North Carolina. These detections indicate potential undiagnosed or unreported cases. At this time, the risk to the public remains low.
The mpox virus, formerly known as monkeypox, is primarily spread by prolonged close contact, typically skin-to-skin, often during sexual activity. There are two genetic types of the virus, known as clade I and clade II. The viral particles found in wastewater were determined to be clade I. To date, only four clade I cases have been reported in the U.S. Clade I mpox is responsible for a large outbreak in Central and Eastern Africa, which appears to be spreading mostly through heterosexual contact with some spread to household members, including children.
North Carolina’s detections were found in wastewater samples collected on March 25, March 28, and April 8 from a treatment plant in Greenville, NC. No clade I cases have been reported to date; however, these detections mean there was possibly at least one person with an undiagnosed or unreported clade I mpox infection present or traveling through the Greenville area around the time of these detections.
“The detection of clade I mpox virus in wastewater surveillance tells us the virus is potentially here in our state, even though no cases have been reported and confirmed,” said NC Health and Human Services Secretary Dev Sangvai. “We encourage health care providers to be on the lookout for mpox cases and we encourage people who are at higher risk to protect themselves by getting vaccinated.”
NCDHHS requests that all North Carolina health care providers consider mpox in patients with compatible symptoms and ask about any recent international travel. Providers who are treating patients with mpox infections should contact their local health department or the NCDHHS Division of Public Health’s 24/7 epidemiologist on-call number: 919-733-3419.
These recent results were found by the North Carolina Wastewater Monitoring Network, which launched in 2021 to better understand the spread of certain viruses in communities across North Carolina. This network is a collaboration between NCDHHS, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wastewater utilities and local health departments. Samples are collected routinely from 35 wastewater treatment plants across the state and tested for specific viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). People with these viruses shed viral particles in their stool even if they don’t have symptoms. These virus particles are no longer infectious but can still be detected through lab testing.
While wastewater surveillance has become a valuable tool for tracking and responding to viruses, the program is now at risk due to proposed federal funding cuts. Wastewater surveillance funding allows North Carolina to have a crucial early warning system for levels of infections that can help public health officials and health care providers make decisions, such as providing guidance on how to prevent infections.
NC Wastewater Monitoring Network results are routinely shared on the NCDHHS wastewater monitoring dashboard. Testing for mpox is done on samples from 18 of the participating sites and results are shared on the CDC Mpox wastewater dashboard.
If you think you have mpox or have had close contact with someone who has mpox, visit your health care provider or contact your local health department. Symptoms include a rash on any part of the body, like the genitals, hands, feet, chest, face or mouth. The rash can initially look like pimples or blisters and may be painful or itchy. The rash will go through several stages, including scabs, before healing. Some people experience flu-like symptoms before the rash, while others get a rash first followed by other symptoms. In some cases, a rash is the only symptom experienced.
Vaccines are available to protect against mpox infection from both clade types and can reduce the severity of illness if infection does occur. Information about vaccine recommendations and where to find vaccine is available on the NCDHHS mpox page.
El Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos de Carolina del Norte está pidiendo a las personas y a los proveedores que estén alertas ante casos de viruela símica (mpox) después de la detección de partículas de mpox en múltiples muestras de aguas residuales encontradas a través de pruebas rutinarias de aguas residuales. Este año hubo dos casos de mpox en Carolina del Norte y se determinó que las nuevas detecciones de aguas residuales eran de otro tipo, clado I, que no se había encontrado anteriormente en Carolina del Norte. Estas detecciones indican posibles casos no diagnosticados o no notificados. En este momento, el riesgo para el público sigue siendo bajo.
Elvirus de la viruela símica (mpox), anteriormente conocido como viruela del mono, se transmite principalmente por contacto cercano prolongado, generalmente piel con piel, a menudo durante la actividad sexual. Existen dos tipos genéticos del virus, conocidos como clado I y clado II. Se determinó que las partículas virales encontradas en las aguas residuales eran del clado I. Hasta la fecha, solo se han reportado cuatro casos de clado I en los EE. UU. La viruela del clado I es responsable de un gran brote en África Central y Oriental, que parece estar propagándose principalmente a través del contacto heterosexual con algunos miembros del hogar, incluso los niños.
Las detecciones de Carolina del Norte se encontraron en muestras de aguas residuales recolectadas el 25 de marzo, el 28 de marzo y el 8 de abril de una planta de tratamiento en Greenville, Carolina del Norte. No se han informado casos de clado I hasta la fecha; sin embargo, estas detecciones significan que posiblemente había al menos una persona con una infección por viruela del clado I no diagnosticada o no informada presente o que viajaba por el área de Greenville en el momento de estas detecciones.
“La detección del virus de la viruela símica del clado I en la vigilancia de aguas residuales nos indica que el virus está potencialmente aquí en nuestro estado, a pesar de que no se han reportado y confirmado casos”, dijo el Secretario de Salud y Servicios Humanos de NC, Dev Sangvai. “Animamos a los proveedores de atención médica a estar atentos a los casos de mpox y alentamos a las personas que corren un mayor riesgo a protegerse vacunándose”.
El NCDHHS solicita que todos los proveedores de atención médica de Carolina del Norte consideren la viruela símica (mpox) en pacientes consíntomas compatiblesy pregunten sobre cualquier viaje internacional reciente. Los proveedores que atienden a pacientes con infecciones por mpox deben comunicarse con su departamento de salud local o llamar al número de guardia las 24 horas del día, los 7 días de la semana del epidemiólogo de la División de Salud Pública de NCDHHS al: 919-733-3419.
Estos resultados recientes se encontraron por la Red de Monitoreo de Aguas Residuales de Carolina del Norte, que se lanzó en 2021 para comprender mejor la propagación de ciertos virus en las comunidades de Carolina del Norte. Esta red es una colaboración entre NCDHHS, la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill, los servicios públicos de aguas residuales y los departamentos de salud locales. Las muestras se recolectan rutinariamente de 35 plantas de tratamiento de aguas residuales en todo el estado y se analizan para detectar virus específicos, incluido el SARS-CoV-2 (el virus que causa COVID-19), la influenza y el virus sincitial respiratorio (RSV). Las personas con estos virus eliminan partículas virales en las heces, incluso si no tienen síntomas. Estas partículas de virus dejan de ser infecciosas, pero aún pueden detectarse mediante pruebas de laboratorio.
Si bien la vigilancia de las aguas residuales se ha convertido en una herramienta valiosa para rastrear y responder a los virus, el programa ahora está en riesgo debido a los recortes de fondos federales propuestos. El financiamiento de la vigilancia de aguas residuales permite que Carolina del Norte tenga un sistema de alerta temprana crucial para los niveles de infecciones que puede ayudar a los funcionarios de salud pública y proveedores de atención médica a tomar decisiones, como proporcionar orientación sobre cómo prevenir infecciones.
Los resultados de la Red de Monitoreo de Aguas Residuales de NC se comparten de forma rutinaria en eltablero de monitoreo de aguas residuales de NCDHHS. Las pruebas de la viruela símica (mpox) se realizan en muestras de 18 de los sitios participantes y los resultados se comparten en eltablero de aguas residuales de CDC mpox.
Si cree que tiene viruela símica (mpox) o ha tenido contacto cercano con alguien que tiene mpox, visite a su proveedor de atención médica o comuníquese con su departamento de salud local.Los síntomasincluyen una erupción en cualquier parte del cuerpo, como los genitales, las manos, los pies, el pecho, la cara o la boca. La erupción de piel puede parecer inicialmente como granos o ampollas y pueden ser dolorosas o provocar comezón. La erupción pasará por varias etapas, incluyendo costras, antes de sanar. Algunas personas experimentan síntomas similares a la influenza (gripe) antes de la erupción, mientras que otras tienen una erupción primero seguida de otros síntomas. En algunos casos, el único síntoma que se experimenta es una erupción cutánea.
Las vacunas están disponibles para proteger contra la infección por mpox de ambos tipos de clados y pueden reducir la gravedad de la enfermedad si se produce la infección. La información sobre las recomendaciones de vacunas y dónde encontrarlas está disponible en lapágina web de NCDHHS mpox.
Although the brain is our most complex organ, the ways to treat it have historically been rather simple. Typically, surgeons lesioned (damaged) a structure or a pathway in the hope that this would “correct the imbalance” that led to the disease. Candidate structures for lesioning were usually found by trial and error, serendipity or experiments in animals.
While performing one such surgery in 1987, French neurosurgeon Alim-Louis Benabid noticed that the electrical stimulation he performed to locate the right spot to lesion had effects similar to the lesion itself. This discovery led to a new treatment: deep brain stimulation. It involved a pacemaker delivering electrical pulses via electrodes implanted in specific spots in the brain.
This treatment has been used to treat advanced Parkinson’s since the early 2000s. However, until today, the stimulator settings had to remain constant once they were set by a specialised doctor or nurse and could only be changed when the patient was next seen in the clinic.
Accordingly, most researchers and doctors thought of stimulation as merely an adjustable and reversible way of lesioning. But these days the field is undergoing a revolution that challenges this view.
Dr Alim Louis Benabid’s discovery led to deep brain stimulation. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Adaptive deep brain stimulation was approved earlier this year by the US and European health authorities. It involves a computer interpreting brain activity and deciding whether to adjust the stimulation amplitude up or down to achieve the best relief of a patient’s symptoms.
Parkinson’s is a complex disorder with fluctuating symptoms that are greatly affected by the drugs a patient takes several times a day. While for some patients constant stimulation does a good job controlling their symptoms, for others it is too strong some of the time and overly weak at other times.
Ideally, the treatment should only kick in when it is most helpful.
The discovery that made adaptive stimulation possible was made by scientists at University College London over two decades ago, around the time when the first patients with Parkinson’s started getting electrodes implanted in the UK National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
When recording deep brain activity from these electrodes shortly after the surgery, the scientists noticed that a particular kind of brain wave appeared when a patient stopped their medication and their symptoms worsened.
The waves went away when the patients took their medication and started feeling better. It took a decade of further research before the same team of scientists first attempted to use the brain waves to control stimulation.
The idea is akin to a thermostat controlling an air conditioner. When the waves (temperature) reach a certain threshold, an electronic control circuit turns the stimulator (airconditioner) on. This reduces the waves and when they go away the stimulation can be turned off for a while until the waves re-emerge.
The original setup was bulky and could only be used in the hospital, and it took another decade to make it fit inside a device smaller than a matchbox that could be implanted in a patient’s chest.
New challenges
While the option to make brain stimulation adaptive gives new tools to doctors and nurses to fit stimulation to a patient in the best possible way, it comes with new challenges.
Even with the original fixed settings, there are many parameters doctors have to set to ensure effective treatment with minimal side-effects. Making stimulation adaptive adds another layer of complexity and puts extra demand on a clinical team’s time and attention.
In the case of Parkinson’s, stimulation effects are almost immediate so it is relatively easy to see how well particular constant settings work. But an adaptive setting must be tested over at least a few days to see how well it copes with the patient’s daily routine and medication cycles.
Adaptive stimulators also come with sensing abilities. They can record the harmful brain wave levels over days and weeks so that the clinical team can review them and see how well they are controlled.
These possibilities are new in the treatment of Parkinson’s, although similar implanted devices have been in use for years by cardiologists and epileptologists (neurologists who specialise in epilepsy).
Studying brain waves recorded by the smart stimulators in Parkinson’s patients opens new doors for understanding other diseases. Many patients suffer from problems such as depression and cognitive decline. Researchers could search for features in their brain signals that track the severity of these symptoms using AI tools to find relations too subtle or too complex for a human observer.
A parallel branch of deep brain stimulation research is focused on precisely mapping out the brain circuits responsible for different neurological and psychiatric symptoms. Several recent studies reported successes in treating depression, OCD and severe headaches.
Stimulating in the right place at the right time considering what the patient is doing is where the field is heading. With the basic technology now in place, progress could be rapid.
Vladimir Litvak previously collaborated with Medtronic plc on a research project.
In a year filled with centenaries of famous novels, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, another novel also quietly turns 100. William was published in 1925 by the once-celebrated, now largely forgotten, E.H. Young.
William was Young’s most successful novel. It sold more than 68,000 copies and was reprinted 20 times before 1948. It was William which established Young’s reputation as a great writer.
It follows the life of William and Kate Nesbitt and their grown-up children, tracing their trials and tribulations as modern life butts up against traditional values. One of the daughters, Lydia, leaves her husband to live with a novelist. William, a shipowner and the family’s steady centre, supports her. Kate, steeped in traditional respectability, cannot.
Two issues lie at the heart of the novel: the role of women and domestic life. Through Kate and William’s relationship, Young breaks new ground as a writer. She explores a later stage of life, when children have grown up. The husband and wife spend time alone and find themselves at odds.
This kind of astute characterisation exemplifies Young’s writing. As with many of Young’s novels, romantic love plays a very small part. The narrative emphasis falls, instead, on other types of relationships.
Women are seen to bear the main burdens of marriage and family life. Again and again, her characters rail against the smallness of middle-class female life and its social conventions.
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Place and psyche
The novel’s central tension plays out not only in the family, but also in the city they inhabit. William spans the docks and suburbs of fictional Radstowe, a thinly disguised Bristol.
As in Mrs Dalloway, place and psyche are deeply connected. Young uses the physical and social geography of Bristol to examine how women move through a world of unspoken rules.
Young lived in Bristol for 15 years. Most of her novels are set there – or rather in “Upper Radstowe”, her fictional version of real life suburban Clifton. She turned the city’s bridges, rivers and steep class divides into metaphors for the pressures placed on women navigating early 20th-century life.
In William, her characters feel real because they are flawed. The conflict between Lydia’s modern values and Kate’s traditional ones doesn’t resolve cleanly. Young isn’t interested in moralising. Instead, she observes. Her sharp wit, psychological acuity and feel for the rhythms of domestic life make William both an engrossing family novel and a quietly radical one.
Modern day Clifton in Bristol. It became Upper Radstowe in E.H. Young’s novels. Sion Hannuna/Shutterstock
Who was the woman behind Radstowe?
Emily Hilda Young was born in 1880 and died in 1949. She wrote 11 novels and was widely read in her day. Four of her novels were made into BBC radio dramas. Her 1930 novel Miss Mole was televised by the BBC in 1980.
Like many of her characters, Young led an unconventional life. During the first world war she worked as a stable hand and in a munitions factory. Her husband, a solicitor named Arthur Daniell, went off to fight. After Daniell was killed at Ypres in 1917, Young moved to London and got a job in a school where her married lover, Ralph Henderson, was the headmaster.
She was also a keen mountaineer in an era when there were few women climbers. She even pioneered and led others along a route, now known as Hope, in the Carneddau mountains in Eryri (Snowdonia) in 1915.
This quiet radicalism filters into her fiction. Her characters are often sharp-tongued, independent and disillusioned by the roles they’ve been expected to play.
It’s hard to place Young in a neat category, however. Her novels can hardly be described as romances. Love is often portrayed as destructive or imprisoning. Young was a feminist and campaigned for votes for women, but she saw human failings in both men and women. She admired strength of character in spite of gender.
If anything, she’s a 20th-century Jane Austen. Her narratives are witty portrayals of social and family life with psychological depth. In Young, though, there’s a mixture of openness and coldness, and a sarcastic sense of humour which emerges spontaneously. At times, it catches you off guard.
Like the best realist writers, Young’s world and its characters are richly drawn. And yet unlike Thomas Hardy or Leo Tolstoy, for instance, Young isn’t interested in tragedy or melodrama. Small troubles are overcome and people make up, even if it doesn’t result in a traditional happy ending.
Young’s legacy has faded, perhaps because her novels sit between genres: not quite realist, not quite modernist, not quite romantic. But as literary anniversaries prompt readers to revisit old favourites, there’s room to bring back overlooked voices.
For readers interested in the inner lives of women, in family dynamics, in novels where place and psychology are intertwined, E.H. Young is worth discovering. This year, rather than returning to the worlds of Clarissa Dalloway and Jay Gatsby, you could instead take a detour to Upper Radstowe, where quiet, deeply human dramas still unfold.
Rebecca Hutcheon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The world is facing a “silver tsunami” – an unprecedented ageing of the global workforce. By 2030, more than half of the labour force in many EU countries will be aged 50 or above. Similar trends are emerging across Australia, the US and other developed and developing economies.
Far from being a burden or representing a crisis, the ageing workforce is a valuable resource – offering a so-called “silver dividend”. Older workers often offer experience, stability and institutional memory. Yet, in the rush to embrace artificial intelligence (AI), older workers can be left behind.
One common misconception is that older people are reluctant to adopt technology or cannot catch up. But this is far from the truth. It oversimplifies the complexity of their abilities, participation and interests in the digital environments.
There are much deeper issues and structural barriers at play. These include access and opportunity – including a lack of targeted training. Right now, AI training tends to be targeted at early or mid-career workers.
There are also confidence gaps among older people stemming from workplace cultures that can feel exclusionary. Data shows that older professionals are more hesitant to use AI – possibly due to fast-paced work environments that reward speed over judgment or experience.
There can also be issues with the design of tech systems. They are built primarily by and for younger users. Voice assistants often fail to recognise older voices, and fintech apps assume users are comfortable linking multiple accounts or navigating complex menus. This can alienate workers with legitimate security concerns or cognitive challenges.
And all these issues are exacerbated by socio-demographic factors. Older people living alone or in rural areas, with lower education levels or who are employed in manual labour, are significantly less likely to use AI.
Workers employed in manual professions can face bigger barriers when it comes to gaining AI skills. Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
Ageism has long shaped hiring, promotion and career development. Although age has become a protected characteristic in UK law, ageist norms and practices persist in many not-so-subtle forms.
Ageism can affect both young and old, but when it comes to technology, the impact is overwhelmingly skewed against older people.
So-called algorithmic ageism in AI systems – exclusion based on automation rather than human decision-making – often exacerbates ageist biases.
Hiring algorithms often end up favouring younger employees. And digital interfaces that assume tech fluency are another example of exclusionary designs. Graduation dates, employment gaps, and even the language used in CVs can become proxies for age and filter out experienced candidates without any human review.
Tech industry workers are overwhelmingly young. Homogenous thinking breeds blind spots, so products work brilliantly for younger people. But they can end up alienating other age groups.
This creates an artificial “grey digital divide”, shaped less by ability and more by gaps in support, training and inclusion. If older workers are not integrated into the AI revolution, there is a risk of creating a divided workforce. One part will be confident with tech, data-driven and AI-enabled, while the other will remain isolated, underutilised and potentially displaced.
An ‘age-neutral’ approach
It’s vital to move beyond the idea of being “age-inclusive”, which frames older people as “others” who need special adjustments. Instead, the goal should be age-neutral designs.
AI designers should recognise that while age is relevant in specific contexts – such as restricted content like pornography – it should not be used as a proxy in training data, where it can lead to bias in the algorithm. In this way, design would be age-neutral rather than ageless.
Designers should also ensure that platforms are accessible for users of all ages.
The stakes are high. It is also not just about economics, but fairness, sustainability and wellbeing.
At the policy level in the UK, there is still a huge void. Last year, House of Commons research highlighted that workforce strategies rarely distinguish the specific digital and technological training needs of older workers. This underscores how ageing people are treated as an afterthought.
A few forward-thinking companies have backed mid- and late-career training programmes. In Singapore, the government’s Skillsfuture programme has adopted a more agile, age-flexible approach. However, these are still isolated examples.
Retraining cannot be generic. Beyond basic digital literacy courses, older people need targeted, job-specific advanced training. The psychological framing of retraining is also critical. Older people need to retrain or reskill not for just career or personal growth but also to be able to participate more fully in the workforce.
It’s also key for reducing pressure on social welfare systems and mitigating skill shortages. What’s more, involving older workers in this way supports the transfer of knowledge between generations, which should benefit everyone in the economy.
Yet, currently, the onus is on the older workers and not organisations and governments.
AI, particularly the generative models that can create text, images and other media, is known for producing outputs that appear plausible but are sometimes incorrect or misleading. The people best placed to identify these errors are those with deep domain knowledge – something that is built over decades of experience.
This is not a counterargument to digital transformation or adoption of AI. Rather, it highlights that integrating older people into digital designs, training and access should be a strategic imperative. AI cannot replace human judgment yet – it should be designed to augment it.
If companies, policies and societies exclude older workers from AI transformation processes, they are essentially removing the critical layer of human oversight that keeps AI outputs reliable, ethical and safe to use. An age-neutral approach will be key to addressing this.
Piecemeal efforts and slow responses could cause the irreversible loss of a generation of experience, talent and expertise. What workers and businesses need now are systems, policies and tools that are, from the outset, usable and accessible for people of all ages.
Sajia Ferdous 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.
Overlooking Peel Bay on the Isle of Man. Clint Hudson
The production and use of toxic synthetic chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were banned internationally more than 40 years ago. There is a great deal of evidence that they are carcinogens and hormone disrupters in mammals and can cause birth defects.
PCBs can build up in the tissues in increasing amounts over time (bioaccumulate) in long-lived animals and people exposed to them. They also biomagnify in the environment meaning they build up in food chains – smaller animals take them into their tissues, those are then eaten by larger animals (such as fish), which themselves are eaten by humans and marine mammals such as dolphins and seals living in Britain’s waters.
Despite these risks, the Isle of Man government – by its own admission – has been dumping toxic silt containing PCBs into the waters of Peel Bay and unlined landfills over the past decade. This is despite the fact these waters have been declared a Unesco biosphere.
Here, Patrick Byrne, Professor of Water Science at Liverpool John Moores University, questions freshwater scientist Calum MacNeil about why he thinks it is so important that the world, and particularly Unesco, takes notice about what’s being dumped into the sea around the Isle of Man.
When did you live on the Isle of Man and what was your exact role?
I lived on the Isle of Man for nearly 15 years (2004 – 2019) and left at the end of 2019.
From 2004 – 2007, I was the Isle of Man government’s freshwater biologist. From 2007 – 2017, I was the freshwater biologist and enforcement officer, responsible for regulation and enforcement of environmental matters related to controlled waters (all inland waters and coastal waters).
Where is the Isle of Man and what is the Unesco status it has earned?
The Isle of Man is a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea, located almost an equal distance from England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. It is British but not part of the UK: it is a self-governing dependency of the British Crown with its own government and laws. It is not part of the EU but is signed up to various international agreements on the environment.
Unesco is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. It began the biosphere programme in 1991, concentrating on the care of land, sea and species, as well as culture, heritage, community and economy.
According to the island government’s own fact sheet, biospheres have three functions: promoting sustainable development, conservation and learning. The sea makes up 87% of the Isle of Man Unesco biosphere.
Despite earning this status, evidence in the public domain shows that pollutants have been dumped into the sea. What’s been going on?
The Isle of Man government has been accused of deliberately dumping 4,000 tonnes of toxic silt from harbour dredging, which included synthetic industrial chemicals known as PCBs and heavy metals, in the Irish sea in 2014.
Despite extensive evidence in the public domain, this dumping was not mentioned once in the biosphere nomination documents, dated 2015. The nation’s biosphere website says the nomination process was “several years” in the making and the Unesco biosphere designation occurred in 2016 – only a relatively short time after the deliberate dumping in the Irish Sea.
The government has also allegedly discharged toxic PCB-contaminated effluent – known as called leachate – from an old landfill, called the Raggatt, directly into Peel Bay, an area which has one of the most popular public beaches on the island. Peel is one of three beaches (technically designated as non-bathing areas) on the island that recently failed to meet minimum standards for bathing waters.
I wasn’t aware of the details of the sea dumping of toxic silt until June 2022 when the employment tribunal findings related to the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture’s (Defa) ex-marine monitoring officer Kevin Kenningtonbecame public. This tribunal heard evidence that this was going on before, during and after the Unesco biosphere designation.
The Isle of Man is a signatory to the Oslo-Paris convention for the protection of the marine environment for the north-east Atlantic (Ospar). The convention specifies a maximum level of marine contaminants.
A decade on from its initial application, the Isle of Man is currently bidding to renew its Unesco Biosphere status in 2026.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
There does appear to be a lack of monitoring, at least in the public domain. Given the serious nature of the contaminants, I would expect the environmental regulator to monitor any PCBs detected in the environment and fully inform the public of any exposure risk.
The disposal of thousands of tonnes of contaminated silt into biodiverse waters could have had a serious negative impact on that bid. So, how did you discover that all was not as it seemed with the marine biosphere status?
Shortly after resigning from my post in 2017, I read an article in the local media about how the attorney general of the Isle of Man (the government’s senior legal advisor) believed it might be in the public interest to hold a full investigation into the discharging of potentially toxic material retrieved from an old landfill site that was being transported by tankers and taken to the sea. There were a number of statements made in that article that I found very concerning, such as the two below:
The then Environment Minister Richard Ronan told the House of Keys [the parliament of the Isle of Man] in July last year that levels of a range of metals, ammonia, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and 225 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) identified in the leachate exceed environmental quality standards, making it unsuitable for direct discharge into the River Neb.
The government said the leachate is subject to a large degree of dilution [as] it enters the sea. Samples are analysed regularly and the leachate “does not pose a risk to people swimming in Peel bay”.
To be clear, I knew at the time of reading this article in 2017 that there was no UK or EU environmental quality standard to legally allow a deliberate discharge of PCBs into either freshwaters (rivers and lakes) or to the sea. I knew this because PCBs are massively hydrophobic (water-hating) – meaning you shouldn’t have them suspended in effluent anyway because all they want to do is settle out at the bottom of whatever they are suspended in as soon as possible.
So, if you can detect them suspended in actual effluent you should be very worried about how much is built up or buried in the sediment accompanying that effluent. I knew the deliberate discharge of this was internationally banned and that it shouldn’t be going on into rivers or the sea.
I was even more alarmed when the article quoted a government spokesperson saying the leachate “does not pose a risk to people swimming in Peel Bay”. The government needs to prove that statement legally and scientifically because in the US and Europe there is a “risk averse” approach to PCB release.
This story and the government’s response was very concerning to me as an internationally banned carcinogen was being discharged deliberately to Peel bay, a popular public beach area, while the public were being told it was fine, legal and safe. I didn’t see how this could possibly be legal as regards international agreements.
A few months later, I was concerned about further silt dredging at Peel bay and was curious how Defa as a regulator would deal with avoiding the risk of resuspending previously buried PCBs.
Ospar gives guidance on this, as this is important as PCBs remain toxic for decades and dredging could obviously further increase the risk to the public and environment – resuspending any PCBs that had been previously buried under layers of sediment for decades would result in releasing another source of PCBs into the bay.
Was anyone concerned about possible pollution at the time of the Unesco application?
The Isle of Man government says it spent a great deal of time on the nomination process and the publicly available nomination documents are long and detailed and Defa was heavily involved in the application process and the details provided so they would have to answer that.
I don’t know if any other scientists were raising a red flag at the time, but I do refer you to Kevin Kennington’s tribunal findings which involved dumping toxic silt at sea and Defa officers were aware of this dumping in 2014. None of this was mentioned in the nomination document as far as I have been able to ascertain.
The tribunal found the toxic silt exceeded Ospar guidelines.
When The Conversation put that to Isle of Man government, it did not accept it was in contravention of the rules. But a spokesperson for the UK regulator, Defra told us: “Defra’s internal analysis concluded that the incident constituted actions that were not in accordance with the Ospar convention (Articles 4, and Annex II Art 4) and the 1996 London protocol on the prevention of marine pollution by dumping of wastes and other matter.”
What laws are involved here?
The 252-page-long nomination forms refer to the Water Pollution Act 1993. This is an act that makes “new provision for the protection of inland and coastal waters from pollution, to control deposits in the sea and for connected purposes”.
Some EU legislation is also applied to the Isle of Man, such as Ospar (the convention for protection of the marine environment of the north-east Atlantic) and the Basel convention which governs how nations, including the Isle of Man, should treat and dispose of hazardous waste, including PCBs, in an environmentally sound way.
What are the most worrying impacts of the pollution here?
In my view, the deliberate tanker discharge of PCBs to Peel bay is extremely worrying from both an environmental and public health risk perspective, as is the dredging up of PCB contaminated silt in Peel harbour.
I’m alarmed by the fact that the Isle of Man government decided that it was not in the public interest to pursue the case for the discharge into the sea, given that international agreements were broken.
What needs to change in terms of governance and law enforcement?
I feel there needs to be international scientific and legal scrutiny of all of this. I believe both Unesco and the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have a responsibility here as well given the international agreements involved and the biosphere designation. Given the biosphere status surely the Isle of Man government should be acting not just to the letter of the law but the spirit of the law.
What should a biosphere reserve really look like and what needs to change?
Ideally, the government in the world’s only all-nation Unesco biosphere would fully abide by its own principlesand pledges and adhere to international agreements.
For instance, the Isle of Man government set its own environmental quality standards (EQS) for PCBs – now, those won’t be breached by the levels of existing discharges. EQS values for soil, sediment, freshwater and marine environments are derived from years of research showing the maximum concentrations (or quality standards) that cannot be exceeded in order to protect human and environmental health.
As far as I’m aware, there is still no EQS for PCBs in effluent agreed to by the EU. There are PCB guidelines for sediment and biota (animals and plants) at the end of pipelines but these are more concerned with monitoring legacy historic sources of PCBs. I don’t know legally how the Isle of Man was able to do this despite international laws.
The Isle of Man government should be taking a far more precautionary approach to PCBs and potential public exposure, environmental damage and public health risk. They should be doing this anyway, but in the world’s only entire nation Unesco biosphere, I think the moral and legal onus is on them to prove what they are doing is safe. If they are saying it is safe, they obviously need to prove it. I think the onus is also on Unesco to check what is going on in their only all-nation biosphere, especially in the “care” areas of that biosphere.
Calum MacNeil raises some important questions about the very nature of Unesco biosphere status and about the safety of the waters in and around the Isle of Man. The public has a right to clear answers and information. Here are some of the key issues from my perspective as a water scientist.
Long-term health effects
The point about PCB sorption to sediments is a good one. An important study from 2019 estimated that 75% of all PCBs manufactured since 1930 now reside in marine sediment. Marine sediment is literally the waste bin for PCBs. Dilution in rivers is commonly used as a convenient way of masking the mass transport of chemicals through rivers and ultimately to the oceans. So, yes, dilution decreases concentrations locally, but it does not reduce the volume of chemicals transported to or disposed of at sea.
The PCB discharge to Peel bay has been going on since the 1990s which is worrying given possible long-term public health risks and environmental impacts.
Some of the metabolites may leave your body in a few days, but others may remain in your body fat for months. Unchanged PCBs may also remain in your body and be stored for years mainly in the fat and liver, but smaller amounts can be found in other organs as well. Once in our bodies, they can have toxic long-term health effects. Some are associated with fertility issues and they are classed as probable human carcinogens.
Persistence in the environment
Since the 1970’s, the gradual phasing out and banning of PCBs has led to dramatic reductions in their release into the environment. However, despite this, PCBs remain one of the biggest chemical threats to humans and wildlife worldwide. Why is this? Well, we know PCBs are very persistent in the environment, which means they last for decades to hundreds of years. Because of this persistence, they accumulate in living things and we know that at certain concentrations they can be very harmful to us.
It is also because of the widely held belief that “dilution is the solution to pollution”. Sure, dilution of effluent in a river reduces concentrations locally and might allow a government or an industry to meet an environmental quality guideline.
But where have the pollutants gone? They have not disappeared – remember PCBs may persist for hundreds of years. They have gone out to sea where they accumulate in sediments and living things. And we see the evidence and impacts of this all around us. For example, PCBs and other harmful chemicals are routinely detected in apex predators like orcas and whales and polar bears and we know this is negatively impacting their physiology and reproductive health.
PCBs have been detected in the Arctic and Antarctica and even in the Mariana trench in the deep ocean. This is the cumulative result of decades of PCB discharge into the seas from all around the world. We cannot do anything about PCBs that are already in the sea, but with everything we now know about how harmful and long-lasting these chemicals are, we really cannot knowingly continue discharging them into the sea.
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Patrick Byrne receives funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council.
Lisa Beare, Minister of Education and Child Care, has released the following statement in celebration of Education Week 2025:
“As we mark Education Week from April 21-25, we take this opportunity to celebrate the hard work and achievements of students throughout British Columbia. This week also recognizes the dedication of the teachers, support staff, school administrators and trustees who make our education system one of the best in the world.
“Our government is committed to ensuring our students succeed and thrive in their education, and continues to invest in initiatives that support students, families and educators.
“We are making historic investments in school food programs to ensure no student needs to learn on an empty stomach. This year, we signed onto the National School Food Program, adding $39 million over three years in federal funding for food programs. This is in addition to $71.5 million in annual funding already provided through B.C.’s Feeding Futures program. Since we introduced Feeding Futures in 2023, almost 90% of schools in B.C. now have school food programs. We know access to nutritious food is essential for learning and we are committed to working toward all students being able to access the food they need to thrive in the classroom.
“Through the new Ministry of Infrastructure, we are working to meet the demands of growing communities and increasing student enrolment by continuing to invest in modern, safe and inclusive learning spaces. During the next three years, our government will invest a record $4.6 billion for new school construction, seismic upgrades and expansions.
“In addition to supporting student well-being, we are strengthening policies to create safer and more focused learning environments. At the start of this school year, all school districts implemented policies to limit cellphone use in classrooms, and we are expanding digital literacy training to help students and families navigate online spaces safely and responsibly. We are committed to ensuring students are safe inside and outside the classroom, which is why we are also working to ensure all students receive CPR learning before they graduate.
“Since we formed government, we’ve more than doubled funding to school districts for inclusive supports and services – it’s almost $1 billion this school year. Two provincial school outreach teams are doing excellent work with schools throughout B.C. to support students with disabilities or diverse learning needs. These teams, which include specialists, such as speech-language pathologists, learning support teachers, behaviour analysts, school counselors and other professionals, have provided support at 52 schools in 27 districts so far, particularly focusing on rural and remote communities. We’ve provided more than $9 million over three years in provincial funding to launch and expand these teams.
“Additionally, we are rolling out supports from our $30-million investment over three years to enhance early literacy supports, particularly for students with dyslexia and other learning challenges. By expanding early screening and intervention, we are supporting school districts to meet the literacy needs of all their students.
“To address teacher shortages and ensure students continue to have access to qualified educators, the Province has allocated $12.5 million over three years for teacher training, recruitment and retention, with a particular focus on rural, northern and Indigenous communities. We’ve also heard through sector engagement that a key area for retention is mentorship, which is why we are working with sector partners to re-establish a provincial teacher mentorship program to further support teachers in their roles.
“I extend my sincere gratitude to all educators, school leaders and support staff who dedicate their time and energy to making British Columbia’s education system strong and inclusive. Your efforts empower students and help build a brighter future for our province.
“As we celebrate this year’s Education Week, I am pleased to reiterate our government’s ongoing commitment to making schools safe and inclusive, a place where every child has a right to show up as their authentic self, while having the resources and opportunities they need to succeed and thrive.”
Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services
Sporting organisations, therapy providers, and community and disability organisations gathered to open the new path.
In brief:
A new bike track and storage shed suitable for all abilities is now open.
The accessible track is designed to help kids build cycling skills, road safety awareness and confidence.
It will host the Cyclabilities program run by Abilities Unlimited Australia.
A new accessible cycling path has opened in Evatt.
The all-abilities Road Safety Learn to Ride concrete bike track and bike storage shed are located at Evatt Community Playground. This is adjacent to Evatt Primary School.
The new facility will make learning to ride safer for all children, no matter their ability.
On Saturday mornings, the Abilities Unlimited Australia (AUA) Cyclabilities program will use the track.
When not in use by Cyclabilities, it is available for the community to enjoy.
AUA Cyclabilities
AUA provides tailored programs for children with disabilities. It promotes inclusion and empowers every child to discover their potential through sports.
The Cyclabilities program is an inclusive cycling initiative.
It helps children of all abilities learn cycling skills and road safety awareness. Beyond this, it fosters social, emotional and physical development.
On Saturday mornings, over 100 participants take part. The new Evatt facility will help grow participation in the program.
AUA’s 1:1 and small group sports programs are designed to meet the unique needs and abilities of each child.
“This inclusive facility is a vital gift to our community, offering children of all abilities a safe space to learn cycling, develop essential road safety skills, and build confidence,” Co-founder of Abilities Unlimited Australia Fiona Jarvis said.
“Children with disabilities face heightened risks and barriers to participation. This precinct breaks those barriers, fostering independence, inclusion, and community connection.”
The ACT Government’s 2024 Community Sport Facilities Program provided funding to Abilities Unlimited Australia (AUA) for the project.
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Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services
The new Parent Portal app makes it easier for families to engage with their school.
In brief:
The new Parent Portal app is available for all ACT public school families.
It is called Sentral for Parents and follows children from kindergarten through to year 12.
This story outlines the key features of the app and how it can be accessed.
The new Parent Portal smartphone app is now available for all ACT public school families. The app gives them more choice in how they access information from their child’s school.
The app is called Sentral for Parents. It has the same functionality as the web-based Parent Portal and follows students from kindergarten through to year 12.
Parent Portal is a secure online platform for sharing student information between ACT public schools and parents and carers.
Parent Portal makes it easier for families to engage with their school by housing key information on one system. Parents and carers only need to sign up for the Parent Portal once. Multiple children can be added to one account using the access key for each child’s school.
Parents can use Parent Portal and the Sentral for Parents app to: * notify their school if their child is sick * book parent-teacher interviews * receive their child’s academic reports (including past reports) * receive their school newsletter * receive messages from their child’s teachers * see their child’s student timetable * get daily notices of school activities * update contact details, and * make payments.
So far, 24,405 parents and carers have registered to use Parent Portal. This number is expected to grow now that the Sentral for Parents app is available.
Parents of new ACT public school students, including those starting kindergarten in 2025, will receive a registration link and access key from their school. They will need to set up an ACT Digital Account if they don’t already have one to register.
Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services
Lawson Connor is an Australian School-based Apprenticeship (ASbA) of the Year Award finalist.
In brief:
Gungahlin College student Lawson Connor is a national finalist at the 2024 Australian Training Awards.
He has overcome health challenges and wants to become a paramedic.
He hopes others are aware there are many career pathways.
A couple of years back, Lawson Connor was picked up from school by ambulance so often, he was on first-name terms with many paramedics.
He missed a whole term of year 9 at Gold Creek School. This was due to epilepsy-related health challenges.
One of seven children, Lawson says he pretty much grew up in hospital.
A proud Wiradjuri man, he is now 17 and at Gungahlin College. And tonight, he is a national finalist at the 2024 Australian Training Awards.
He is in the running for the Australian School-based Apprenticeship (ASbA) of the Year Award.
People from all over Canberra, and further afield, in Wiradjuri country, will cheer him on.
A turning point
If there was a turning point for Lawson, perhaps it was when he became vice-captain of Gold Creek School.
He led several initiatives and was a mentor for many. This included other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
A teacher encouraged Lawson to consider applying for an ASbA. He hasn’t looked back.
A clear career path
Lawson was inspired by the kindness he’d experienced in the health system. He had already decided to pursue a career in health care.
He was accepted into Indigenous Allied Health Australia’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Academy ASbA program.
Through this, he is completing a Certificate III in Allied Health Assistance (HLT33021) through CIT. He is doing this while finishing years 11 and 12.
The program has given him insights into career pathways in the health sector. He has also found clarity about his career goal.
“Through placements I’ve tried out different areas … physio, occupational therapy, aged care … it’s really helped me narrow it down, to paramedicine.”
“It would be such an honour to be able to provide emergency healthcare within the community, especially a rural or remote community, or a disadvantaged Indigenous community, where I could provide a level of cultural care and understanding.”
Lawson has also taken an online university class this year. It is part of an early entry program for Midwifery, Nursing and Paramedicine.
Well-deserved recognition
Today, Lawson’s health is much better. He has been also received several awards. These include:
an Exceptional Young Person Award, ACT Children’s Week Awards
the flagship Children’s Commissioner Award, ACT Children’s Week Awards.
Advice for others
Lawson hopes other students may be inspired by his journey to consider alternative pathways.
It worries him that a lot of his friends are stressed about getting a high-enough ATAR.
“I want a lot of people to know that ATAR isn’t the only option to get into a university or have a successful life,” he said. “There are so many avenues.”
Lawson recommends talking to careers teachers at school about available pathways.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, there are dedicated programs and supports to consider.
“There are so many opportunities out there,” Lawson said.
“If you really want to do something, pursue it. You can achieve it.”
PHILADELPHIA, April 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — SEMCAP announces its new AI investment strategy, SEMCAP AI, to capitalize on the burgeoning Artificial Intelligence revolution that is fundamentally changing the way businesses operate, while tapping its decades of strong technology investment acumen. The investor announces this new vertical investment strategy alongside its other platforms focused on Food & Nutrition and Healthcare. Notably, SEMCAP AI will absorb the firm’s legacy Education strategy, and Education will be one area of focus for SEMCAP AI.
SEMCAP AI targets influential investment stakes in high-growth, next generation AI platforms, with the majority of deals expected to be growth equity stage. This focus will include AI business applications, vertical solutions, and AI infrastructure solutions disrupting how businesses operate, increasing sales, boosting productivity and transforming entire markets.
“As a team, we’ve been fortunate to be part of early tech-driven transformations and are very excited to tap into our tech roots and embrace the power of AI as the next major wave of disruption,” said Walter “Buck” Buckley, SEMCAP co-founder and co-CIO. “Having been around this block a few times, we understand the value of coupling transformative technologies with strong operating expertise to drive outsized growth. We firmly believe that AI has the potential be the greatest wave yet—and the biggest force of change we will witness in our lifetime.”
Drawing on the team’s decades of experience investing in and leading technology businesses, SEMCAP AI takes influential positions in high growth businesses that have established product-market fit, demonstrated strong ROI for customers, have the potential to be market leaders, and the profound ability to transform entire industries. SEMCAP AI drives strong alignment with management and leverages active post-investment value creation and governance in seeking to maximize and accelerate the performance of its portfolio companies.
SEMCAP AI Investment Team
SEMCAP AI’s investment team is led by SEMCAP co-founders and co-CIOs, Buckley and Cyrus Vandrevala, as well as Managing Partner, Vince Menichelli, Managing Directors John Loftus, Erik Rasmussen and Abraham Kromah and Operating Partner, Bader Al-Rezaihan. Together members of this team have decades of shared experience building and investing in technology business while officers at Safeguard Scientifics, ICG and later Actua Corporation. SEMCAP AI has offices across the globe including in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Kuwait and Vancouver. In order to more fully capitalize on the enormous opportunity within AI, SEMCAP AI has partnered with Wayve Capital to offer public investment opportunities, in addition to their core offering of private investment strategies. The partnership also enables the teams to opportunistically source proprietary deals in the AI space through their vast respective networks.
SEMCAP AI Strategic Operating Advisors
The investor has also assembled a diverse, influential and well-connected team of Strategic Operating Advisors to assist in the sourcing and vetting of potential investment opportunities, while also working closely with portfolio companies to create value and lasting impact, post-investment. This includes providing targeted strategic support, strengthening management teams, expanding customer pipelines and providing access to the industry’s key decision makers. SEMCAP AI’s Strategic Operating Advisors hail from disparate but significant industries, ripe for transformation, and represent sectors where we expect accelerated transformation driven by artificial intelligence. SEMCAP AI’s advisors include:
Sylvia Acevedo is an engineer, advocate for girls’ STEM education, and a lifelong Girl Scout. She worked in leadership positions at a number of technology companies, such as Apple, Dell, and IBM, and served as head of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. In 1983 she became one of the first Hispanic students—male or female—to earn a graduate degree in engineering from Stanford University. Acevedo was named the 2018 Cybersecurity Person on the Year. She was also named a 2019 Notable Woman in Tech by Crain’s magazine and one of the 100 Most Influential Latinas by Latino Leaders magazine in 2020.
Samantha Bradely serves as managing director of RealmSpark, a business unit of ASU Enterprise Partners that facilitates the capital investments necessary to fuel ASU’s modalities of learning. She brings years of experience in private equity, including with firms managing billions of dollars in assets, such as Truvvo Partners and Baron Capital.
Harry Keiley currently serves as chairman of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) Investment Committee, the largest educator-only pension fund in the world, with more than $300 Billion in assets under management. His previous positions include Chaiman of the Board of CalSTRS and multiple terms as President of the Santa Monica Classroom Teachers Association.
SEMCAP AI’s Investment in Arcana Labs
In conjunction with the launch of this new vertical investment strategy, SEMCAP AI recently announced that it led a $5.5 million investment round in Arcana Labs, a leading generative AI creative studio transforming the film and production industry. Arcana is revolutionizing key steps in the filmmaking process with its all-in-one generative AI tools, which were purpose-built for the film industry’s unique creative needs from pre-production to post-production. Buckley will join the Acana Board of Directors and Menichelli will serve as a Board observer.
“From our first meeting with Buck and the SEMCAP team, we knew we had found partners who truly understood our vision for revolutionizing the creative industry with AI,” said Jonathan Yunger, co-founder and CEO of Arcana Labs. “Their deep expertise and strategic networks across multiple verticals, combined with their genuine enthusiasm for empowering artists through technology, makes them the ideal partner for Arcana’s next phase of growth. In a time when AI’s potential seems limitless, SEMCAP shares our commitment to putting Arcana’s powerful tools in the hands of artists while preserving the unmatched power of human creativity. SEMCAP’s partnership and guidance will help us accelerate our mission of making artist-driven AI accessible to creators and professionals everywhere.”
“We are thrilled to officially launch SEMCAP AI and announce our investment in Arcana, which exemplifies the type of company that SEMCAP AI will seek to invest in moving forward. Arcana is delivering significant ROI to its customers and unequivocally transforming the film and production industry. Beyond that we believe it has the power to also completely upend multiple other markets like advertising, branding, interior design, and gaming,” said Buckley. “Additionally, I have been fortunate enough to witness firsthand how Arcana’s platform is revolutionizing the nearly $300 Billion global film industry through my work on a docuseries about George Washington. Using their platform, we were able to reduce our production time and costs by almost 90%, while producing a historically accurate and realistic end-product. We look forward to collaborating with Jonathan and the Arcana team to support and accelerate their growth and help transform the industry.”
About SEMCAP
SEMCAP AI invests in high-growth, next-generation AI companies that are disrupting how businesses operate, boosting productivity and transforming markets. Led by a highly skilled investment team with deep operating and investing experience in technology and AI, the team provides unique deal insight and support for strategic partnering and enhanced growth. SEMCAP AI is one of SEMCAP’s three platforms – AI, food & nutrition and health. SEMCAP is a growth equity platform committed to investing across sectors that have the greatest impact on society.
About Arcana
Arcana Labs is an artist-driven AI company that empowers creators with model agnostic AI-powered creative tools. Founded by a braintrust of tech nerds and Hollywood blockbuster filmmakers, Arcana Labs is revolutionizing the AI art space by marrying traditional creative processes with the magic of AI, empowering Artist-driven AI, rather than AI-driven art. The company’s flagship product, Arcana AI, gives artists an all-in-one, “AI production company in a box,” with sleek, easy-to-use tools that assist artists rather than replace them. https://www.arcanalabs.ai/
This release is provided for informational purposes only, and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell any securities to any person in any jurisdiction in which an offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. This material may contain estimates and forward-looking statements, which may include forecasts and do not represent a guarantee of future performance. This information is not intended to be complete or exhaustive and no representations or warranties, either express or implied, are made regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein. The views expressed are as of April 22, 2025, and are subject to change without notice. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. Investing involves significant risks.
The Justice Department filed a statement of interest Friday in support of a Christian Church in North Carolina alleging violations of federal law by the Chatham County Board of Commissioners.
The Civil Rights Division filed the statement in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina supporting a claim by a Christian church under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The Church alleges the County unlawfully denied an application to rezone several parcels of land to allow the church to build a new place of worship.
“RLUIPA protects the rights of religious groups to exercise their faith free from the precise type of undue government interference exhibited here,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to defending religious liberties as our founders intended and as federal law requires.”
Summit Church-Homestand Heights Baptist Church worshipped at East Chapel Hill High School for several years but has grown and now needs additional space to meet the religious needs of its congregation. In its complaint, Summit Church claims that the denial of its rezoning applications by the Board treated the Church on less than equal terms to nonreligious assemblies and imposed an unjustified substantial burden on its religious exercise.
Summit Church filed a motion for preliminary injunction, seeking an order requiring the County to approve the church’s rezoning request and associated site plan. The County moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing the zoning decision is a “legislative act” under state law and is therefore not controlled by RLUIPA. The department’s statement of interest supports the church’s claim that RLUIPA protects against the County’s discriminatory zoning decision.
RLUIPA is a federal law that guards individuals and religious institutions from unduly burdensome, unequal, or discriminatory land use regulations. More information about RLUIPA and the department’s work can be found on the Place to Worship Initiative’s webpage.
As part of this initiative, the department distributed a letter to state, county, and municipal leaders throughout the country to remind them of their obligations under RLUIPA, including its requirement that land use regulations treat religious assemblies and institutions at least as well as nonreligious assemblies and institutions.
Individuals who believe they have been subjected to discrimination in land use or zoning decisions may contact the U.S. Attorney’s Office Civil Division’s Civil Rights Section at (718) 254-7000 or the Civil Rights Division’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section at (833) 591-0291 or may submit a complaint through the RLUIPA complaint portal. More information about RLUIPA, including questions and answers about the law and other documents, may be found at www.justice.gov/crt/about/hce/rluipaexplain.php.
Many bakers working at high altitudes have carefully followed a standard recipe only to reach into the oven to find a sunken cake, flat cookies or dry muffins.
Experienced mountain bakers know they need a few tricks to achieve the same results as their fellow artisans working at sea level.
These tricks are more than family lore, however. They originated in the early 20th century thanks to research on high-altitude baking done by Inga Allison, then a professor at Colorado State University. It was Allison’s scientific prowess and experimentation that brought us the possibility of perfect high-altitude brownies and other baked goods.
We are two current academics at CSU whose work has been touched by Allison’s legacy.
One of us – Caitlin Clark – still relies on Allison’s lessons a century later in her work as a food scientist in Colorado. The other – Tobi Jacobi – is a scholar of women’s rhetoric and community writing, and an enthusiastic home baker in the Rocky Mountains, who learned about Allison while conducting archival research on women’s work and leadership at CSU.
Inga Allison is one of the fascinating and accomplished women who is part of the exhibit.
Allison was born in 1876 in Illinois and attended the University of Chicago, where she completed the prestigious “science course” work that heavily influenced her career trajectory. Her studies and research also set the stage for her belief that women’s education was more than preparation for domestic life.
In 1908, Allison was hired as a faculty member in home economics at Colorado Agricultural College, which is now CSU. She joined a group of faculty who were beginning to study the effects of altitude on baking and crop growth. The department was located inside Guggenheim Hall, a building that was constructed for home economics education but lacked lab equipment or serious research materials.
Allison took both the land grant mission of the university with its focus on teaching, research and extension and her particular charge to prepare women for the future seriously. She urged her students to move beyond simple conceptions of home economics as mere preparation for domestic life. She wanted them to engage with the physical, biological and social sciences to understand the larger context for home economics work.
Such thinking, according to CSU historian James E. Hansen, pushed women college students in the early 20th century to expand the reach of home economics to include “extension and welfare work, dietetics, institutional management, laboratory research work, child development and teaching.”
News articles from the early 1900s track Allison giving lectures like “The Economic Side of Natural Living” to the Colorado Health Club and talks on domestic science to ladies clubs and at schools across Colorado. One of her talks in 1910 focused on the art of dishwashing.
Allison became the home economics department chair in 1910 and eventually dean. In this leadership role, she urged then-CSU President Charles Lory to fund lab materials for the home economics department. It took 19 years for this dream to come to fruition.
In the meantime, Allison collaborated with Lory, who gave her access to lab equipment in the physics department. She pieced together equipment to conduct research on the relationship between cooking foods in water and atmospheric pressure, but systematic control of heat, temperature and pressure was difficult to achieve.
She sought other ways to conduct high-altitude experiments and traveled across Colorado where she worked with students to test baking recipes in varied conditions, including at 11,797 feet in a shelter house on Fall River Road near Estes Park.
But Allison realized that recipes baked at 5,000 feet in Fort Collins and Denver simply didn’t work in higher altitudes. Little advancement in baking methods occurred until 1927, when the first altitude baking lab in the nation was constructed at CSU thanks to Allison’s research. The results were tangible — and tasty — as public dissemination of altitude-specific baking practices began.
As a senior food scientist in a mountain state, one of us – Caitlin Clark – advises bakers on how to adjust their recipes to compensate for altitude. Thanks to Allison’s research, bakers at high altitude today can anticipate how the lower air pressure will affect their recipes and compensate by making small adjustments.
Air pressure is a force that pushes back on all of the molecules in a system and prevents them from venturing off into the environment. Heat plays the opposite role – it adds energy and pushes molecules to escape.
When water is boiled, molecules escape by turning into steam. The less air pressure is pushing back, the less energy is required to make this happen. That’s why water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes – around 200 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver compared with 212 F at sea level.
So, when baking is done at high altitude, steam is produced at a lower temperature and earlier in the baking time. Carbon dioxide produced by leavening agents also expands more rapidly in the thinner air. This causes high-altitude baked goods to rise too early, before their structure has fully set, leading to collapsed cakes and flat muffins. Finally, the rapid evaporation of water leads to over-concentration of sugars and fats in the recipe, which can cause pastries to have a gummy, undesirable texture.
Allison was one of many groundbreaking women in the early 20th century who actively supported higher education for women and advanced research in science, politics, humanities and education in Colorado.
Others included Grace Espy-Patton, a professor of English and sociology at CSU from 1885 to 1896 who founded an early feminist journal and was the first woman to register to vote in Fort Collins. Miriam Palmer was an aphid specialist and master illustrator whose work crafting hyper-realistic wax apples in the early 1900s allowed farmers to confirm rediscovery of the lost Colorado Orange apple, a fruit that has been successfully propagated in recent years.
In 1945, Allison retired as both an emerita professor and emerita dean at CSU. She immediately stepped into the role of student and took classes in Russian and biochemistry.
In the fall of 1958, CSU opened a new dormitory for women that was named Allison Hall in her honor.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Ask three of the editors of UConn’s Undergraduate Political Review to describe what it’s like to talk about politics today and they use the same single word.
Messy.
As much as they study political science, listen to podcasts about it, talk with professors and friends about it, write about it, at times seemingly live and breathe it, there’s no other way for this trio to describe the state of political discussions today.
What they add though after a short pause is that their coursework and involvement in the Undergraduate Political Review (UPR) has taught them to see both sides of issues, maybe even land on the middle ground when right debates left, and red and blue have at it.
“There are smarter and more capable people than us analyzing these issues,” Alessandro Portolano ’25 (CLAS) says, “and engaging with their work helps us gain some appreciation, some humility if you will. That’s unique and probably needed in today’s world.”
Portolano, a graduating senior who’s one of UPR’s seven associate editors, says he joined the review in fall 2023 when he was looking for a way to explore topics outside his history major, things he finds personally interesting like international relations, climate and conflict, and digital authoritarianism.
“My interest in politics and history has always been there,” he says, attributing that to his father. “Bedtime stories as a kid were about the Roman empire. Julius Caesar was as familiar to me as Little Red Riding Hood.”
So, the hours he spends each week researching and writing his own UPR stories in addition to editing pieces by other authors aren’t particularly arduous.
Their eventual publication is just “an output of what you’re already engaging with and what you’re doing already,” he says. “You read the news. You think about these things. It’s just a way to formally express it.”
UPR employs the talents of between 10 and 15 student writers and a handful of student editors twice a year to put out an edition each semester, explains Makenzie Cossette ’25 (CLAS), the editor-in-chief who’s graduating a year early in May with a degree in political science and an individualized major in law and society.
Oksan Bayulgen and Evan Perkoski, both political science professors, serve as advisors, and their help – along with the rest of the department – is invaluable, she adds.
Founded in 2015, the review is celebrating its 10th anniversary with its 20th issue, which was released online this week; print copies will be available by the end of the semester.
“It’s a great opportunity to engage in academics outside of your classes, especially for people who aren’t political science majors but are still interested in politics,” Cossette says. “People think this is just a political science organization because it’s run through the department, but we are open to anyone in any major or field, as long as they’re an undergraduate student.”
Take, for example, Yana Tartakovskiy ’25 (BUS) who joined UPR in the fall and is an associate editor this semester. She’s a graduating health care management major and wanted to look closer at health care policy than her classes allowed.
Tartakovskiy’s first piece considered how the right to an abortion is being litigated in the courts, while this semester she’s researched some of the arguments favoring reproductive rights, like First Amendment claims from women who practice Judaism who say their religion allows them the right to an abortion.
These are topics she’d researched in the past but hadn’t published for public consumption, she says. UPR gave her that venue.
“I’m not going to lie, I’m not a huge politics fan,” Tartakovskiy admits. “I come from a family who has a wide range of political views because my parents and grandparents immigrated from the Soviet Union. So, politics is always such a heavily debated subject, and I hate to insert myself in there.”
But she continues of UPR, “This organization gave me the pathway to not only focus on political issues but also see how they intertwine with things I am passionate about, which is health care, the health care system, and health care access for women.”
In the fall 2024 edition, “The Politics of Influence: Global Trends & Local Realities,” pieces ranging from “The Taylor Swift Effect: Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter in Political Campaigns” to “The State of Medicaid in Connecticut” and “The Politics of Loneliness: Restoring Social Capital Amidst Social Impoverishment” kept editors busy.
While each associate editor works throughout the semester with a couple of writers to polish articles, Cossette says the editor-in-chief is busiest at the start and end of the semester – matching editors and writers at the outset and assembling the final product at the end.
With only three all-staff meetings a semester, most work is done independently.
“Having a UPR gives students an outlet to look at issues more deeply than they can in an introductory class,” Portolano says, explaining he often seeks out professors with expertise in certain areas and schedules office hours with them – just to chat. “Making those relationships, developing your political language, and engaging with complex ideas in a way that is accessible to a general audience are important skills.”
Tartakovskiy says she’s presenting in early May at George Washington University’s “The Student Journal Symposium for Literary and Research Publications,” and several others from UConn’s UPR participated in Fordham University’s similar event last semester.
Professional development is one of the club’s strengths, Cossette says.
A decade from now, Tartakovskiy says she hopes students from UConn, even elsewhere, will look at the scholarly research published in UPR as source material and cite it in their own research.
Cossette says she hopes future members will continue to improve the look and feel of the digital and print products, while Portolano says fostering a UPR community that includes current writers and alums is something to aim for.
“Having a formal publication at the university gives students an opportunity to have other people read and experience their ideas outside the traditional classroom format where only your professor is reading your work,” Cossette adds.
“These are some formative years,” Portolano notes. “Being able to engage seriously with these topics that in many ways are going to define our future, I think, is important.”
Cossette says she’s been interested in politics and the law since early high school when she took AP United States Government and Politics, so majoring in political science and participating in UConn’s Special Program in Law was a predicted path.
She says she tried what some might call “fun clubs” when she came to UConn, “and then I ended up joining a political club because that’s what I find fun.”
Tartakovskiy, who also is in the Special Program in Law, says that of the five or six organizations she’s been involved with during her time at UConn – including founding the student advocacy group Jewish on Campus UConn – UPR helped round her for the future.
“Politics is scrutinize-criticize and that’s for the better because nothing is perfect, and for things to change or get better, they have to be scrutinized,” she says. “It’s nice to challenge one person’s opinion of an issue and get them to see the other side of it.”
Even if it is messy.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, UPR held an alumni panel in late March with alums from the first couple of editions talking about the review’s early days and where their careers have taken them. Watch the panel discussion here.
overnor Kathy Hochul today announced the award of the fifth and final construction contract of phase one of the transformative Interstate 81 Viaduct Project in the City of Syracuse. The award of the nearly $251 million contract to Salt City Constructors marks a significant milestone in this historic project to reunite the long-divided communities of Syracuse’s Southside and modernize the entire transportation landscape of Central New York. It is the first contract to include removal of portions of the viaduct and signals the transition of the project away from its initial stages — which focused largely on improvements needed to redesignate Interstate 481 as the new I-81 — and toward the later phase of eliminating the viaduct and establishing the Community Grid. Work on the fifth contract is set to begin imminently.
“Across the State, we are reimagining and reshaping our infrastructure to reconnect communities and address the misguided planning decisions of the past,” Governor Hochul said. “The award of the I-81 Viaduct Project’s latest contract is proof of the advancements we are making to reunite the Southside neighborhoods that were wrongly divided by this highway’s construction and is an indicator of the progress that is yet to come for all of Central New York.”
The generational I-81 Viaduct Project is the largest project ever undertaken by the New York State Department of Transportation and is part of Governor Hochul’s unprecedented commitment to modernize New York State’s infrastructure and invest in projects that promote equity, connectivity, and multi-modal transportation opportunities for communities across the state. The project will remove a 1.4-mile stretch of elevated highway that has divided the City of Syracuse for decades and implement a Community Grid that will reconnect neighborhoods, modernize infrastructure, give motorists additional ways to safely access downtown Syracuse and improve mobility for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Comprised of eight separate contracts, construction on the project began in the spring of 2023 and with the award of the fifth contract, New York State has now reached the major milestone of having all five phase one contracts in construction. The $33 billion NYSDOT Capital Plan adopted in 2022 helps fulfill the Governor’s vision for a modern transportation system that serves New Yorkers across the State. The project is being funded with a mix of federal and State resources.
New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez said, “Under Governor Kathy Hochul’s leadership, New York State is doing more to invest in infrastructure projects that are fundamentally transforming communities across the state – creating jobs and providing economic opportunities for generations of New Yorkers to come. The I-81 Viaduct project is an outstanding example of working with the community to develop and progress a project that truly reflects the transportation needs of the community. Today’s announcement is further proof that we are moving full speed ahead on this transformative project in the City of Syracuse, which will promote connectivity in all its forms, for communities across Central New York, leading to a brighter path forward for the thousands of residents – many of whom were negatively impacted by the viaduct’s construction over seventy five years ago.”
As part of contract five, construction will begin in earnest on the southside of Syracuse, with the transformation of the southern end of Almond Street and I-81 into future Business Loop 81. Work includes reconstructing and converting I-81 to Business Loop 81 from just north of Colvin Street to Burt Street, gradually bringing the highway down to street grade, while introducing several traffic calming measures, including curved roadways and narrower lanes and shoulders. Plans also call for a grassy median, decorative lighting, and trees as traffic approaches Martin Luther King East. View an aerial rendering.
Contract five also includes the construction of a roundabout at Business Loop 81 and Van Buren Street, which will help slow northbound traffic as it approaches Martin Luther King East and downtown Syracuse. The roundabout was initially planned for a location at Martin Luther King East, near the STEAM at Dr. King Elementary School, but was relocated after community members expressed concerns about its proximity to the school. View a rendering of the roundabout at the intersection of Business Loop 81 and Van Buren Street looking west.
As construction on contract five proceeds, two thirds of the way through completion, the viaduct will officially close to traffic south of Harrison Street and approximately seven spans of the viaduct will be removed. Southbound traffic destined for Exit 18 to Adams and Harrison Streets, and northbound traffic that enters using the on-ramp to I-81 at Harrison Street will remain on the viaduct. Temporary improvements will be made to Almond Street to allow for all traffic destined to or from Business Loop 81 to access the central business district.
Additionally, a new railroad bridge will be constructed between Martin Luther King East and the new roundabout to carry the New York Susquehanna and Western Railway tracks over Business Loop 81. The new bridge will include blue painted steel and lighting to create a new gateway entrance into the City of Syracuse.
Additional contract five components include:
An off-ramp from Business Loop 81 northbound to Colvin Street to enhance connectivity to the downtown areas, Syracuse University, and the university’s south campus. View a rendering of the new Colvin Street exit.
Improvements to the City of Syracuse and Onondaga County’s storm water runoff and sewage systems.
Pedestrian and cyclist amenities, including designated bike lanes, shared use paths, new sidewalks and crosswalks with enhanced pedestrian activated signals.
New traffic signals with video detection on mast arm poles to enhance safety and traffic flow.
Noise barriers along Business Loop 81 southbound between Martin Luther King East and along the off-ramp to South State Street, South Salina Street, and Brighton Avenue, in the northbound direction between a half mile south of the I-81 bridge over Colvin Street to just north of the I-81 bridge over Colvin Street.
As part of NYSDOT’s ongoing commitment to engage with the community at every step of the process, several outreach events will be scheduled to keep stakeholders informed about the project, including an open house for southside residents to learn more about contract five construction.
Senator Charles Schumer said, “With the fifth and final contract now awarded for Phase 1 of I-81’s transformation we have never been closer to realizing the dream of a reconnected Syracuse with green space and modern transportation for all. This contract will remove portions of the viaduct and signals that wheels are in motion to realize the city’s vision for a community grid to better connect Syracuse to a brighter future. When I led the Bipartisan Infrastructure & Jobs Law to passage, I did so with projects like Syracuse’s I-81 transformation as my north star. I am proud this significant over $250 million contract will be invested in Syracuse to reconnect the community and create good-paying construction jobs. I’m grateful for Governor Hochul and Mayor Walsh’s partnership in putting this federal funding to good use building the better, brighter future that Syracuse deserves.”
Representative John W. Mannion said, “Today marks another visible step forward in removing the outdated I-81 viaduct and constructing a better, more connected Syracuse and Central New York. Thanks to Governor Hochul’s leadership and commitment to bold infrastructure investments, we are creating a safer, smarter road system that will deliver smoother drives, stronger neighborhoods, cleaner air, and a brighter future for the region.”
State Senator Rachel May said, “The I-81 project is transforming Central New York, and it’s exciting to see the next phase begin. As the final contract is awarded, we must continue reinvesting in the Syracuse area, ensuring the high-quality construction jobs go to workers in our community. This once-in-a-lifetime project aims not only to improve our infrastructure but also to unite Syracuse and guide us toward a brighter future. Thank you to Governor Hochul for her leadership, NYSDOT for keeping the project on track, and my Senate Majority colleagues for their continued support.”
State Senator Christopher Ryan said, “This milestone is about more than just one phase of concrete and construction — it’s part of a major step forward in reconnecting neighborhoods, restoring opportunity, and renewing a sense of unity across our community. For too long, infrastructure decisions have divided communities and limited potential across Central New York. With this next phase of the I-81 Project, we move closer to a future where every neighborhood in Syracuse and the surrounding area is part of the progress. I’m grateful to Governor Hochul for her partnership and her commitment to building a more connected and equitable CNY.”
Assemblymember William Magnarelli said, “I am pleased to see the final Phase I contract of the I-81 Viaduct Project awarded. This marks an important step in the construction of the project. I look forward to its timely completion.”
Assemblymember Pamela Hunter said, “This investment not only addresses decades of infrastructure inequity, but also sets the foundation for a more connected, accessible, and unified community. The removal of the viaduct and the creation of the Community Grid will help restore neighborhoods that have been divided for far too long, and I commend Governor Hochul and the Department of Transportation for their continued commitment to making this vision a reality.”
Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh said, “The award of Contract Five means Syracuse continues to be all systems go for the positive transformation of Interstate 81. Work has already been occurring within the City of Syracuse, and with these next stages we will see even more progress toward the Community Grid. I thank Governor Hochul, Commissioner Dominguez and the entire New York State Department of Transportation I-81 project team for advancing this critically important public infrastructure project.”
Follow the I-81 Viaduct Project on Facebook, Instagram, and X or visit our website.
About the Department of Transportation It is the mission of the New York State Department of Transportation to provide a safe, reliable, equitable, and resilient transportation system that connects communities, enhances quality of life, protects the environment and supports the economic well-being of New York State.
Lives are on the line; slow down and move over for highway workers!
For more information, find us on Facebook, follow us on X or Instagram, or visit our website. For up-to-date travel information, call 511, visit www.511NY.org or download the free 511NY mobile app.
The Justice Department filed a statement of interest Friday in support of a Christian Church in North Carolina alleging violations of federal law by the Chatham County Board of Commissioners.
The Civil Rights Division filed the statement in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina supporting a claim by a Christian church under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The Church alleges the County unlawfully denied an application to rezone several parcels of land to allow the church to build a new place of worship.
“RLUIPA protects the rights of religious groups to exercise their faith free from the precise type of undue government interference exhibited here,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to defending religious liberties as our founders intended and as federal law requires.”
Summit Church-Homestand Heights Baptist Church worshipped at East Chapel Hill High School for several years but has grown and now needs additional space to meet the religious needs of its congregation. In its complaint, Summit Church claims that the denial of its rezoning applications by the Board treated the Church on less than equal terms to nonreligious assemblies and imposed an unjustified substantial burden on its religious exercise.
Summit Church filed a motion for preliminary injunction, seeking an order requiring the County to approve the church’s rezoning request and associated site plan. The County moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing the zoning decision is a “legislative act” under state law and is therefore not controlled by RLUIPA. The department’s statement of interest supports the church’s claim that RLUIPA protects against the County’s discriminatory zoning decision.
RLUIPA is a federal law that guards individuals and religious institutions from unduly burdensome, unequal, or discriminatory land use regulations. More information about RLUIPA and the department’s work can be found on the Place to Worship Initiative’s webpage.
As part of this initiative, the department distributed a letter to state, county, and municipal leaders throughout the country to remind them of their obligations under RLUIPA, including its requirement that land use regulations treat religious assemblies and institutions at least as well as nonreligious assemblies and institutions.
Individuals who believe they have been subjected to discrimination in land use or zoning decisions may contact the U.S. Attorney’s Office Civil Division’s Civil Rights Section at (718) 254-7000 or the Civil Rights Division’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section at (833) 591-0291 or may submit a complaint through the RLUIPA complaint portal. More information about RLUIPA, including questions and answers about the law and other documents, may be found at www.justice.gov/crt/about/hce/rluipaexplain.php.
MAPLE GROVE, Minn., April 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — TopLine Financial Credit Union, a Twin Cities-based member-owned financial services cooperative, held a food drive during the month of March for the MN FoodShare March Campaign benefitting three local non-profits, Community Emergency Assistance Programs (CEAP), Hope 4 Youth and Keystone Community Services. TopLine members and employees generously donated non-perishable food items of canned vegetables, soups, rice, dry pasta, and more to help fight hunger in our local communities.
Employees were able to participate by donating non-perishable food items and money in exchange for a “Foundation Friday/Saturday” sticker, allowing them to wear jeans to work. TopLine and community members could also purchase items from an Amazon Wishlist or Target Registry and have them delivered directly to TopLine, and in return delivered to the charitable partners. When the program ended TopLine employees and members had donated over 574 pounds of food items and $1,155 in cash to assist local individuals and families.
“We frequently receive feedback from our non-profit partners that food supplies decrease during the initial months of the year following a surge in holiday donations,” said Mick Olson, President and CEO of TopLine Financial Credit Union. “Through the generous contributions of our TopLine family, including members and employees, we aim to alleviate some of the stress associated with food insecurity. By collaborating with other donors, we are optimistic that our collective efforts will strengthen our local communities and provide vital support to those in need of food assistance.”
Minnesota FoodShare began its work in 1982 as a campaign advanced by congregations to restock food shelves in the 7-county Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. The effort was so successful, and the need so evident, the March campaign became a statewide initiative just one year later and is now in its 44th year. Minnesota Foodshare March Campaign is the largest grassroots food and fund drive in the state and helps support the capacity of nearly 300 food shelves. Each year, CEAP, Hope 4 Youth and Keystone Community Services participate in the statewide food and fund drive to restock pantry shelves.
Community Emergency Assistance Programs (CEAP), serving Hennepin and Anoka Counties, is a community-based, non-profit agency dedicated to providing information, referrals, advocacy and assistance to local communities. Visit www.ceap.org to learn more.
Hope 4 Youth is a nonprofit organization in Anoka County that helps young people, ages 16-24, who are experiencing homelessness in the northern Twin Cities metro area. To learn more, visit www.hope4youthmn.org.
Keystone Community Services is a community-based volunteer organization in St. Paul that helps thousands of low-income individuals and families in the East Metro Area. Keystone’s mission is to strengthen the capacity of individuals and families to improve their quality of life. Visit www.keystoneservices.org to learn more.
TopLine Financial Credit Union, a Twin Cities-based credit union, is Minnesota’s 9th largest credit union, with assets of over $1.1 billion and serves over 70,000 members. Established in 1935, the not-for-profit financial cooperative offers a complete line of financial services from its ten branch locations — in Bloomington, Brooklyn Park, Champlin, Circle Pines, Coon Rapids, Forest Lake, Maple Grove, Plymouth, St. Francis and in St. Paul’s Como Park — as well as by phone and online at www.TopLinecu.com or www.ahcu.coop. Membership is available to anyone who lives, works, worships, attends school or volunteers in Anoka, Benton, Carver, Chisago, Dakota, Hennepin, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs, Pine, Ramsey, Scott, Sherburne, Washington and Wright counties in Minnesota and their immediate family members, as well as employees and retirees of Anoka Hennepin School District #11, Anoka Technical College, Federal Premium Ammunition, Hoffman Enclosures, Inc., GRACO, Inc., and their subsidiaries. Visit us on our Facebook or Instagram. To learn more about the credit union’s foundation, visit www.TopLinecu.com/Foundation.
CONTACT: Vicki Roscoe Erickson Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer TopLine Financial Credit Union verickson@toplinecu.com | 763.391.0872
Pope Francis’ journey from the streets of Flores, a neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the Vatican, is a remarkable tale.
Born in 1936, Jorge Bergoglio was raised in a middle-class family of Italian Catholic immigrants.
Bergoglio defied his mother’s wish for him to become a medical doctor and chose instead to pursue priesthood, a calling he felt during confession. The young man joined the Jesuits in the 1950s, attracted to the order’s vow of poverty and its ethos of serving others and living simply.
He became a priest in 1969, Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and took on the papacy in 2013. As Pope Francis, his dedication to social justice was deeply rooted in the Latin American context.
The region’s history of inequality, poverty and political upheaval greatly influenced his perspective.
The young Argentinian priest
Bergoglio, a devoted supporter of the San Lorenzo soccer team, was also a confident tango dancer, mate drinker, and an unconditional admirer of his compatriot, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
In 1965, the two men collaborated on the publication of short stories written by Bergoglio’s literature students. The students had been inspired by a seminar led by Borges, organised by the young priest.
Borges thought highly of Bergoglio, finding him charming and intelligent. For Borges, Bergoglio was a Jesuit through and through, noting the clerics of that order had been historically transgressive as well as possessors of a good sense of humour.
While Borges never saw him transformed into Pope Francis, his observations somehow fit with the respect Bergoglio earned as a global leader.
Theology of the people
As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he lived modestly, often taking public transport and dedicating himself to the poor and disenfranchised. He personally attended the needs of underprivileged neighbourhoods known as villas miseria (literally “misery towns”) in Argentine Spanish.
He was a vocal opponent to economic inequality. During the 2001 Argentine economic crisis he advocated for the rights and dignity of impoverished citizens.
Pope Francis hails from a region deeply influenced by the progressive movements of Catholic priests and nuns, who were significantly inspired by liberation theology during the 1960s in Latin America.
Liberation theology developed in Latin America during the latter part of the 20th century, as a reaction to significant political and theological transformations in the area. It believed in political liberation for the oppressed, inspired by the Cuban Revolution and Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII, both in 1959.
While Francis did not fully subscribe to the tenets of liberation theology, much of his dedication to social justice aligns with its ideals. Pope Francis’ social awareness was deeply shaped by the “theology of the people”.
Distinct to Argentina, and emerging in the 1960s, the theology of the people shared liberation theology’s focus on social justice, but is devoid of Marxist ideology, and emphasises the dignity and agency of the marginalised and the impoverished.
During Argentina’s dictatorial regime from 1976–83, Bergoglio led the Jesuits. But he did not adopt the highly dangerous stance of full opposition typical among liberation theologians elsewhere in Argentina and other parts of Latin America.
Commenting on Latin American affairs
In his early years as the Pope, he resonated with progressive Catholics across Latin America, because of his grounding in Argentinian theology and his focus on social justice. But in recent years, his popularity in some Latin American countries declined.
In Argentina, this dip in enthusiasm is partly attributed to his decision not to visit, despite travelling to neighbouring nations.
More profoundly, the decline likely stems from his fixed stance against contentious issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. To the disappointment of many Argentines and other Latin American citizens, he refused to compromise.
Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis received all Argentine presidents – even those who were previously critical of him, such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
He maintained a strong connection to his Buenos Aires roots and remained engaged with Argentina’s social and political landscape, often commenting on situations that provoke strong reactions from politicians.
He was a critic of policies instituted by the current President of Argentina, Javier Milei, particularly Milei’s libertarian model of economy and the government’s brutal response to public dissent and opposition. In September 2024, the Pope famously said:
the government put its foot down: instead of paying for social justice, it paid for pepper spray.
An alternative model of leadership
By reflecting on how Pope Francis’ theology is rooted in the Argentina he grew up in, we can better understand his actions as Pope.
He appointed clergymen from non-European countries, enhancing representation from Asia, Africa and Latin America and increased the participation of women within the Church’s leadership structures.
His landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’, underscored the moral imperative to address climate change, inspiring accolades from global leaders. His critique of Israel and the conflict in Gaza underscored his consistent opposition to war and advocacy for peace.
Despite existing tensions and contradictions within his papacy – particularly regarding the Church’s stance on LGBTQIA+ issues and women’s rights – Pope Francis’s approach to global issues remained steadfast and aligned with his core values, and the Buenos Aires he came of age in.
Francis’s leadership is a product of his upbringing and a catalyst for regional and global dialogue on social justice.
The profound influence of the Latin American region on him is well captured by long time friend, Uruguayan lawyer and activist, Guzman Carriquiry who described the Pope as:
Priest, and profoundly priest; Jesuit and profoundly Jesuit; Latin American, and profoundly Latin American.
Fernanda Peñaloza 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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has draped himself in old-fashioned, medieval conceptions of Russian history to add symbolic weight to his authoritarian government.AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko
Published in March 2025, the textbook’s co-author Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, claims that it will teach students “traditional moral values” that will improve “the demographic situation in the country” as part of a “Family Studies” course that was rolled out in the 2024-2025 school year.
But some of those lessons for modern living come from a less-than-modern source. Among the materials borrowed from in “My Family” is the 16th century “Domostroi” – a collection of rules for maintaining patriarchal domestic order. It was written, supposedly, by Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Terrible.
Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” seem out-of-keeping with today’s sensibilities. For example, it states that it is the right of a father to coerce, if needed by force, his household – at the time, this would refer to both relatives and slaves – in accordance with Orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of the Domostroi quotations repeated in the textbook.
“Wives ask their husbands about strict order, how to save their souls, please God and their husbands, arrange their home well, and submit to their husbands in all matters; and what the husband orders, they should agree with love and carry out according to his commands,” reads another extract
The use of “Domostroi” in the textbook both references the past while evoking the current government’s politics of decriminalizing family violence. A 2017 law, for example, removed nonaggravated “battery of close persons” from the list of criminal offenses.
It also fits a wider pattern. As a scholar of historical memory, I have observed that references to the Russian Middle Ages are part of the Kremlin’s broader politics of using the medieval past to justify current agendas, something I have termed “political neomedievalism.”
Indeed, President Vladimir Putin’s government is actively prioritizing initiatives that use medieval Russia as a model for the country’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian far right with a broader quest for the fulfillment of Russian imperial ambitions.
But the group’s name evokes the first reign of brutal state terror in Russian history. The Oprichnina was a state policy unleashed by Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572 to establish his unrestrained power over the country. The oprichniks were Ivan’s personal guard, who attached a dog’s head and a broom to their saddles to show that they were the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away.
Chroniclers and foreign travelers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that were conducted with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered women, flayed or boiled men alive and burned children. In this frenzy of violence, they slaughtered many thousands of innocent people.
Ivan’s reign led to a period known as the “Time of Troubles,” marked by famine and military defeat. Some scholars estimate that by its end, Russia lost nearly two-thirds of its population.
Ivan IV, czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584, known as Ivan the Terrible. Rischgitz/Getty Images
Throughout Russian history, Ivan the Terrible – who among his other crimes murdered his eldest son and had the head of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was remembered as a repulsive tyrant.
However, since the mid-2000s, when the Russian government under Putin took an increasingly authoritarian turn, Ivan and his terror have undergone a state-driven process of reevalution.
The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as a great statesman and devout Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian Empire.
Prior to that alteration of Russian historical memory, only one other Russian head of state had held Ivan in such high esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, no public monuments to Ivan existed until 2016, when Putin’s officials unveiled the first of three bronze statues dedicated to the terrible czar. Yet, the cinematic propaganda outmatched the commemorations of Ivan in stone. By my count, from 2009 to 2022, 12 state-sponsored films and TV series paying tribute to Ivan the Terrible and his rule aired in prime time on Russian TV channels.
Russian revisionism
The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible goes back to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or high ranking bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” published in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect known as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie calls for a return to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonization of all Russian czars. The belief that Russian state power is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was reaffirmed on April 18, 2025, by Alexander Kharichev, an official in Putin’s Presidential Administration, in an article that has been likened to an instruction manual for the “builder of Putinism.”
The canonization of Ivan the Terrible specifically is a top priority for members of this sect. And while the Russian Orthodox Church has yet to canonize Ivan, Tsarebozhie have garnered significant support from Russian priests, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts sit alongside Putin’s yearslong push to give public support for Ivan. Not by chance, Putin’s minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Terrible among one of Putin’s three “most trusted advisers.”
In Snychov’s worldview, Russians are a messianic people, part of an imperial nation that is uniquely responsible for preventing Satan’s domination of the world. In his explicitly antisemitic pseudo-history of Russia, the Oprichnina is described as a “saintly monastic order” led by a “pious tsar.”
Since the 1930s, when Stalin used Ivan to justify his own repressions, Ivan and Stalin – the Oprichnina and Stalinism – became historical doubles. The whitewashing of Ivan by the Kremlin goes hand in hand with Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as commander in chief of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II.
Promoting the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” – as the Second World War has officially been called since the Soviet period – has been central to Putin’s militarization of Russian society and part of the propaganda effort to foster support for the invasion of Ukraine. The remorse for the loss of empire and desire to restore it underlies Moscow’s discourse over the past two decades.
Putin’s neomedieval politics have adopted the Russian far-right belief that the country should return to the traditions of medieval Rus, as it existed before the Westernization reforms undertaken by Peter the Great in the early 18th century.
Over the past 15 years, Russian TV viewers have received an average of two state-funded movies per month, advertising the benefits of Russian medieval society and praising Russian medieval warlords.
This use of Russian historical memory has allowed Putin to normalize his use of state violence abroad and at home and mobilize support for his suppression of the opposition. The major goal of political neomedievalism is to legitimize huge social and economic inequalities in post-Soviet society as a part of Russia’s national heritage.
To serve the purpose of undermining the rule of law and democratic freedoms, as my research demonstrates, the Kremlin and its proxies have promoted the Russian Middle Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, serfdom and repression – as a state-sponsored alternative to democracy.
Dina Khapaeva 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.
