But while enthusiasm in purchasing locally made food is growing, actually identifying Canadian products in grocery stores is often confusing. Decades of free trade have deeply integrated Canada’s food supply chains with the U.S., making it difficult to determine what is actually local.
Even for Canadian-owned companies, most food products are enmeshed in global supply chains and often contain a mix of Canadian and foreign ingredients.
As food systems researchers and practitioners who have explored ways for Canadians to feed themselves in equitable and sustainable ways, it has become clear that local food systems lack the infrastructure and supply to meet increasing demand.
What’s holding local food systems back?
In collaboration with Sustain, an Ontario-wide network that promotes healthy, just and sustainable food and farming, we conducted a study to understand the policy priorities of organizations and businesses working to build local food economies in regions across the province.
Ontario already has a vibrant network of farmers, organizations and food entrepreneurs ready to meet local food demand. However, systemic challenges continue to hinder their ability to scale up production and distribution.
To better understand how to support Ontario’s food system, we surveyed over 90 organizations working in different food-related sectors.
Through this research, we developed a series of policy reports focused on supporting aspiring farmers, protecting land for food production and strengthening local food systems.
Our findings show that regulatory changes to support small- and medium-sized enterprises and key investments could remove barriers and allow local food economies to flourish.
Smaller farms struggling to survive
Our study identified several barriers holding back Ontario’s local food economy. The first set of barriers are on the supply side. A strong local food system depends on a strong network of farmers. However, many small- and medium-sized farms that supply local markets face disproportionate barriers that threaten their survival.
Compounding the issue is Canada’s looming farm succession crisis. More than 40 per cent of farmers in Canada are expected to retire by 2033, yet many aspiring farmers cannot afford to purchase farms or access start-up capital. When farmers can’t afford land, it’s often sold for non-agriculture uses.
To tackle these barriers, our study calls for provincially supported low-interest loan programs to finance down-payments, construction and equipment. Strengthening policies to protect farmland from urban sprawl, among other strategies, is also essential, as is expanding access to public land for local, ecological food production.
Processing, distribution bottlenecks
The second set of barriers we identified affect the farm-to-plate process. Small- and medium- sized farmers need better access to retail opportunities to sell fresh produce, along with the infrastructure to process raw foods into products like flour, packaged meats, jams, sauces and pickles.
This is especially evident in Ontario’s meat-processing sector, where a shortage of local abattoirs has led to long wait times.
To address these issues, our study recommends increased investment in regional food hubs. Food hubs are shared-use facilities that manage the aggregation, processing and distribution of food products from local and regional producers, giving them better access to markets.
These hubs are essential to meeting the growing demand coming for sustainable, local food from businesses, public institutions and school food programs. But they are only part of the picture.
We also identified funding opportunities that could bolster local food economies. These include expanding Ontario’s Fair Finance Fund to provide more financing options for regional food enterprises and supporting new abattoirs through the expansion of the Meat Processors Capacity Improvement Initiative.
A co-ordinated strategy is needed
Ontario manufacturers, retailers and farmers have all shown a willingness to expand local food production, but they need better support from policymakers to make it viable. There must be policies in place to support local food production and processing, remove key barriers and prioritize much-needed investments.
Across Canada, other provinces and territories face similar challenges in building strong local food networks. Most of the recommendations we heard are similarly outlined across different regions.
With consumer interest in local food on the rise, this is a critical moment for governments at all levels to improve avenues for new farmers, invest in processing and storage facilities and build local distribution networks — all essential to building a robust local food system.
Moe Garahan, a board member of Sustain Ontario, co-authored this article.
Rosie Kerr receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Charles Z. Levkoe receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Ontario.
Leigh Potvin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Council for Articulation and Transfer, the Government of Nova Scotia, and the University of the Arctic.
Source: The Conversation – France – By Pierre Micheletti, Responsable du diplôme «Santé — Solidarité — Précarité» à la Faculté de médecine de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
The collapse of western funding for international aid–for both emergency humanitarian operations and official development assistance (ODA)–is a major blow. The dramatic consequences for the neglected populations are the result of the structural weaknesses–evident for years [1]–of an economic model of international aid and development whose obsolescence is now plain for all to see. What is particularly dramatic, however, is the abrupt, non-negotiated manner in which the procedures and targets of the withdrawals have been determined.
The “four temptations” inherent to the financial system in force to date [2]–and now unashamedly embraced by the new US administration–are obvious: the “western-centrism” of the donor countries; the “neo-liberal approach” to international aid where each contributing state chooses which countries to help; the “security concerns” about payments which are governed by strict control procedures to prevent such payments falling into the hands of the enemies of donor countries in conflict areas; and the “temptation to withdraw” funding whenever donor countries experience a major upheaval (Covid-19, economic crises, the rise of nationalism and isolationism, etc.). These trends converge to generate a volumetric insufficiency and suspicions of political soft power in the countries contributing to the annual budgets [3].
Of course, this is a disaster for international aid and development actors themselves, both in terms of feeling responsible for abandoning the activities developed in the field, and in terms of the redundancy plans that have already hit some of the organisations. Some of these organisations will clearly not survive the current events: even those with little or no reliance on USAID (the US development agency whose aid was ordered frozen for 90 days) will potentially be affected by the knock-on effects of the withdrawal of the leading donor country.
Du lundi au vendredi + le dimanche, recevez gratuitement les analyses et décryptages de nos experts pour un autre regard sur l’actualité. Abonnez-vous dès aujourd’hui !
Scaling back aid in an interdependent world
Even before the United States announced its cuts, other countries had begun to scale back their international aid and development budgets. These include France [4], the UK, Germany and Belgium, to name a few we already know of.
Organisations for which the “generosity of the public” (which accounts for around 20% of annual humanitarian aid funding) [5] is a major component of their resource structure will not escape the consequences either.
The economic rebalancing and political tensions resulting from some of the Trump administration’s decisions are indeed likely to have industrial and social repercussions in all the countries that were once privileged partners of the United States, particularly among the members of the European Union. Experience shows the effects that the erosion of certain national parameters can have on the donation processes of the individual donors who support non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Individual donors will have to prioritise a wide range of crises that are now being neglected by government funding, and compassion will then be a matter of personal choice.
The tension looming everywhere as a result of increasing trade restrictions may have economic and social repercussions, which in turn may lead to higher expectations among the general public and redirect donations toward local, national or family forms of aid and development.
Some political groups are starting to question the legitimacy and validity of ODA, which recently prompted the director of the Agence française de développement (AFD) to speak out specifically in defence of the actions of the organisation [6].
The richest countries are gradually developing a dynamic that shows an insane indifference to poverty, environmental degradation and the zoonoses that can result from the abuse of our primary forests. Yet no border can act as an illusory and impenetrable Maginot line to curb the worldwide dangers that define the interdependencies of today’s globalised world [7].
We cannot be indifferent–neither in Europe nor in North America–to all the forms of abuse inflicted on our planet (and soon to be compounded by the revival of a mutilating and predatory extractive industry), nor to the survival strategies underlying current and future massive population movements, nor to the conflicts that these different mechanisms can generate.
The danger of losing interest in equality of opportunity
Two figures immediately reveal the huge gap that already exists in terms of global inequality. The global ODA envelope, provided by OECD countries, amounted to $230 billion in 2023, when “migratory remittances”–sums transferred by migrants to their countries of origin–stood at $830 billion, of which $650 billion were sent to low- and middle-income countries [8]. These sums are a lifeline for the poorest populations. They reflect the inseparable balance of survival between here and there.
Yet we are being encouraged to accept the idea that, despite these border-free interdependencies, we, in the richest countries, could lose interest in the various mechanisms that are destroying equality of opportunity throughout the world; that an unabashed reaffirmation of “everyone for themselves”, in terms of both consumption and global solidarity, could henceforth serve as a new, unabashed political mantra; and that this would have no long-term consequences for lasting peace…
Therefore, in a world where, by 2100, the population of Africa could represent 40% of humankind, we risk major turmoil if we turn our backs on the reality that is unfolding [9]. On that continent (and in other places where major vulnerabilities exist), we cannot shy away from showing concern for others–out of a sense of realism if not generosity.
Together, we must resist the strategy of every man for himself and the law of the strongest promoted by the new leaders of the United States and their affiliates. We must also strive to invent a new model free of the four founding temptations of the existing system, which grew out of the Second World War and the process of decolonisation. This implies creating the conditions for a significant increase in the number of contributing countries for government funds, as well as a diversification of sources for private funds. A new distribution of creative and decision-making power within the governance of a system in need of rebuilding is thus essential. In the aftermath of the current crisis, new battles are emerging to radically overhaul the strategies and methods of international solidarity.
A version of this article originally appeared under a different headline in Alternatives Humanitaires. It was translated by Derek Scoins for that publication.
Pierre Micheletti ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
The editorial section, also called the opinion section, is where editors and contributors with a deep and broad understanding of the latest news offer their analysis of the day’s issues. This content is distinct from the fact-based news reporting of the outlet’s everyday journalists.
Both kinds of content serve the public interest. Journalists report news to inform the public, while editors and opinion writers analyze and explain news, putting facts into a larger context to aid understanding.
At the Post, instead of news editors making independent decisions on what to write and the perspectives they should take, Bezos tweeted, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Opinion and analysis in the Post was thus going to limit itself to one particular viewpoint.
As a journalism historian, I analyze how journalism has changed over time. Over the years, the purpose, practices and forms of journalism have evolved.
Bezos’ decision harks back to an earlier time when editors and owners were the same person, and newspapers offered a specific interpretation of the world, not just a neutral report.
Informed opinions and analysis
While editorial writers and opinion columnists offer their opinions, these views are still expected to be grounded in journalistic principles, building from verifiable facts and comprehensively considering context to offer well-reasoned analysis.
Many of today’s news editors and journalists stake their professional reputations on their obligation to truth, independent of special interests or particular ideologies. They pride themselves on reporting and explaining the news without fear or favor.
After Bezos’ announcement, editorial page editor and veteran journalist David Shipley resigned from his position. Shipley told his staff he was stepping down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession that I love.”
Limiting the newspaper’s opinion section to a single viewpoint, critics argue, doesn’t seem to align with the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as it stifles public discussion and purposefully turns off some of the lights.
Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told the Guardian, “If you’re trying to advance the cause of democracy, then you allow for public debate, which is what democracy is all about.”
Putting all of this in historical context can help illuminate Bezos’ decision as well as the current state of American media.
A facsimile of a 1765 edition of The Pennsylvania Journal, focused on The Stamp Act, in which the British government imposed direct taxation upon the American Colonies. The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images
Opinionated early American journalism
At the nation’s founding, the very first newspapers were highly partisan, supporting and receiving much of their funding from particular political parties and government subsidies. Newspapers were small operations where editors, owners, writers and typesetters were usually all the same person.
As the country and its political direction were just forming, these editor-owners felt a public obligation and duty to stake out a clear political position. There were no standards of journalistic neutrality; editor-owners framed news reports, wrote columns and published other people’s opinions based on their own particular viewpoints.
Editors wrote passionately, using language that suggested the fate of the nation was at stake. They were also principled and willing to criticize their own parties if they thought it warranted. And because they were transparent about their views, readers responded by gravitating to their preferred newspapers. Consequently, the number of newspapers in the U.S. increased from 35 in 1783 to 1,200 by 1833. Historians have thus argued that the early United States was a “nation of newspaper readers.”
Unlike modern notions of journalistic impartiality, if a newspaper didn’t support a political party or remained neutral, it was dismissed by readers as either lacking morals or being too stupid to form an opinion.
As newspapers of the early republic developed from reporting recycled news from other sources to guiding public discussion, the editorial thus emerged as a short opinion essay separate from reports on local speeches or foreign news.
For various reasons, the partisan press gave way to a journalism that attempted wider appeal. By 1900, many news outlets aimed for impartiality and neutrality.
By the 1920s, most journalists embraced the ideals of objectivity, the notion that journalists should only report facts.
Interestingly, this led to a growth in editorials, opinion columns and news analysis.
Opinion columns written by journalists provided interpretive frameworks for readers to understand the meaning of news events. One such journalist-commentator was Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), a political analyst who wrote a number of influential columns, including a piece infamously viewed as a catalyst for Japanese internment during World War II.
Such content provided journalists a means to show their independence from the powerful. Journalists could commit themselves to truth and verifiable facts while still asserting their independent role to contextualize news, explain its implications and guide the conversations necessary for democracy.
In today’s digital world, everyone can broadcast or publish their opinion, whereas fact-based reporting takes time and resources. While news analysis and thoughtful opinion can generate important social conversations and help citizens understand news, too much opinion that isn’t grounded in facts can also lead to a general atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. This spells trouble for the good-faith understanding, open dialogue and mutual trust so vital to democracy.
But as a matter of context, there is a difference between the principled partisans of the early republic, the professional analysts of the 20th century, and an owner who demands his media outlet’s opinions should be limited to his preferences.
When he purchased The Washington Post in 2013, Bezos said the newspaper would not change and that “the paper’s duty will remain to its reader and not to the private interests of its owners.”
In this latest move, he has signaled that his private interest is a priority, at least for the editorial section. This limits the perspectives the Post-reading public can encounter and restricts the free marketplace of ideas. So when a Post journalist of 40 years wrote a column opposing Bezos’ editorial decision, her bosses refused to publish it.
Apparently, light criticism was not a “personal liberty” afforded a longtime employee. With her beloved employer not even willing to discuss the column – discussion being the cornerstone of deliberative democracy – the veteran journalist resigned.
In the current media environment, organizations and people who don’t participate in news production or share its values can purchase journalistic outlets and alter their standards and practices. As a result, principled journalists may decide to leave rather than compromise their mission of public service.
Ultimately, Bezos is being transparent. It is thus up to the American people to decide on the kind of journalism and pursuit of truth they desire. It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of canceled subscriptions have already begun to make that decision clear.
Joseph Jones 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.
The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbours. Weichen Wang et al. (2025)
Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It’s a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We’ve dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published today in Nature Astronomy.
This giant disk galaxy existed within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, meaning it formed when the universe was just 15% of its current age. It challenges what we know about how galaxies form.
What is a disk galaxy?
Picture a galaxy like our own Milky Way: a flat, rotating structure made up of stars, gas and dust, often surrounded by an extensive halo of unseen dark matter.
Disk galaxies typically have clear spiral arms extending outward from a dense central region. Our Milky Way itself is a disk galaxy, characterised by beautiful spiral arms that wrap around its centre.
An artist impression of the Milky Way showcasing the dusty spiral structures similar to The Big Wheel.
Studying disk galaxies, like the Milky Way and the newly discovered Big Wheel, helps us uncover how galaxies form, grow and evolve across billions of years.
These studies are especially significant, as understanding galaxies similar to our own can provide deeper insights into the cosmic history of our galactic home.
A giant surprise
We previously thought galaxy disks form gradually over a long period: either through gas smoothly flowing into galaxies from surrounding space, or by merging with smaller galaxies.
Usually, rapid mergers between galaxies would disrupt the delicate spiral structures, turning them into more chaotic shapes. However, the Big Wheel managed to quickly grow to a surprisingly large size without losing its distinctive spiral form. This challenges long-held ideas about the growth of giant galaxies.
Our detailed JWST observations show that the Big Wheel is comparable in size and rotational speed to the largest “super-spiral” galaxies in today’s universe. It is three times as big in size as comparable galaxies at that epoch and is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early cosmos.
In fact, its rotation speed places it among galaxies at the high end of what’s called the Tully-Fisher relation, a well-known link between a galaxy’s stellar mass and how fast it spins.
Remarkably, even though it’s unusually large, the Big Wheel is actively growing at a rate similar to other galaxies at the same cosmic age.
The Big Wheel galaxy is seen at the centre. In striking contrast, the bright blue galaxy (upper right) is only about 1.5 billion light years away, making the Big Wheel roughly 50 times farther away. Although both appear a similar size, the enormous distance of the Big Wheel reveals its truly colossal physical scale. JWST
Unusually crowded part of space
What makes this even more fascinating is the environment in which the Big Wheel formed.
It’s located in an unusually crowded region of space, where galaxies are packed closely together, ten times denser than typical areas of the universe. This dense environment likely provided ideal conditions for the galaxy to grow quickly. It probably experienced mergers that were gentle enough to let the galaxy maintain its spiral disk shape.
Additionally, the gas flowing into the galaxy must have aligned well with its rotation, allowing the disk to grow quickly without being disrupted. So, a perfect combination.
An illustration of how a massive spiral galaxy forms and evolves over billions of years. This evolutionary path is similar to real-world galaxies like Andromeda, our closest spiral galaxy neighbour, which also developed distinct spiral arms similar to the Big Wheel.
A fortunate finding
Discovering a galaxy like the Big Wheel was incredibly unlikely. We had less than a 2% chance to find this in our survey, according to current galaxy formation models.
So, our finding was fortunate, probably because we observed it within an exceptionally dense region, quite different from typical cosmic environments.
Besides its mysterious formation, the ultimate fate of the Big Wheel is another intriguing question. Given the dense environment, future mergers might significantly alter its structure, potentially transforming it into a galaxy comparable in mass to the largest ones observed in nearby clusters, such as Virgo.
The Big Wheel’s discovery has revealed yet another mystery of the early universe, showing that our current models of galaxy evolution still need refinement.
With more observations and discoveries of massive, early galaxies like the Big Wheel, astronomers will be able to unlock more secrets about how the universe built the structures we see today.
Data on overdose deaths in Philly in 2024 is not yet available. However, new research shows that drug deaths are dropping in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Still, opioid overdose deaths in Philadelphia remain what public health researchers call a “wicked problem.” These are complex, multifaceted challenges that are constantly changing and have no clear solution.
The Conversation U.S. published several articles over the past year that sought to untangle various threads of this wicked problem in Philadelphia. Here are four essential reads.
1. Overdose deaths down – but still high
Philadelphia’s 7% drop in fatal overdoses in 2023 is notable. Still, opioid use disorder claimed the lives of over 1,100 residents that year – more than three times as many lives as 10 years earlier.
“Local drug-testing efforts found as much as a fiftyfold difference in potency between bags of fentanyl that appear identical,” Cocchiaro writes. “It’s like cracking a beer and not knowing whether drinking it will get you mildly buzzed or send you to the graveyard.
Forensic testing has revealed that over 90% of street heroin and fentanyl samples in Philly now contain xylazine, an animal tranquilizer with no FDA-approved use in humans.
Rachel McFadden is an emergency room nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and also works at a walk-in clinic in North Philadelphia that serves people who use drugs. Before xylazine, she says, most of the wounds she saw were minor skin infections that she treated with antibiotics.
But that changed in late 2019.
“Participants at the wound care clinic started to come in with a different kind of wound. They were filled with black and yellow dead tissue and tunneled deep into the skin. They were not wounds from infection but rather from tissue death or necrosis,” McFadden writes.
McFadden explains the protocol for treating these serious wounds, which involves removing the dead tissue, administering antimicrobials and antibiotics for the inflammation and infection, and keeping the wound moist and dressed. She says it’s also important that people’s other basic needs, including food, shelter and a place to shower, are met so they can properly heal.
The combination of fentanyl and xylazine in Philly street opioids has made withdrawal symptoms far more excruciating than those experienced by heroin users in the past.
That’s according to Kory London, an emergency room doctor and associate professor of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. London says these withdrawal symptoms lead many patients who are addicted to opioids to discharge themselves from the hospital before their treatment is complete.
“Patients with opioid use disorder will often do whatever they can to stay out of the hospital due to fear of withdrawal,” he writes. “Asking how withdrawal symptoms are managed, therefore, is often their first priority when hospitalized. We see this even when they have conditions that require complicated and time-sensitive treatments.
Beginning in 2022, London and colleagues began experimenting with new approaches to treating “tranq” dope withdrawal in Philly. The new protocols reduced the likelihood of these patients leaving early by more than half – from 10% to just under 4%.
Researchers Karli Hochstatter and Fernando Montero at Columbia University are part of a team that tests fentanyl samples collected in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia each month. Those tests have turned up a new adulterant: an industrial chemical known as BTMPS that is used in making plastics.
“We first detected BTMPS in Philadelphia in June 2024. We found it in two of the eight samples – 25% – that we collected that month. By November 2024, 12 of 22 samples – or 55% – contained BTMPS,” Hochstatter and Montero write. “What’s more, the amount, or concentration, of this industrial chemical in the drug samples often exceeded the amount of fentanyl.”
BTMPS has not been studied in humans, but rat studies reveal exposure – at far lower levels than what is found in the Philly fentanyl samples – can cause heart defects, serious eye damage and death.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Mathers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University
Around 73% of Ukrainians now want their country to “restore” its nuclear weapons, according to a recent opinion poll. A majority of Ukrainians (58%) were in favour of Ukraine owning nuclear weapons, even if this meant losing western allies.
This suggests an underlying regret that Ukraine agreed to relinquish the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal as part of the Budapest Memorandum around 30 years ago. This agreement, signed in December 1994, provided security guarantees for Ukraine from the US, the UK and Russia in return for giving up the weapons. Ukraine also agreed it would not acquire nuclear weapons in the future.
The focus on nuclear weapons is intensifying all over Europe. This week the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, called on the US to station its nuclear weapons in his country to deter Russian attacks. He cited Moscow’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons just across the border in Belarus during 2023 as part of his reasoning.
Trump’s apparent weakening commitment to Nato has also prompted the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to suggest that France could extend protection of its own nuclear weapons to its allies.
It’s clear that some Ukrainians now believe that their country would have been less likely to have experienced a Russian invasion if it had held on to its nuclear capacity. Ukrainians now question how much they can rely on other states after the failure of security guarantees that were central to the 1994 agreement.
The pledges by the US, UK and Russia to protect the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine were put to the test in 2014 when Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea and began providing financial and military backing for militia leaders in eastern Ukraine who claimed to lead pro-Russian separatist movements.
The US and UK imposed economic sanctions against Russia and provided training, equipment and non-lethal weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces. But these measures fell well short of ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and were insufficient to help Ukraine retake its territory.
Similarly, US and UK support for Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, although valuable and much appreciated by the Ukrainians, has not been enough to allow Kyiv to completely expel Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
What was the Budapest Memorandum?
What if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?
But what if Ukraine had never given up its nuclear weapons? The logic of deterrence suggests that Putin would have not have invaded and attacked a nuclear-armed Ukraine. But the argument that Ukraine should not have surrendered the Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory overlooks the specific circumstances. For while physical components of a nuclear weapons capability – delivery vehicles and nuclear warheads – were within Ukraine’s grasp, the launch codes remained in Moscow, and Russian leaders showed no willingness to relinquish them.
So, Kyiv would have had no control over whether, when or against whom those weapons might have been used. The risk to Ukraine of becoming the target of another state’s nuclear strike would have been considerable, and the Kyiv government would have been unable to do anything to reduce that risk. Retaining nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet period would have probably made Ukrainians less rather than more secure.
Ukraine also lacked the economic resources to maintain the nuclear weapons on its territory, or develop them into a credible deterrent force. In exchange for giving up nuclear weapons, Ukraine received much-needed economic assistance from the west.
In the 1990s Ukrainian views were shaped by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This had a devastating and lasting impact on the land and the people in that part of Ukraine, highlighting the risks of the nuclear sector. In 1994, when the Budapest Memorandum was being negotiated, only 30% of Ukrainians were in favour of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons.
What now?
Ukraine would face considerable technical challenges in developing nuclear weapons today, both in creating the necessary quantities of fissile material for warheads and manufacturing delivery vehicles.
Kyiv would also need to pay for an expensive nuclear weapons development programme at a time when the Ukrainian economy is struggling to supply its soldiers with conventional weapons and meet the needs of civilians.
And unless Ukraine’s international supporters were on board, Kyiv might face the withdrawal of economic and military aid at a crucial juncture. If Moscow detected any move on Ukraine’s part to develop nuclear weapons, there would be a strong motive for a preemptive Russian strike to put an end to that plan.
But even though it may not be feasible for Ukraine to develop an independent nuclear deterrent in the short term, Kyiv may feel compelled to pursue a nuclear weapons programme unless Ukraine is provided with serious and reliable security guarantees. With the Trump administration apparently ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine, the onus is on the country’s international supporters to come up with an alternative unless they want to see further nuclear proliferation in Europe.
Jennifer Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When Bernard Berenson learned that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre Gallery in Paris, the art critic heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Finally, he reflected, he could remove himself once and all from the dangerous influence of the work. “She had simply become an incubus,” he recalled years later, “and I was glad to be rid of her.”
At long last, Berenson had freed himself from the vampiric face of the Mona Lisa.
Today Leonardo’s painting, happily recovered in 1913 for generations of visitors after its theft in 1911, still looms large as perhaps the definitive symbol of Italian Renaissance art.
French president Emmanuel Macron recently announced plans for a project titled Nouvelle Renaissance, which will see the artwork moved to its own exhibition room, relieving pressure on the main gallery space. One of the most visited artworks in the world, Berenson’s pronouncement of the enigmatically smiling figure as a male demon in female human form, sits oddly with her endless appearance on t-shirts and tea-towels.
But looking again at how the myth of the Mona Lisa emerged, I believe that her fame is due not just to the painting’s display of artistic ingenuity – but to the troubling vampirism and gender ambiguity that 19th-century critics saw in Leonardo’s work.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
Unlike many of his artistic contemporaries, Leonardo’s reputation remained relatively stable following his death in 1519. But praise for his work was, for centuries, caveated with one apparently intractable problem: he seemed a better draughtsman, inventor and scientist than artist proper.
John Ruskin, England’s preeminent mid-Victorian critic, wrote off the Mona Lisa as a total mess. He lamented that the painting’s background was simply “grotesque” being all “blue and unfinished”.
But as the century progressed, the tide began to turn, particularly in France. Writers newly praised the strange feelings that Leonardo’s paintings provoked, interrogating the nervous smiles and ironic stares of their subjects. “You are fascinated and troubled,” the historian Jules Michelet imagined in his monumental book Histoire de France (1855), describing himself in the Louvre moving like hypnotised prey towards the sinister artworks.
The Mona Lisa was being slowly injected with a dose of eerie, haunted beauty. But it wasn’t until 1873, when the Oxford aesthete Walter Pater published his explosive book Studies in the History of the Renaissance that the character of the Mona Lisa took a decisively gothic turn. In it, Pater described her as one of the undead:
She is older than the rocks on which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave
“Lady Lisa”, as Pater memorably nicknamed her, turned from an Italian noblewoman into a dangerously deathly femme-fatale. Pater claimed that she carried all of time and history within her body, bearing the world’s experience from “the animalism of Greece” to “the sins of the Borgia”.
The passage caused shockwaves, and a generation of readers were hooked. The poet Richard Le Gallienne recalled in his memoir how his friends were “all going round quoting the famous description”, as wannabe aesthetes endlessly recited, copied and reworked Pater’s lines.
Pater scholar Michael Davis has explained how the book “queered the Renaissance”: he called on his readers to worship at the altar of a strange beauty, demanding that they “burn” with a “hard, gemlike flame” as they did so. Pater’s new reading of Mona Lisa was at the heart of an erotic revolution. The Mona Lisa had become a symbol of a new way of looking and feeling, charged with the aching pain of melancholic beauty.
By the early 20th century, an industry of criticism had developed that took increasingly outrageous stances against the Mona Lisa.
Stories circulated about virtuous mothers who refused to allow reproductions of the work to enter their home. Sigmund Freud reworked Pater’s interpretation of the Mona Lisa’s “unfathomable smile” to evidence his theory of Leonardo’s homosexuality, claiming that the Mona Lisa’s smile was in fact a painting of his dead mother’s smile. Pater’s passage, as the Irish writer W. B. Yeats summarised, had taken on a “revolutionary importance” and with it the Mona Lisa changed from a minor work to an icon of a decadent generation.
Beyond the canon
As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frankie Dytor’s suggestion:
The lesbian poet couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published the poem La Gioconda (the Italian name for the Mona Lisa) under the pseudonym “Michael Field” in 1892:
Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and does not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die.
The poets frequently turned to historical subjects and artworks to explore queer and same-sex desire. Here, they show themselves to be the disciples of Pater’s cult of beauty, openly incorporating his stress on the “cruelty” that surrounds the “historic” features of the figure.
But they also go beyond Pater, revelling in the desire that saturates the work, such as the twilight touching the Mona Lisa’s breast “amorously”.
Frankie Dytor receives funding from The British Academy.
Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The computerised systems in your car alone incorporate tens of millions of lines of code. The increasing digital transformation of our society means that demand for more and better software is likely to continue into the future.
The dilemma is that there are not enough human programmers to build all this
software. This means that more and more of the software you use every day is built with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).
Software developers are already very familiar with tools such as GitHub Copilot, a kind of ChatGPT for programmers. It works something like a smart autocomplete tool to increase the productivity of human programmers.
But we are now witnessing a more radical revolution, where AI “agents” are poised to carry out many types of development tasks on behalf of human programmers. Agents are programs that use AI to perform tasks and achieve specific objectives for a human user. AI agents can learn and make decisions with some level of autonomy, though they are still under human supervision – for now.
We predict that in a near future, many software apps will be entirely built by AI agents. “Agentic” systems are communities of AI agents cooperating together, each one specialised in solving a specific type of task. With an agentic system, you can
generate a software application from a plain English description of what you would like the application to do.
This has potential positive impacts. Agentic systems could empower users without software programming skills to build or adapt software to their needs. There are also potential negatives consequences. Agents are far from perfect and they can easily generate code that is vulnerable to attacks, is not efficient or is biased against certain communities.
For example, an agent building recruitment software might favour male over female candidates because of biases in the data used to train, or improve, the software. Therefore, we need to put mechanisms in place to minimise such risks, as required by AI regulations such as the EU’s AI Act.
Researchers are addressing this challenge first by intensively testing the LLMs (Large Language Models) that are at the core of any agent. An LLM is an AI system trained on massive amounts of data. Agents rely on their internal LLM to predict and generate the best response to a user request.
By evaluating all major LLMs against a number of concerns such as accuracy, security vulnerabilities and biases, software developers can choose the best LLM for an AI agent. This would depend on the specific tasks that the agent would be involved in.
Users could customise new software with the help of blueprints, applying similar principles to the blueprints used in architecture and construction. Lee Charlie / Shutterstock
This helps ensure a certain amount of ethical behaviour in the agents. But how can we be sure they understand and follow our instructions? Our solution is to start from the blueprints (the designs) of the software to be built.
Broadly speaking, it’s possible to understand blueprints of a house even if you’re not an architect. Similarly, if we make a blueprint for software as easy to understand as possible, users without advanced software development skills should be able to grasp the concepts and how to make changes to it.
From the user’s initial description, the AI agent or agents would propose a detailed blueprint of a potential solution and explain it to the user in plain English. The user could then validate it or request improvements. Only after the final validation would the software application be automatically generated from the blueprint.
This way of building software is known as low-code or no-code development, as most of the code (all of it for some applications) is generated by the computer from the blueprints, instead of being hand written by a human from scratch. Our open source BESSER platform helps you build applications in this way.
As the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke once observed: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And soon enough, this magic will be part of our daily lives. We just need to be careful that the magic doesn’t turn into sorcery with the potential to disrupt, rather than improve.
We, and many other researchers, are working to put guardrails (mechanisms for preventing potential harms) on the behaviour of AI agents to keep them in check. This would help transform every citizen into a capable developer with the power to autonomously build the ideal software solutions for their companies or other aspects of their lives.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is not a book about conquering peaks or mapping uncharted terrain. It is instead a deeply felt, poetic encounter with the Cairngorms.
This vast mountain range in north-east Scotland has been shaped by ancient glaciers and known for its high plateaus, deep corries and shifting light. These mountains, some of the highest in the UK, are rugged, remote, and often treacherous. Yet, they hold a stark, indifferent beauty.
First written towards the end of the second world war, The Living Mountain remained unpublished in a drawer until 1977, its quiet brilliance only gradually recognised. Now, with publisher Scribner bringing out its first US edition, a new audience will discover this landmark of nature writing.
Shepherd, a Scottish writer, educator, and poet, had an unparalleled relationship with the mountains. The best way to describe it is a word she herself used: feyness. There is a deep, almost mystical sensitivity in the way she moves through the landscape. She does not seek to master it, but to know it intimately – its ice, its rock, its light.
Each chapter of The Living Mountain focuses on an element of this vast range: the plateau, the recesses, the plants, and, most strikingly for me, the water. Her description of Loch Etchachan made me want to go there immediately, but such is the clarity of her prose that I felt as if I already had. Its pristine waters shimmering in the shifting light, the stillness broken only by the wind and the sheer presence of the place evoked so vividly that it felt less like reading and more like remembering.
Shepherd’s writing reminds me of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig – though where MacCaig wrote often of Assynt in the far north-western corner of Scotland, Shepherd’s domain was the Cairngorms. Both share an awe, a humility and a sense of reverence towards their subject.
There is a poetic tenderness throughout Shepherd’s writing, in the cadence of her sentences, in the careful weight of each word. At around 30,000 words, it is a short book, yet every phrase feels hewn from the page, as enduring as the granite she describes.
A line I return to often is one that Shepherd uses to describe the water at the height of these peaks: “It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.” This is the essence of Shepherd’s philosophy. The mountains do not exist for our amusement or our conquest. They simply are.
This is a book not about “Munro bagging” – the practice of ticking off Scotland’s 282 mountains over 3,000 feet – but about being with the land, walking it slowly, attentively, over a lifetime.
A fragile land
Yet, The Living Mountain is also a stark reminder of the fragility of that world. Shepherd notes, as early as 1934, that summer snow is disappearing: “Antiquity has gone from our snow.” Was this, unwittingly, one of the earliest literary observations of climate change? Around the same time, British engineer Guy Callendar had begun linking rising global temperatures to CO₂ emissions, though his findings were dismissed. Almost a century on, Shepherd’s words feel prophetic.
For US readers encountering The Living Mountain for the first time, they may wonder what a remote range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland offers them. But these mountains contain, in their own way, the spirit of the Santa Cruz mountains, the Appalachians, the Rockies. In their solitude and permanence, they offer the same humility, the same respect, the same quiet self-reflection that comes with encountering something so vast and indifferent to human life.
With a framing introduction by Robert Macfarlane, a British writer known for his books on landscape and nature, and an afterword by Jenny Odell, an American artist and educator, this edition gives The Living Mountain the platform it deserves. This is not just a book about place – it is a book that is place. It remains as vital as the mountains themselves, urging us to look more closely. To listen more deeply. To move through the world with the same quiet reverence that Shepherd once did.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Sam Illingworth 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.
Home is not always a place of safety for everyone. This is an unspoken reality for some parents who endure abuse at the hands of their children. From physical violence to emotional manipulation, this largely hidden issue cuts across families of all backgrounds.
For too long, stigma and silence have allowed child-to-parent abuse to fester in the shadows, unacknowledged in policy discussions and under-researched in academic circles. But a recent study of ours analysed a therapeutic programme designed to address child-to-parent abuse, and its transformative potential.
Child-to-parent abuse affects families across socio-economic and cultural boundaries. But it’s particularly prevalent in homes where domestic abuse and intimate partner violence is present.
Legally, child-to-parent abuse is ambiguously positioned in England and Wales. It is often subsumed under domestic abuse legislation, including the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. But the law primarily focuses on people aged 16 and older, and problematically labels children as perpetrators, despite youth justice policy and practice moving to child-first approaches.
This adds to the societal stigmas around child-to-parent abuse, and it is often misattributed to poor parenting. The problem is then compounded, discouraging parents from seeking help and perpetuating a cycle of silence and isolation.
The Parallel Lives Programme is a therapeutic intervention in Wales, which takes a non-punitive, relationship-focused approach to support families affected by child-to-parent abuse. Delivered over seven weeks, the programme uses therapeutic and relationship-based approaches to support children and their parents to prevent child-to-parent abuse.
What we found
We undertook an evaluation of the programme to understand its potential strengths for addressing the abuse and areas for development. We used interviews, online surveys, observations and file reviews. A total of 42 people participated, including six members of staff, 19 parents and 17 children.
One of the most significant findings from our research is the importance of therapeutic spaces and the destigmatisation of the issue. The Parallel Lives Programme created safe spaces for families to discuss complex and often stigmatised issues. Therapists provided non-judgmental environments where parents and children felt heard and supported. By framing young people as “children first” and creating spaces free of blame, the programme helped families address their issues.
One therapist described the kind of things that often prevent parents from speaking out:
There’s a lot of guilt and shame attached to [child-to-parent abuse], and [the parents] don’t feel like they can talk about it. So “I must be the only parent whose kid kicks off and breaks my window.” I think it is a lot for them to say, okay, this is a thing, and these are the steps that we can take, and also give them strategy.
Parents echoed this sentiment, highlighting how the programme provided a rare opportunity to speak openly in a supportive environment. One father of a 12-year-old boy described his experience:
Talking about raw emotions with people who do not judge you, they do not gasp, they don’t laugh or tut, they feel what you feel, and they want to help; it’s a safe environment. I struggle to talk about my feelings, and this has helped me open up.
Another important finding was the programme’s emphasis on parent-child relationship building. Both parents and children reported improved communication and reduced conflict as a result of the intervention. One 14-year-old girl reflected: “[Because of the programme] my mum is listening to me more. She used to always just talk at me and have a go at me without listening to my side of things. It’s so much better now.”
The strength-based approach adopted by the programme was also critical. Rather than focusing on deficits, therapists emphasised the inherent capabilities of families. One 16-year-old boy described how this approach helped him “learn to deal with anger and about my strengths”.
Explaining the ethos behind this method, one therapist said: “We focus on strengths. It’s in our [organisational] DNA – everything that we do is focused on children’s strengths.”
Tailored support also emerged as a central factor. No two families are the same, so interventions were flexible and adaptive, considering the unique circumstances and needs of each family member.
Child-to-parent abuse affects families across socio-economic and cultural boundaries. polya_olya/Shutterstock
Recommendations
Our evaluation has highlighted critical gaps and opportunities in addressing child-to-parent abuse. But more extensive research is needed to understand how much of it goes on. Future research should also focus on measuring the long-term effectiveness of interventions like the Parallel Lives Programme.
In terms of policy, child-to-parent abuse requires its own legal and policy frameworks, distinct from domestic abuse. Legislative reforms must reflect the complexity of this kind of abuse and avoid stigmatising children or neglecting parents’ needs.
Initiatives like the Parallel Lives Programme should also be scaled, ensuring accessibility for all families. Increased funding and therapist training are essential to sustaining and replicating such initiatives.
Finally, destigmatisation efforts are vital. Public awareness campaigns may be crucial in breaking the silence surrounding child-to-parent abuse. Removing the sense of shame and disgrace from this issue may encourage more families to seek help and engage with support services.
Gemma Morgan received funding from the Media Academy Cymru to undertake an external evaluation of the Parallel Lives Programme.
Joseph Janes received funding from the Media Academy Cymru to undertake an external evaluation of the Parallel Lives Programme.
Ice cores in freezers, dinosaurs on display, fish in jars, birds in boxes, human remains and ancient artifacts from long gone civilizations that few people ever see – museum collections are filled with all this and more.
These collections are treasure troves that recount the planet’s natural and human history, and they help scientists in a variety of different fields such as geology, paleontology, anthropology and more. What you see on a trip to a museum is only a sliver of the wonders held in their collection.
Museums generally want to make the contents of their collections available for teachers and researchers, either physically or digitally. However, each collection’s staff has its own way of organizing data, so navigating these collections can prove challenging.
Creating, organizing and distributing the digital copies of museum samples or the information about physical items in a collection requires incredible amounts of data. And this data can feed into machine learning models or other artificial intelligence to answer big questions.
Currently, even within a single research domain, finding the right data requires navigating different repositories. AI can help organize large amounts of data from different collections and pull out information to answer specific questions.
But using AI isn’t a perfect solution. A set of shared practices and systems for data management between museums could improve the data curation and sharing necessary for AI to do its job. These practices could help both humans and machines make new discoveries from these valuable collections.
AI tools can do amazing things, such as make 3D models of digitized versions of the items in museum collections, but only if there’s enough well-organized data about that item available. To see how AI can help museum collections, my team of researchers started by conducting focus groups with the people who managed museum collections. We asked what they are doing to get their collections used by both humans and AI.
Museums can have vast collections – everything from samples from archeological sites to preserved insects to dinosaur bones. And huge collections means lots of data to collect and organize. Justin Pumfrey/The Image Bank via Getty Images
Collection managers
When an item comes into a museum collection, the collection managers are the people who describe that item’s features and generate data about it. That data, called metadata, allows others to use it and might include things like the collector’s name, geographic location, the time it was collected, and in the case of geological samples, the epoch it’s from. For samples from an animal or plant, it might include its taxonomy, which is the set of Latin names that classify it.
All together, that information adds up to a mind-boggling amount of data.
But combining data across domains with different standards is really tricky. Fortunately, collection managers have been working to standardize their processes across disciplines and for many types of samples. Grants have helped science communities build tools for standardization.
In biological collections, the tool Specify allows managers to quickly classify specimens with drop-down menus prepopulated with standards for taxonomy and other parameters to consistently describe the incoming specimens.
A common metadata standard in biology is Darwin Core. Similar well-established metadata and tools exist across all the sciences to make the workflow of taking real items and putting them into a machine as easy as possible.
Special tools like these and metadata help collection managers make data from their objects reusable for research and educational purposes.
Many of the items in museum collections don’t have a lot of information describing their origins. AI tools can help fill in gaps.
All the small things
My team and I conducted 10 focus groups, with a total of 32 participants from several physical sample communities. These included collection managers across disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, botany, geology, ichthyology, entomology, herpetology and paleontology.
Each participant answered questions about how they accessed, organized, stored and used data from their collections in an effort to make their materials ready for AI to use. While human subjects need to provide consent to be studied, most species do not. So, an AI can collect and analyze the data from nonhuman physical collections without privacy or consent concerns.
We found that collection managers from different fields and institutions have lots of different practices when it comes to getting their physical collections ready for AI. Our results suggest that standardizing the types of metadata managers record and the ways they store it across collections could make the items in these samples more accessible and usable.
Additional research projects like our study can help collection managers build up the infrastructure they’ll need to make their data machine-ready. Human expertise can help inform AI tools that make new discoveries based on the old treasures in museum collections.
Bradley Wade Bishop receives funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By James Byrne, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society, University of Colorado Boulder
What was the first thing scientists discovered? – Jacob, age 9, Santiago, Panama
All societies have had ways of understanding nature based on their experiences of it. For example, farmers need to understand the seasons and weather to know when to plant and harvest their crops. Hunters need to understand the lives of animals to know how to hunt them.
This kind of understanding of the natural world isn’t quite the same as science though. Science typically refers to knowledge that’s more organized and formal than that. It’s not just an explanation, but a system that uses observations and experiments to build theories that are recorded, passed on to others and built on.
With that idea in mind, as a historian of science, my best answer to the question of what the first scientists discovered is Babylonian astronomy.
The Babylonians lived from about 2,500 to 4,000 years ago in the area that’s now Iraq. What makes Babylonian astronomy stand out as being especially scientific is the careful, organized way in which Babylonian scribes – their keepers of knowledge – observed, recorded and eventually mathematically predicted the ways that the Sun, Moon, stars and planets move in the skies.
Babylonian astronomy was uniquely scientific
Before clocks, observing the sky was how people knew the time. During the day you can see the Sun, and at night you can see the stars. Many calendars are based on the skies too. A month is about how long it takes the Moon to go through its phases. A year is one full revolution of the Earth around the Sun.
But keeping track of time wasn’t the only way the Babylonians used astronomy. Like today’s world, Babylonia could be both predictable and chaotic. The weather changed with the seasons; crops were planted and harvested; festivals were celebrated; people were born, aged and died, all predictably. But a bad harvest might cause high prices for grains and starvation; a king might die young, causing political upheaval; a disease might kill thousands, all unpredictably.
The stars and planets can seem like that, too. The stars are always in the same places in relation to one another, so you can identify constellations, and those constellations rise and set at regular times over the course of a year. But the planets move around – they’re not always in the same places, and sometimes they even seem to stop and move backward in their paths. Sometimes even more spectacular events occur, such as eclipses.
For the Babylonians, those ideas were linked. They saw changes in the motions of the planets or rare events such as eclipses as signs – omens – about what was going to happen on Earth. For example, they might think the shadow of the Earth moving over the Moon in a certain way during a lunar eclipse meant that a flood would also happen.
The scribes kept a book called Enūma Anu Enlil listing omens and their meanings. So if the seemingly changing motions of the heavens could be predicted, maybe earthly events could be, too. This led the scribes to study astronomy.
How Babylonian astronomy worked
The foundation of Babylonian astronomy was kept in a book called MUL.APIN, meaning “The Plough Star,” the name of a constellation. It recorded the positions of the stars, when in the year they would first be visible, the paths of the Sun and Moon, the periods when the planets would be visible in the night sky, and other fundamental astronomical knowledge.
Later, Babylonian scribes began to keep their Astronomical Diaries, which contained detailed records of the positions of the Moon and planets along with events on Earth such as the weather and the price of grain. In other words, they recorded their observations of both astronomical omens and the events they might have predicted.
This kind of careful observation and record-keeping is a major part of science. The Astronomical Diaries were kept for over 700 years, making them maybe the longest-running scientific project ever.
The records in the Astronomical Diaries helped Babylonian scribes take another scientific step: predicting astronomical events. One part of this was computing what the Babylonians called goal-years: the number of years it took for a planet to return to the same place on the same day. For example, they computed that the period for Venus was eight Babylonian years. So if Venus was somewhere on a particular day, it would be in the same place on the same day eight years later.
By around the fourth century B.C.E., the scribes developed this knowledge into a system of mathematically predicting astronomical events. They made tables called ephemerides that showed when these events would happen in the future. So Babylonian scribes succeeded in their project: They made the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets predictable.
Babylonian astronomy and you
MUL.APIN, the Astronomical Diaries, the ephemerides and all of Babylonian astronomy had a major impact on later astronomers, one that continues to today. Greek astronomers used Babylonian observations to make geometric models of planetary motions, part of the long path toward modern astronomy. The ephemerides were the ancestors of astronomical tables, which still exist. For example, NASA has a table of eclipses online that goes to the year 3000.
But the most familiar thing that comes from Babylonian astronomy is how we tell time. The Babylonians didn’t use a decimal system with units of 10 like we do. Instead, they used a sexagesimal system, with units of 60. Babylonian observations were so important that later people kept Babylonian units for astronomy, even though they used a base 10 system for other things.
So if you’ve ever wondered why an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds, it’s because we’ve kept that way of measuring from Babylonian astronomy. Whenever you tell the time, you’re using some of the very oldest science.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
James Byrne 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.
Teens who supported President Trump in 2016 became less aware of societal inequalities after the election.AP Photo/Evan Vucci
When asked about reactions to Donald Trump being president, a 16-year-old Black girl said, “I feel unsafe and not protected. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free but is really the land of racism.”
In contrast, a 16-year-old white girl said, “I think it’s OK … I do feel bad for minorities … I’m white however and come from a somewhat similar background so I will be alright.”
These two teenagers responded very differently to the racial climate created by Trump – during his first presidency. Research on adolescents during Trump’s first term takes on new relevance now that he is back in office.
As a scholar of adolescent development, I have studied U.S. teenagers for over two decades. When Trump took office in 2016, I was in the midst of leading a five-year study to understand how young people become civically engaged. My colleagues and I were tracking adolescents’ beliefs and behaviors over time, which gave us a unique opportunity to document changes after Trump was elected.
Focusing on 1,400 ninth through 12th graders, I hypothesized that adolescents would become more divided during Trump’s presidency, given the political divisions evident among adults in 2016. And, like other social scientists, my team and I did identify diverging worldviews about racism and inequalities among teenagers and increased discrimination.
Decades of research shows that adolescents are influenced in lasting ways by societal events and political shifts, such as the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and changing presidential administrations. Likewise, the short-term impacts of Trump’s presidency identified by research may portend long-lasting effects for this generation of young people.
Diverging worldviews
In our study, young Trump supporters were more likely to be white and male and to have politically conservative parents, and less likely to be immigrants. Teenagers in our study who disapproved of Trump were more likely to be female and Latino, Black or Asian, to have politically liberal parents, and to have parents or grandparents who were immigrants. These groups were not just different demographically; they diverged in their worldviews about race and inequality over time.
Across Trump’s first year in office, young Trump supporters decreased their race consciousness – that is, their support for racial equity and inclusion declined. We measured race consciousness by whether high schoolers agreed with statements like “I show support for equal rights for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds” and “I express concern about discrimination faced by racial and ethnic groups.”
Young Trump supporters also grew less aware of inequalities in society during this time frame, becoming less likely to endorse statements like “In America, certain groups have fewer chances to get ahead.”
Conversely, young Trump detractors increased their race consciousness and awareness of societal inequalities during this time. Another study that interviewed youth of color during Trump’s first presidency similarly found that adolescents critical of Trump developed deeper capacities to understand societal inequalities in response to Trump’s policies.
Did these divergent beliefs translate into different behaviors?
Interestingly, only young Trump supporters in our study became more likely to vote after Trump’s first election. This heightened interest in voting among young Trump supporters aligns with 2024’s election results. Although people ages 18-29 were more likely to support Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, the majority of white youth (54%) and young men (56%) who voted turned out to support Trump. The adolescents we surveyed in 2016 and 2017 are among this cohort of young voters in 2024.
The divergent beliefs of Trump supporters and detractors may have implications for other behaviors in addition to voting.
After Trump’s first election, 28% of K-12 teachers reported witnessing increases in students’ derogatory remarks toward minority groups, especially in predominantly white schools. Students were emboldened to make bigoted statements about immigrants, Muslims and other groups. Researchers documented incidents of anti-Black racism and anti-transgender discrimination in schools.
These studies did not definitively attribute increased discrimination to actions of young Trump supporters. But young Trump supporters did become less concerned about discrimination and racial equity. And adult Trump supporters did endorse more racist and anti-immigrant attitudes and the use of political violence compared with other adults.
Based on how people responded in the early days of Trump’s first term, these orders may directly harm adolescents and embolden discrimination again. For example, immediately after the 2024 election, crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth increased by 200%, and harassing texts were sent to Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ adolescents across 20 states.
The executive order to eliminate teaching on racial and gender equity from schools, if upheld, would limit adolescents’ opportunities to learn about racism, sexism and inequalities faced by different groups.
Adolescents’ awareness of and concerns about inequalities diverged during Trump’s first presidency based on their political views. Given the policy focus of Trump’s second term, I anticipate similar or greater divisions in young people’s racial attitudes and actions than my research revealed over the course of his first term.
Laura Wray-Lake received funding for research reported herein from the National Science Foundation and John Templeton Foundation. She is a registered Democrat.
Global crises have shaped our world over the past two decades, affecting education systems everywhere. Higher education researcher Emmanuel Ojo has studied the impact of these disruptions on educational opportunities, particularly in southern Africa.
He looked at 5,511 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2024 to explore what the research suggests about making education systems more resilient. Here, he answers some questions about his review.
What are the global crises that have undermined education?
In my review I drew up a table documenting how multiple crises have disrupted education systems worldwide.
The cycle began with the 2000-2002 dot-com bubble collapse, which reduced education funding and slowed technological integration. This was followed by the 2001 terrorist attacks, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak (2002-2004), Iraq War (2003-2011), Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), and Hurricane Katrina (2005). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2000, global food crisis (2007-2008), financial crisis (2007-2008), and European debt crisis (2010-2012) continued this pattern of disruption.
More recently, the Ebola epidemic, COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia-Ukraine war have destabilised education systems. Meanwhile, the ongoing climate crisis creates challenges, particularly in southern Africa where environmental vulnerability is high.
Who suffers most, and in what ways?
Education has consistently been among the hardest-hit sectors globally. According to Unesco, the COVID pandemic alone affected more than 1.6 billion students worldwide.
But the impact is not distributed equally.
My research shows crises have put vulnerable populations at a further disadvantage through school closures, funding diversions, infrastructure destruction and student displacement. Quality and access decline most sharply for marginalised communities. Costs rise and mobility is restricted. Food insecurity during crises reduces attendance among the poorest students.
In southern Africa, the Covid-19 disruption highlighted existing divides. Privileged students continued learning online. Those in rural and informal settlements were completely cut off from education.
Climate change compounds these inequalities. Unicef highlights that climate disasters have a disproportionate impact on schooling for millions in low-income countries, where adaptive infrastructure is limited.
What’s at stake for southern Africa is the region’s development potential and social cohesion. The widening of educational divides threatens to create a generation with unequal opportunities and capabilities.
What makes southern African education systems fragile?
Southern Africa’s geographic exposure to climate disasters combines with pre-existing economic inequalities. The region’s digital divide became starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some students were excluded from learning by limited connectivity and unreliable electricity.
The region’s systems also rely on external funding. The Trump administration’s sudden foreign aid freeze was a shock to South Africa’s higher education sector. It has affected public health initiatives and university research programmes.
Research representation itself is unequal. Within the region, South African researchers dominate and other nations make only limited contributions. This creates blind spots in understanding context-specific challenges and solutions.
Each successive crisis deepens educational divides, making recovery increasingly difficult and costly. Weaker education systems make the region less able to respond to other development challenges, too.
How can southern Africa build education systems to withstand crises?
One striking finding from my review was the surge in educational research after the Covid-19 pandemic began – from 229 studies in 2019 to nearly double that in 2020, with continued rapid growth thereafter. This indicates growing recognition that education systems must be redesigned to withstand future disruptions, not merely recover from current ones.
Research points to a number of ways to do this:
Strategic investment in educational infrastructure, particularly digital technologies, to ensure learning continuity.
Equipping educators with skills to adapt teaching methods during emergencies.
Innovative, context-appropriate teaching approaches that empower communities.
Integration of indigenous knowledge systems into curricula, enhancing relevance, adaptability and community ownership.
Interdisciplinary and cross-national research collaborations.
Protection of education budgets, recognising education’s role in crisis recovery and long-term stability.
Community engagement in education, ensuring interventions are culturally appropriate and widely accepted.
In my view, African philanthropists have a duty to provide the independent financial base that education systems need to withstand external funding fluctuations.
What’s the cost of doing nothing?
The economic and social costs of failing to build resilient education systems are profound and long-lasting. Each educational disruption creates negative effects that extend far beyond the crisis period.
When students miss critical learning periods, it reduces their chances in life. The World Bank estimates that learning losses from the Covid-19 pandemic alone could result in up to US$17 trillion in lost lifetime earnings for affected students globally.
Social costs are equally severe. Educational disruptions increase dropout rates, child marriage, early pregnancy, and youth unemployment. These outcomes create broader societal challenges that require costly interventions across multiple sectors.
Spending on educational resilience avoids those costs.
The question isn’t whether southern African nations can afford to invest in educational resilience, but whether they can afford not to.
The choices made today will determine whether education systems merely survive crises or make society better. Evidence-based policies and regional cooperation are essential for building education systems that can fulfil Southern Africa’s human potential.
Emmanuel Ojo receives funding from National Research Foundation (NRF).
Nigeria has abundant human and natural resources but remains mired in underdevelopment. There are high levels of poverty, corruption, unemployment and inequality. The country is currently witnessing a rise in ethnic militias and terrorism, adding to the threats posed by armed herdsmen’s deadly clashes with rural communities over land.
The nation suffers from poor economic management and a political leadership that has failed to promote structural transformation of the economy and politics.
I am a political scientist with research specialisation in the political economy of development. In my view, Nigeria’s social, economic and political crises stem from the absence of a grouping of people who put the country’s interests first. I call this grouping a developmentalist coalition.
I argue that for Nigeria to realise its potential and forge a prosperous shared future, like-minded individuals motivated by the ideology of development nationalism must come together in a coalition.
Development nationalism refers to the commitment to advancing one’s country and ensuring its prosperity. This includes enhancing the capabilities of its people so they can reach their potential and contribute to national progress. Individuals like this put loyalty to their country above other identities or considerations.
This coalition must focus on enhancing the nation’s productive capacity and uplifting the well-being of its citizens. Together, they can break the cycle of underdevelopment and achieve lasting progress.
And this can be measured through the creation of a predictable governance structure characterised by the rule of law and the provision of essential public goods to citizens.
Developmentalist coalitions shape political and economic affairs in most developed nations. In China, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Korea, Singapore and other countries that have tried to catch up with advanced nations, developmental nationalism has played a significant role.
In some cases, a developmentalist elite creates its own political party. An example of this is the People’s Action Party founded by Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and his colleagues. The Labour Party in Norway, a coalition mostly of workers and farmers, is another example.
In other instances, members of this elite join different political parties. When developmentalists are the dominant political elite, any party in power ensures that it upholds standards that reflect the core principles upon which the country is founded.
Developmental elites articulate values that define and bind their nations. They provide moral and political leadership, as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa.
Most of these elites want to have inclusive economic and political institutions that help them achieve their development objectives.
Since Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960, most of those who have overseen the country’s political and economic landscape have not acted in a nationalistic or patriotic manner.
Instead, they have followed their self-interest and exploited the Nigerian state for personal gain.
As a result, the economy remains undiversified, with a small and declining manufacturing sector, thereby missing out on the potential for job creation.
Successive administrations in the last 26 years have allocated less funding to the education sector than the 26% of the national budget recommended by Unesco.
The political elite have not built an economy that will create decent jobs for the youth. Also, they have fostered an education system that produces graduates who do not have the skills to start enterprises.
Most young Nigerians are engaged in the informal sector, with its associated problems: unstable jobs, hazardous working conditions, and a lack of decent wages. Most youths are underemployed and in low value-added economic activities. This means Nigeria is missing out on the potential benefits of its youthful population.
About 70% of Nigeria’s population of over 200 million are under 30 years old, and 41% are younger than 15.
Political leaders have failed to create an environment that allows them to achieve their full potential.
In Nigeria, the issue is not the lack of individuals focused on development. These people exist across all segments of the Nigerian society, including government. The real problem is that they haven’t formed a coalition.
As a result, they cannot act collectively and cohesively to invest in Nigeria’s greatest asset: its people; and to promote industrialisation.
Now is the time to form the developmentalist coalition to change the governance and development trajectory of the country.
In Nigeria, a broad-based coalition of developmentalist elites needs to be led by individuals with a clear vision for development and national cohesion.
Members of this coalition could establish a political party to contest elections, gain political power, and use their positions in government to develop the nation.
Party members must be disciplined and subordinate their personal ambitions to those of the party and the national interests. The party must not become an empire of powerful individuals: instead, its organs must be allowed to function.
Establishing this coalition is the way to end Nigeria’s endemic corruption and build a robust manufacturing sector and a thriving digital economy.
It also needs to promote agro-allied industry, investment in infrastructure, job creation and poverty reduction.
This coalition should aim to transform Nigeria’s democracy into a system where political parties and elected representatives genuinely serve the people.
Despite the phrase’s rich history, the fame of Jane Austen’s novel ended up drowning out all other associations.Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels
Most readers hear “pride and prejudice” and immediately think of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, that salty-sweet confection of romance and irony with a fairy-tale ending.
Like most Austen fans and scholars, I had read and loved her novels for years without learning much about the history of the title, which Austen chose after scrapping the original one, “First Impressions.”
By the 20th century, “pride and prejudice” became solely associated with Austen’s 1813 novel.
The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born. From Britain it traveled to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.
Fighting words for religious factions
While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.
If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.
One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism.
The unnamed minister himself complained that, owing to “the Pride and Prejudice of mens Spirits, the prevailing Interests of some Factions and Parties, the greatest part of the Nation are miserably wanting in their Duty.”
At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness.
“When all Pride and Prejudice, all Interests and Designs, being submitted to the Honour of God, and the Discharge of our Duty,” an anonymous clergyman wrote in 1734, “the Holy Scriptures shall again triumph over the vain Traditions of Men; and Religion no longer take its Denomination from little Sects and Factions.”
From politics to prose
In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.
One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine.
In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.”
Others included Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe.” In his 1708 essay “Review of the State of the British Nation,” Defoe satirically exhorted the public to vote Tory rather than electing men of sense, to “dispell the Poisons” that “Sloth, Envy, Pride and Prejudice may have contracted, and bring the Blood of the Party into a true circulation.”
After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”
Among them was Frances Burney. Scholars have often attributed Austen’s famous title to Burney, who used the phrase “pride and prejudice” in her novel “Cecilia.”
As the critique embodied in the phrase progressed beyond religious and partisan conflict, it became increasingly used in the context of ethics and social reform.
My most striking discovery in this research is the long-standing association of the phrase “pride and prejudice” with abolitionism, the movement to eradicate enslavement and the slave trade.
The leaders of transnational antislavery organizations used it at their conventions and in the books and periodicals they published. In 1843, 30 years after the publication of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” British Quaker Thomas Clarkson wrote to the General Antislavery Convention, which was meeting in London.
He exhorted the faithful to repudiate slavery “at once and forever” if there were any among them “whose eyes may be so far blinded, or their consciences so far seared by interest or ignorance, pride or prejudice, as still to sanction or uphold this unjust and sinful system.”
He even used the phrase twice. Acknowledging that some violent abolitionists had aroused reaction, he warned his audience that “this state of feeling arises as much from pride and prejudice on the one hand, as from indiscretion or impropriety on the other.”
At the funeral for abolitionist John Brown, the minister prayed over his body, “Oh, God, cause the oppressed to go free; break any yoke, and prostrate the pride and prejudice that dare to lift themselves up.”
Use of the phrase did not end with Emancipation or the end of the U.S. Civil War.
In fact, it was one of Frederick Douglass’ favorite phrases. On Oct. 22, 1883, in his “Address at Lincoln Hall,” Douglass excoriated the Supreme Court’s decision rendering the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.
As was typical of Douglass, the speech ranged beyond racial inequities: “Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman.”
Austen’s independent women
Early on in “Pride and Prejudice,” the conceited Caroline Bingley snipes that Elizabeth Bennet shows “an abominable sort of conceited independence.” Later, the snobbish Lady Catherine accuses Bennet of being “headstrong.” But near the ending, Mr. Darcy tells Bennet that he loves her for “the liveliness” of her “mind.”
In this respect, Bennet reflects a quality that all of Austen’s heroines possess. While they try to adhere to standards of courtesy and respect, none are guilty of saying only what the leading man wants to hear.
Given that Austen chose her title to honor the phrase and its history, it is ironic that her own fame ended up drowning out the abolitionist associations of “pride and prejudice” after the Civil War.
If there is any work of fiction that successfully makes self-sufficiency, independent thinking and open-mindedness look good – and makes sycophants, rigidity and hysterical devotion to rank and status look bad – it is “Pride and Prejudice.”
Yet the lasting popularity of Austen’s novel demonstrates that the ethics contained in the phrase continue to resonate today, even if its context has been lost.
Margie Burns 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul Bierman, Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Vermont
In 1957, Hollywood released “The Deadly Mantis,” a B-grade monster movie starring a praying mantis of nightmare proportions. Its premise: Melting Arctic ice has released a very hungry, million-year-old megabug, and scientists and the U.S. military will have to stop it.
Yes, it’s over-the-top fiction, but the movie holds some truth about the U.S. military’s concerns then and now about the Arctic’s stability and its role in national security.
A poster advertises ‘The Deadly Mantis,’ a movie released in 1957, a time when Americans worried about a Russian invasion. The film used military footage to promote the nation’s radar defenses along the Distant Early Warning line in the Arctic. LMPC via Getty Images
It was the beginning of the military’s understanding that climate change couldn’t be ignored.
Army engineers test the properties of snow on Greenland’s ice sheet in 1955, a critical determinant of mobility on the ice and one that changes rapidly with temperature and climate. U.S. Army
As I was writing “When the Ice is Gone,” my recent book about Greenland, climate science and the U.S. military, I read government documents from the 1950s and 1960s showing how the Pentagon poured support into climate and cold-region research to boost the national defense.
Ice roads, ice cores and bases inside the ice sheet
The military’s snow and ice engineering in the 1950s made it possible for convoys of tracked vehicles to routinely cross Greenland’s ice sheet, while planes landed and took off from ice and snow runways.
In 1953, the Army even built a pair of secret surveillance sites inside the ice sheet, both equipped with Air Force radar units looking 24/7 for Soviet missiles and aircraft, but also with weather stations to understand the Arctic climate system.
The public reveal of U.S. military bases somewhere – that remained classified – inside Greenland’s ice sheet, in the February 1955 edition of REAL. Paul Bierman collection.
The military wasn’t shy about its climate change research successes. The Army’s chief ice scientist, Dr. Henri Bader, spoke on the Voice of America. He promoted ice coring as a way to investigate climates of the past, provide a new understanding of weather, and understand past climatic patterns to gauge and predict the one we are living in today – all strategically important.
Henri Bader describes drilling high on Greenland’s ice sheet in 1956 or 1957 in a Voice of America recording (National Archives), “The Snows of Yesteryear,” and a movie (U.S. Army). Created by Quincy Massey-Bierman.
In the 1970s, painstaking laboratory work on the Camp Century ice core extracted minuscule amounts of ancient air trapped in tiny bubbles in the ice. Analyses of that gas revealed that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were lower for tens of thousands of years before the industrial revolution. After 1850, carbon dioxide levels crept up slowly at first and then rapidly accelerated. It was direct evidence that people’s actions, including burning coal and oil, were changing the composition of the atmosphere.
Since 1850, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have spiked and global temperatures have warmed by more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.3 Celsius). The past 10 years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began, with 2024 now holding the record. Climate change is now affecting the entire Earth – but most especially the Arctic, which is warming several times faster than the rest of the planet.
Since 1850, global average temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen together, reflecting human emissions of greenhouse gases. Red bars indicate warmer years; blue bars indicate colder years. NOAA
A view of aircraft carriers docked at the sprawling Naval Station Norfolk show how much of the region is within a few feet of sea level. Stocktrek Images via Getty Images
Consider Naval Station Norfolk. It’s the largest military port facility in the world and sits just above sea level on Virginia’s Atlantic coast. Sea level there rose more than 1.5 feet in the last century, and it’s on track to rise that much again by 2050 as glaciers around the world melt and warming ocean water expands.
High tides already cause delays in repair work, and major storms and their storm surges have damaged expensive equipment. The Navy has built sea walls and worked to restore coastal dunes and marshlands to protect its Virginia properties, but the risks continue to increase.
Planning for the future, the Navy incorporates scientists’ projections of sea level rise and increasing hurricane strength to design more resilient facilities. By adapting to climate change, the U.S. Navy will avoid the fate of another famous marine power: the Norse, forced to abandon their flooded Greenland settlements when sea level there rose about 600 years ago.
As the impacts of climate change grow in both frequency and magnitude, the costs of inaction are increasing. Most economists agree that it’s cheaper to act now than deal with the consequences. Yet, in the past 20 years, the political discourse around addressing the cause and effects of climate change has become increasingly politicized and partisan, stymieing effective action.
In my view, the military’s approach to problem-solving and threat reduction provides a model for civil society to address climate change in two ways: reducing carbon emissions and adapting to inevitable climate change impacts.
The U.S. military emits more planet warming carbon than Sweden and spent more than US$2 billion on energy in 2021. It accounts for more than 70% of energy used by the federal government.
Solar panels generate power on many U.S. military bases. This array at Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, Calif., generates enough power for more than 15,000 homes and has a backup battery system to provide power when the sun isn’t shining. Frederic J . Brown/AFP via Getty Images
As sea ice melts and Arctic temperatures rise, the polar region has again become a strategic priority. Russia and China are expanding Arctic shipping routes and eyeing critical mineral deposits as they become accessible. The military knows climate change affects national security, which is why it continues to take steps to address the threats a changing climate presents.
Paul Bierman receives funding from the US National Science Foundation, this work in part supported by grant EAR-2114629.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stephanie Balkwill, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles
In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager Ling ruled over an empire called the Northern Wei. Historians do not know her birth name or in what year she was born, but they do know that she served as empress dowager between 515 and 528. As the spouse of a ruling emperor prior to his death, she retained the title of empress dowager in her widowhood.
She ruled on behalf of her young son, the heir to the throne; however, her regency was interrupted by a coup d’etat from 520 to 525. Although the empress dowager was expected to rule only as a regent, historical records indicate that she administered court in her own name. These same records also reveal that she adopted a personal pronoun – “zhen 朕,” otherwise known as the Chinese “royal we” – that was reserved for the exclusive use of the emperor.
In my recent book, “The Women Who Ruled China,” I offer an overview of these historical sources and records that document her life, including a translation of her biography retained in the official chronicle of the Northern Wei. Using these sources, I argue that even though the Empress Dowager’s rule was problematic and short – resulting in her assassination – she laid the foundation for other, more successful female rulers across medieval East Asia.
Capitalizing on different cultural traditions
In the late fifth century, the capital city of the Northern Wei was moved from its northern location in modern-day Datong, China, to its southern location in Luoyang, a city at the very heart of Han Chinese culture and history; however, the people who ruled the empire were not ethnically Han Chinese.
Known as the Taghbach, this group migrated south from the Mongolian steppe and ruled a multiethnic and multicultural empire from Luoyang, the world’s largest city and the former capital of the Eastern Han dynasty. The Northern Wei empire adopted laws, institutions and policies from both Taghbach and Han Chinese traditions.
This cultural hybridity enabled the empress dowager to rule directly: On one hand, the Chinese court system rooted in the Han dynasty had long included the position of empress dowager, even though none of the women who held it had ruled directly. On the other, Taghbach culture had no formal position of empress dowager prior to its adoption of court ranks in the Northern Wei, but it did have a long tradition of women in public life. These women served in the military and advised on political matters.
Multiple sources of evidence indicate that Taghbach women had a high degree of personal autonomy and political power, with no source suggesting otherwise.
A well-known story about Taghbach woman appears in the legend of Mulan, who is said to have dressed as a man so that she could serve in the military in place of her father. The Mulan legend is widely recounted in Chinese literature and inspired a fictional character in two Walt Disney movies based on the Chinese fable.
As a historian of gender in this period, I believe that the Mulan legend does not accurately depict Taghbach women. Instead, it is a Chinese story that emphasizes a form of gender transgression that makes sense only within Chinese and Confucian culture. Unlike Chinese culture, Taghbach culture had long known women warriors who could ride horses and shoot arrows without concealing their gender.
Empress Dowager Ling was not a warrior, but she embraced martial symbols of her own power that were available to women in Taghbach culture but not in Chinese culture. For example, she was an accomplished archer and famously drove her own horse cart, which was just as splendid and imposing as was the emperor’s cart.
In the Confucian culture of Han China, such actions were considered highly inappropriate for women, but Empress Dowager Ling carried them out while holding the Chinese title of empress dowager. Her rule, like her empire, was culturally hybrid. That blend of cultural traditions enabled her to take power in a way that neither Chinese nor Taghbach women had done before.
A Buddhist ruler
By the time of the reign of the Northern Wei empire, both Taghbah and Chinese cultures had become deeply familiar with Buddhism, a religion that they had inherited from India in a long process of cultural exchange along the Silk Road. The empire had integrated methods of Buddhist statecraft into its own forms of governance.
Simply put, what this meant was that the ruler of the empire legitimized his reign through Buddhism, portraying himself either as a Buddha or as a patron of Buddhists – their texts and institutions. This was a type of governance that was widely practiced in premodern East Asia.
Even though Buddhist statecraft was widespread in the empress dowager’s time, she was the first woman to directly legitimate her independent rule through Buddhism. As a patron of Buddhism, she commissioned majestic Buddhist architecture. Perhaps seen by her populace as a Buddhist figure herself, she symbolized her co-rule with her son by using a Buddhist visual motif of two Buddhas sitting side by side, a representation that came to be known as the rule by “Two Sages,” meaning tandem rulers depicted in the guise of buddhas. The source for the image was the popular Buddhist text, the “Lotus Sūtra.”
She also attempted to put her own granddaughter on the throne after the death of her son. As I argue in my book, she did so by capitalizing on the idea that first her son, and then her granddaughter, were thought of as the bodhisattva Maitreya, a being of infinite compassion who is believed to be the future Buddha.
The empress dowager’s legacy
Empress Dowager Ling was largely unsuccessful in her bid for power. Her rule was short and contested. She was murdered, and her empire was toppled within 13 years of her rule. For five of those years, she was not in power because of a coup d’etat.
However, about 150 years after the assassination of the empress dowager, another woman would rise to rule China independently, this time taking the title of “emperor.” That woman is known as Empress Wu, or Emperor Wu Zhao, and she is undoubtedly the most famous woman in all of Chinese history. Numerous historical sources attest to her life, work and rule.
What those sources tell us, however, is that she ruled using the very same strategies as Empress Dowager Ling. Investing her own family heritage in distant links to the Taghbach, she also positioned herself as a “Two Sage” ruler alongside the emperor in precisely the same way that Empress Dowager Ling did. She was also able to successfully establish herself as the bodhisattva Maitreya by using Buddhist texts known to Empress Dowager Ling and her court.
She patronized the very same Buddhist structures as did Empress Dowager Ling, including the Buddhist caves at Longmen, just outside of Luoyang. However, she accomplished what Empress Dowager Ling could not – holding onto power successfully. I argue her success was possible because Empress Dowager Ling had paved the way.
Stephanie Balkwill 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kate Coleman-Minahan, Associate Professor of Nursing, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Since 2022, Colorado and 10 other states have passed voter initiatives to protect or expand abortion access. Yet, seven of these states, including Colorado, require people under the age of 18 to get consent from or notify a parent prior to receiving abortion services.
In January 2025, my colleagues and I published research using in-depth interviews with 33 people ages 15 to 22 in Colorado who considered or obtained abortion care between 2020 and 2023. Our study suggests that Colorado’s parental notification law delays young people’s access to abortion, complicates already complex family relationships, and forces unwanted disclosure of the pregnancy and abortion.
As a nurse, I have provided health care to young people and their families for more than two decades, and as a researcher, I have spent the past 10 years studying young people’s experiences with parental involvement laws.
Expanding abortion access, but not for adolescents
In the U.S., 38 states allow abortion services at some point in pregnancy. Of those,24 states have parental involvement laws. And of those, 12 states require young people to obtain consent from a parent or guardian; seven require young people to notify a parent or guardian; and five require both notification and consent. Three states – Kansas, Missouri and North Dakota – require involvement of both parents.
In 2024, Colorado passed a constitutional amendment that protects the right to abortion and allows funding through Medicaid. Yet, Colorado still requires parental notification for people under 18 to obtain abortion services. There have been no recent state-led efforts to remove this law.
We found that even in a state like Colorado that has expanded abortion access, the law creates barriers to services. It takes time for young people to learn the law exists and figure out how to comply with it. That’s true for both young people who can tell their parents and those who cannot. Delays due to parental involvement laws can increase the cost of abortion services, restrict adolescents’ choice of abortion methods and push adolescents past the gestational limit of the clinic or state.
For some Colorado young people, following the law resulted in unwanted disclosure of their pregnancy and abortion to parents and others, which is associated with negative mental health outcomes and exposes some young people to emotional or physical abuse.
Judicial bypass
In states that mandate parental involvement, young people who feel they cannot involve a parent can try to obtain a judicial bypass. The young person must go to court to prove to a judge that they are mature and well informed or that abortion without parental involvement is in their best interest.
Judicial bypass also delays access to abortion. For one participant in our Colorado study, the two- to three-week delay contributed to her inability to obtain her wanted abortion because it pushed her past the gestational limit of her chosen clinic.
Another participant thought the judicial bypass process would take too long, so she instead tried to end the pregnancy herself. She took vitamin C, which is not effective, and considered but did not take large doses of over-the-counter medications such as ibuprofen, which could have caused organ damage.
The delays and burdens of the judicial bypass process led some study participants’ parents to find out about the pregnancy. This unwanted disclosure breached the privacy that judicial bypass is meant to protect.
Policymakers in some states with abortion bans, such as Idaho, Tennessee and Mississippi, are trying to stop people from traveling out of state for services by targeting young people. These proposed laws would make it a crime to help a young person under 18 leave the state for abortion services without parental consent.
Colorado protects the right to abortion in its state constitution but still requires minors to notify a parent to get an abortion. The Washington Post/Contributor/GettyImages
Our research found that Colorado young people want their parents’ or guardians’ support when considering abortion, yet some felt it was not safe for them to ask for it.
Confirming prior research, we found a number of reasons young people felt unable to disclose their pregnancies to a parent. Those include fearing a parent’s reaction, feeling a parent would not respect their pregnancy decision, and not living with or not having a supportive relationship with a parent.
In addition to those reasons, young people also accurately predicted their parents’ reactions. Young people recounted emotional abuse and abandonment or feeling coerced into either continuing the pregnancy or having an abortion when a parent they did not feel they could tell found out about the pregnancy. Research, including our new study in Colorado, shows we can trust young people to decide who to involve in their pregnancy decision.
The views expressed here are her own and not those of the University of Colorado. Kate Coleman-Minahan receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Society of Family Planning.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet have been sworn in, ending Justin Trudeau’s time in office and paving the way for a spring election. Canadians are soon heading to the polls as they watch American democracy crumble.
United States President Donald Trump recently argued “he who saves his country does not violate any Law” as he ignores Congress and the courts, governs by executive order and threatens international laws and treaties.
Republican leaders moved dramatically to the right, and the primary system allowed the choice of an extremist. Republican voters then aligned their opinions with his. Trump’s disdain for democratic fundamentals spread quickly. Partisans defending their team slid away from democratic values.
Canada’s more centrist ideological spectrum is not foolproof against this type of extremism. Public opinion can be moved when our leaders take us there.
Decline can start slowly and then accelerate. America’s democratic backsliding in the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency follows the erosion of democratic norms over decades. Republican attacks on institutions, the opposition, the media and higher education corrosively undermined public faith in the truth, including election results.
Trust in government is holding steady in Canada, however. That provides an important guardrail for Canadian democracy.
The dangers of courting the far right
There are also lessons for our political parties. To maximize their seats, Republicans accepted extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but soon needed those types of politicians for key votes.
The so-called Freedom Caucus, made up of MAGA adherents, forced the choice of a new, more extreme, leader of the House of Representatives. This provides a clear lesson that history has shown many times: it is dangerous for the party on the political right to accommodate the far right, which can quickly take control.
Once established within the ruling party, extremists can hold their party hostage.
Austria recently avoided the inclusion of the far right in its new coalition, and now Germany is working to do the same. As Canada’s Conservatives look for every vote, courting far-right voters and candidates risks destabilizing the system.
They clearly did not imagine party loyalty negating the safeguards that protect democracy from an authoritarian-minded president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate and impeach, limits the executive’s power to spend and make appointments, gives the judiciary power to hold an executive accountable and contains the 25th amendment allowing cabinet to remove a president.
But when one party controls the legislative and executive branches during a time of hyper-partisanship, these mechanisms may not constrain an authoritarian. Today, Republican loyalty has eroded these checks and balances and American courts are struggling to step up to their heightened role.
Although counter-intuitive, parliamentary systems like Canada’s are usually less susceptible to authoritarianism than presidential ones because the cabinet or the House of Commons can turn against a lawless leader.
Still, if popular, authoritarian leaders can still retain their party’s support — and then things can slide quickly. The rightward pull of extremists seen in the U.S. House would be more dangerous here since the Canadian House of Commons includes our executive.
Guarding against xenophobia
Lastly, Canada should be wary of xenophobic rhetoric.
“America First” is not simply shopping advice. It began as an isolationist slogan during the First World War but was soon adopted by pro-fascists, American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. These entities questioned who is really American and wanted not only isolationism, but racist policies, immigration restrictions and eugenics.
Trump did not revive the phrase accidentally. It’s a call to America’s fringes. Alienating domestic groups is a sure sign of democratic decline.
“Canada First” mimics that century-long dark theme in America. In combination with contempt for the opposition, it questions the right of other parties to legitimately hold power if used as a message by one party.
Also, asserting that “Canada is broken” — as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre often does — mimics Trump’s talk of American carnage, language and imagery he uses to justify extraordinary presidential authority.
Such language erodes citizens’ trust in democratic institutions and primes voters to support undemocratic practices in the name of patriotism. Canadian parties and politicians should exit that road.
Ultimately, institutions alone do not protect a country from the rise of authoritarianism. Democracy can be fragile. As a federal election approaches in Canada, it’s important to know the warning signs of extremism and anti-democratic practices that are creeping into our politics.
Matthew Lebo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Michael Williams, Professor of International Politics, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
In the few weeks since United States President Donald Trump returned to the White House, world leaders and commentators have struggled to make sense of his approach to foreign policy, including tariffs, alliance renegotiations and threats of territorial appropriation.
No one is sure how much is bluff or negotiating tactics, nor how much is deadly serious.
For some, Trump’s foreign policy is simply incoherent, but most try to fit his approach into the familiar choice between isolationism and internationalism.
But there’s a third possibility: Trump’s second presidency marks a contemporary twist on an older form of continentalist geopolitics with important implications for Canada and the world.
‘Great Powers’
Although it has been largely missing from foreign policy debates in the post-Second World War era, continentalist geopolitics has a long and often controversial history.
In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, it envisioned a world divided into “great spaces,” each dominated by a different “Great Power.” According to this perspective, not all regions are equally important, and continentalist geopolitics does not require a choice between internationalism and isolationism.
Instead, continentalism recommends that Great Powers like the U.S. — with its massive financial, natural and industrial resources — concentrate on controlling territory, the regions surrounding it and the crucial transportation routes on its continental fringes.
Pressure is placed on countries whose importance is determined by their geopolitical proximity, and those that are least able to resist due to their dense connections and relative dependence on the U.S.
The objective is not just to gain specific advantages; it’s to force neighbours into even tighter economic and infrastructural connections and dependence. The obvious countries in this scenario are Canada and Mexico, and it’s therefore unsurprising that both have been the targets of Trump’s significant tariff threats and other coercive measures.
Beyond geographically contiguous states, continentalist geopolitics also focuses on areas that command key strategic passages and trade routes, especially those currently controlled by weaker powers.
For the U.S., Panama, with its canal, fits the bill. Danish-administered Greenland, with its natural resources and geographic importance in a rapidly thawing Arctic region, is another. It’s unsurprising that these countries, along with Canada, were a Trump focus in the first weeks of his second administration.
Today, continentalist geopolitics recognizes the multi-polarity and “multi-alignment” in world politics.
It’s not isolationist, but it recognizes that waning American power in an inter-connected world gives more distant states the ability to resist U.S. pressure by making deals with a wide range of other countries. In this setting, an interventionist global role is neither possible nor desirable, and the U.S. should refrain from global commitments.
“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.”
No commitment to global stability
The continentalist perspective does not require a complete separation from the world economic or security order. Trade, financial and technology flows can be encouraged, but their basis would be a re-industrialized and more self-sufficient core, well-insulated from economic and security threats.
Extended interests, such as European stability, could be minimized by increasing the cost burden to allies and minimizing fixed commitments. A powerful global capacity with a “light” geographic footprint is the preferred posture.
Calls for increased defence spending by NATO allies and for European responsibility in enforcing a post-war settlement in Ukraine logically follow.
The continentalist playbook is content to leave the management of distant regions to other powers, each pre-eminent in their part of the world. That means participation in international organizations is minimized.
Foreign aid should reflect American interests, with involvement depending on the costs and benefits, not any automatic commitment to global stability. Feeding the world’s most extensive development agency, USAID, “into the wood-chipper” — to quote Elon Musk — is a page taken straight from this kind of geopolitician’s handbook.
Unsavoury history
The possibility that a continentalist geopolitics underpins recent U.S. foreign policy initiatives has received too little attention in Canada.
It’s not yet clear that the actions of America’s new administration represent the rise, much less the triumph, of Trumpian geopolitics. Nor is there any guarantee that such a vision would or will succeed.
But there is enough evidence to suggest we should take the possibility seriously. Since 1945, America’s foreign policy options have resided somewhere between internationalism and isolationism. But a geopolitical vision of world politics as a diverse canvas of large territory dominated by different Great Powers have a long, if often unsavoury, history in foreign policy.
A southern neighbour pursuing a such a geopolitical approach would mark a radical transformation in world order and pose huge challenges for Canada. Canadians should at least be prepared for the possibility.
Michael Williams receives funding from the Social Science Research Council of Canada
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, Associate Professor in Quantitative Political Science, University of Southampton
From a very young age, we’re socialised to view the world as being made up of “goodies” and “baddies”. When you’re a child fooling around with your friends in the playground, nobody ever wants to be the baddy. And when it comes to dressing up, everybody wants to be Luke Skywalker – not Darth Vader.
This oversimplified way of viewing the world as being made up of right and wrong or good people and bad people doesn’t dissipate as we grow older. If anything, it tends to solidify as we form the social identities that define who we are in adult life.
This is particularly the case when it comes to our political identities and, specifically, the partisan identities and loyalties that individuals attach themselves to.
Partisanship is one hell of a powerful force. Not only does sticking a party label under a candidate determine whether we support them or not – often regardless of what the individual candidate actually stands for – but it also shapes how we view the state of the country and economy. Note how Democrats’ view of how the US economy was doing tanked the day Donald Trump took office, while Republicans’ positivity about the same economy spiked.
Want more politics coverage from academic experts? Every week, we bring you informed analysis of developments in government and fact check the claims being made.
Our partisanship can also affect who we choose to socialise with, who we share a beer with, and who we date. There is even evidence that it affects who gets hired and who doesn’t. Knowing who your neighbour votes for and if they vote for “your team” shapes your view of them as good or bad.
In a new study, I show that the reverse is also true. Knowing someone is good or bad shapes if we think they are one of “us” or one of “them”. In other words, partisans project their own political identities onto people they view as good, and project the political identities of their opponents onto those they dislike.
Who do Darth Vader and Cinderella vote for?
The first part of the study involved a social experiment that applied a political twist on a childish game. In a representative survey of thousands of respondents from both the US and UK, participants were shown images of fictional characters. These were heroes like Harry Potter and Spiderman, or villains like Scar from Disney’s The Lion King and Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones.
Participants were then asked to guess each character’s political affiliation. What emerged was a striking pattern: participants thought that heroes voted for the same party as them, and that villains voted for the opposing party.
Essentially, US Democrats consistently thought Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione voted Democrat, whereas Republicans consistently thought they voted Republican. Similar behaviour was expected of heroes (and the opposite of villains) from across a whole host of characters from different film and fiction.
Percentages who thought each character voted for ‘their’ party:
Heroes in pink, villains in blue: how we think fictional characters vote. Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, CC BY-ND
Participants thought Spiderman, Cinderella, Yoda, Aladdin, Brienne of Tarth, Gandalf and Captain America shared their political views. They dismissed Kylo Ren, Ursula the sea witch, Cersei Lannister and Thanos as siding with their political opposition.
Participants were also asked to read a short story about a local politician. In one version of the story, the politician was depicted as a generous figure who donated money to charity. In another, the same politician was shown in a negative light, and as having been accused of corruption. At no point in the story was the partisanship of the politician mentioned.
Despite the absence of any direct mention of partisanship, respondents falsely “remembered” the politician’s party affiliation in a way that aligned with the moral tone of the story. Labour-voting participants who read the generous politician story said they remembered it was about a Labour politician. Conservative-voting participants reading the same story said they remembered it being about a Conservative politician. The reverse pattern was observed among participants who read the corrupt politician story.
These results are striking. Even when there is nothing to be remembered and participants could say that partisanship wasn’t part of the story, voters read what they wanted between the lines based on their own tribal political identities.
These studies demonstrate that partisan identities undermine voter rationality. Politically motivated projection – assuming those who are good must be one of “us” and those who are bad must be one of “them” – doesn’t just shape how we view others; it reinforces and consolidates partisan divisions.
If we assume the person who lives next door is a lousy neighbour because they vote for our political opponents, and simultaneously assume the person who lives down the street votes for our political opponents because they are a lousy neighbour, then we very quickly fall into a scenario where our politically tribal instincts feel increasingly justified.
This cycle of political villainisation deepens divides, making it harder to find common ground. If we continue to let partisanship shape not just how we vote but how we see each other, we risk turning those who don’t share our political views into our enemies.
Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte has received funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust
Thousands of tonnes of plastic pollution could be escaping into the environment every year … from our mouths. Most chewing gum on sale is made from a variety of oil-based synthetic rubbers – similar to the plastic material used in car tyres.
If you find that thought slightly unsettling, you are not alone. I have been researching and speaking about the plastic pollution problem for 15 years. The people I talk to are always surprised, and disgusted, when they find out they’ve been chewing on a lump of malleable plastic. Most manufacturers just don’t advertise what gum is actually made of – they dodge around the detail by listing “gum base” in the ingredients.
There’s no strict definition of synthetic gum base. Chewing gum brand, Wrigley Extra partners with dental professionals around the world to promote the use of sugar-free chewing gum to improve oral health.
The brand’s Wrigley Oral Health Program states that: “Gum base puts the “chew” in chewing gum, binding all the ingredients together for a smooth, soft texture. We use synthetic gum base materials for a consistent and safe base that provides longer-lasting flavour, improved texture, and reduced tackiness.“
It almost sounds harmless. But chemical analysis shows that gum contains styrene-butadiene (the durable synthetic chemical used to make car tyres), polyethylene (the plastic used to make carrier bags and bottles) and polyvinyl acetate (woodglue) as well as some sweetener and flavouring.
The chewing gum industry is big business, worth an estimated US$48.68 billion (£37.7 billion) in 2025. Three companies own 75% of the market share, the largest of which is Wrigley, with an estimated 35%. There are few reliable statistics available about the amount of gum being produced, but one peer-reviewed global estimate states 1.74 trillion pieces are made per year.
I examined several types of gum and found that the most common weight of an individual piece of gum is 1.4g – that means that globally, a staggering 2.436 million tonnes of gum are produced each year. About a third (30%) of that weight, or just over 730,000 tonnes, is synthetic gum base.
If the idea of chewing plastic isn’t disturbing enough, consider what happens after you spit it out. Most people have experienced discarded gum under bench seats, school desks and on street pavements. But, like other plastics, synthetic chewing gum does not biodegrade and can persist in the environment for many years.
In the environment it will harden, crack and breakdown into microplastics but this can take decades. Cleaning it up is not cheap because it is labour intensive. The average cost is £1.50 per square metre and estimates suggest that the annual clean-up cost for chewing gum pollution for councils in the UK is around £7 million.
There have been some efforts to address the problem. In many public locations around the UK, gum collection pots supplied by Dutch company Gumdrop Ltd have been installed to collect and recycle used gum. Signage provided by councils encouraging responsible disposal is also now a regular feature in some UK high streets, and there is a growing number of small producers offering plant-based alternatives.
In the UK, the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy launched the chewing gum task force in 2021. This collaboration involves three major manufacturers who have committed to investing up to £10 million in order to clean up “historic gum staining and changing behaviour so that more people bin their gum”.
The first objective implies that cleaning up gum is a solution to this form of plastic pollution; it isn’t. Manufacturers making a financial contribution to clean-up efforts is like plastic manufacturers paying for litter pickers and bin bags at volunteer beach cleans. Neither addresses the root cause of the problem.
Binning gum is not the solution either. Addressing gum as a plastic pollutant dictates that the prevention of gum pollution should include the well-known tenets, like all plastic pollution, of reduce, reuse, recycle and redesign. It is not only a disposal issue.
Another issue that I have uncovered is definition. In the two annual reports published by the gum litter task force since its inception, there is no mention of the word pollution. The distinction between litter and pollution is important. By calling it chewing gum pollution, the narrative changes from an individual negligence issue to a corporate one. That places an onus for accountability onto the producers rather than the consumers.
Single-use solutions
Like single-use plastic items, chewing gum pollution needs to be tackled from all angles – education, reduction, alternatives, innovation, producer responsibility, and legislation.
Educating people about the contents of gum and the environmental consequences those ingredients have will reduce consumption and encourage better disposal habits. More transparent labelling on packaging would empower shoppers to make informed choices. Stricter regulations can hold manufacturers to account – a levy tax on synthetic gum can help pay for clean ups. In turn, this would incentivise more investment in plant-based gums and other sustainable alternatives.
We can all reduce the environmental consequences of this plastic pollution by kicking the gum habit, calling on councils to enforce stricter pollution penalties and encouraging governments to put a tax levy on manufacturers to fund clean ups and force them to list the contents of gum base.
Throwing away any non-disposable, inorganic products is unsustainable. Chewing gum pollution is just another form of plastic pollution. It’s time we start treating it as such.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
A fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia has killed at least 59 people and injured more than 150. The blaze broke out at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani, where around 500 people were attending a concert.
Witnesses reported that pyrotechnics used during the performance ignited the ceiling, causing flames to spread rapidly.
Authorities have arrested 20 people so far, including the club’s manager. Investigations continue. The North Macedonian government has declared a seven-day mourning period.
While building fires are not limited to nightclubs, many of the most devastating building fires in history have happened in nightclubs around the world. So why are nightclubs such a risky place for deadly fires?
A long history of nightclub fires
A look at past nightclub fires shows just how common and deadly they’ve been in the past 100 years. We identified at least 24 nightclub fires where ten or more people died since 1940.
Collectively, these 24 incidents account for at least 2,800 deaths, with nearly 1,300 in the 21st century alone.
Now, North Macedonia’s Pulse nightclub joins this long list.
Why are nightclubs so risky for fires?
A review of past nightclub fires we’ve collated in our database reveals common patterns. Two key factors have contributed to the frequency and severity of these fire disasters.
1. Pyrotechnics, fireworks and flammable materials
One of the most common causes of nightclub fires has been the use of pyrotechnics in enclosed spaces. Pyrotechnics are controlled chemical reactions designed to produce flames, smoke, or light effects.
They have been involved in at least six of the deadliest nightclub fires, including the recent Pulse nightclub fire in North Macedonia, as well as The Station (United States, 2003), Kiss (Brazil, 2013), Colectiv (Romania, 2015), Lame Horse (Russia, 2009) and República Cromañón (Argentina, 2004).
In some cases, fireworks – which are different from stage pyrotechnics and sometimes illegally used indoors – have played a role. The Lame Horse nightclub fire, which killed 156 people in Russia in 2009, was caused by a spark from fireworks igniting a low ceiling covered in flammable plastic decorations.
Foam insulation, wooden panelling, plastic decorations and carpeted walls have all been key factors in past nightclub fires. In Cocoanut Grove (Boston, 1942), artificial palm trees and other flammable decorations accelerated the blaze.
2. Overcrowding and blocked or insufficient exits
Evacuation failures have been a factor in nearly every major nightclub fire.
In some instances, crowds may not immediately recognise the severity of the situation, especially if they mistake alarms for false alarms or special effects (for example, smoke machines, loud music).
Further, patrons could be intoxicated due alcohol or other drugs. Intoxication combined with potential disorientation due to dim lighting can further reduce judgement during an evacuation.
Clearly, the best way to protect patrons is to prevent a fire from breaking out in the first place. But in settings where fire risks are inherently high, the ability to evacuate people swiftly is crucial.
Nightclubs are among the most crowded indoor spaces. While crowd density is part of a nightclub’s design and atmosphere, overcrowding beyond legal capacity is common.
A crowd that has gradually gathered over several hours must suddenly evacuate in seconds or minutes to survive a fire. This is made more difficult by narrow hallways and limited exits, which quickly become bottlenecks when hundreds of people attempt to escape at once.
What’s more, not all exits are always accessible during a fire. In several past nightclub disasters, locked or obstructed emergency exits have significantly worsened the death toll.
Minimising the risks
Nightclubs are uniquely vulnerable to fires due to a combination of structural risks, unsafe materials, overcrowding and regulatory failures.
While human behaviour plays a role in how fires unfold in confined spaces such as nightclubs, people should be able to go for a night out and expect to come home safely.
Regulatory oversight must ensure strict compliance with fire codes. Venues should have fire suppression systems (such as sprinklers, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors) to control or contain fires before they spread, and adequate exits.
Nightclubs should ban indoor pyrotechnics and fireworks, as history has repeatedly shown their deadly consequences.
Capacity limits must be enforced, and emergency exits should always be accessible.
Public awareness is also key. Patrons need to understand the real risk of fires in nightclubs, and be prepared to evacuate swiftly but calmly if danger arises.
Ruggiero Lovreglio receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi (NZ) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA).
Milad Haghani 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.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia
Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.
As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.
Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.
He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.
“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .
Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”
To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”
If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.
Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.
And from the very start the official facts became slippery.
Our latest investigation –
AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS
We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.
— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025
What did they know and when did they know it The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.
The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.
We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.
The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.
“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . .. the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”
But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.
The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, sailing south in the Coral Sea on February 15, 2025, in a photograph taken from a RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane. Image: Royal Australian Air Force/Declassified Australia
Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.
“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”
Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.
Eyes and ears on ‘every move’ It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.
Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.
The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.
“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.
“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . . we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”
Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.
Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.
Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.
“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.
“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”
The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.
This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships on their “right to freedom of navigation” voyage in international waters circumnavigating Australia, with dates of way points indicated — from 3 February till 6 March 2025. Distances and locations are approximate. Image: Weibo/Declassified Australia
As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.
With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.
“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.
As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.
The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.
There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.
Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.
The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.
Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.
Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.
The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) – showing the north-eastern corner of the huge base with some 18 of the base’s now 45 satellite dishes and covered radomes visible. Image: Felicity Ruby/Declassified Australia
The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.
A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:
“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . . Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”
The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.
It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.
Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.
These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.
Alliance priorities The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.
For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.
However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.
Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.
But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.
The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.
Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.
The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.
Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.
It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.
Who knew and when did they know If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.
Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. Image: ADF/Declassified Australia
Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.
As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.
Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.
If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.
A final word In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.
The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.
Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.
Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.
Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Joshua M. Pearce, John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and Professor, Western University
A recent study has shown that the environmental and human mortality impacts of modern information technology — especially email infrastructure — are significant.(Shutterstock)
My recent study explored the environmental impact of lengthening email signatures, focusing specifically on two types of information: gender pronouns and land acknowledgements because both are relatively new additions to email signatures.
In both cases, the extra carbon emissions for each email for the extra characters is estimated and aggregated over the population that uses them.
The environmental consequences of minor digital habits are often overlooked. (Shutterstock)
The results showed that in Canada, where about 15 per cent of people include gender pronouns in emails, the resulting carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year, according to the 1,000-ton rule.
The environmental harm and human mortality caused by this seemingly minor digital habit is evident. Large blocks of text like legal disclaimers and land acknowledgements cause even more harm. Images and logos, which contain even larger amounts of data, cause more emissions and deaths still.
Doing away with email signatures
Most of the content in email signatures is redundant, as we tend to email the same people repeatedly. The environmental and human cost of using email signatures clearly outweighs the benefits. One solution to this issue is to replace email signatures with a hyperlinked name to additional information.
Another simple way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions is by eliminating email signatures entirely, since emails already identify senders in the header. After all, we don’t sign our texts, so why do we feel the need to sign our emails?
If you receive an email with a long signature, you might consider asking the sender to switch to a hyperlink instead, or eliminate their signature all together.
Additionally, you can encourage others to use free, open-source ad blockers to reduce unnecessary data from ads while browsing or emailing. Ads, especially on websites, generate an enormous amount of unnecessary data and energy consumption.
While these steps may seem small on their own, collectively, they can make a significant difference in reducing digital waste and unnecessary emissions.
It also gives pause for the far more damaging impacts of other forms of digital communications, particularly email spam.
Already more than half of all emails are spam. (Shutterstock)
Spam accounts for over half of all emails and, despite having lower carbon emissions per email (since many are deleted without being opened), spam accounts for far more emissions-producing data. Beyond its environmental toll, spam also wastes the time of every email user.
In response, several proposals and laws have been put forward to reduce this digital waste, from including taxes on emails, opt-in or opt-out systems to even outlawing spam entirely. While these efforts are a step in the right direction, we all still suffer through an enormous amount of spam.
The environmental impact of our online habits is far larger than most realize, and as digital communication continues to evolve, we must consider its long-term consequences on the environment and human life. We should take the easy steps of cutting wasteful energy use in our communications and it can start with eliminating email signatures.
Joshua M. Pearce 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.
Yet, despite this widespread patriotism, some Canadians may have a relative or friend in the contrarian 10 per cent of citizens who welcome annexation.
From peacekeepers to politicians to ordinary civilians, I have seen how cognitive biases can cause rational, intelligent people to ignore valuable evidence, even at great peril.
Humans often react to unsettling evidence by denying, minimizing or re-interpreting the information to restore their cognitive ease. Everyone in a conflict-prone part of the world experiences cognitive distortions and denial at some point. Psychological security often overrides physical security.
The tricky part is that challenging a person’s denial can provoke defensiveness, even rage. But allowing denial to persist leaves them dangerously unprepared to face real-world threats.
On balance, the safer choice is to rip off these psychological Band-aids.
Denial through confirmation bias
Except for a small percentage of extremists, the 10 per cent who are in favour of American annexation are ordinary Canadians. What makes them different are two interrelated cognitive biases: confirmation bias and belief perseverance.
For Canadians who hold Trump in high esteem, acknowledging his threats creates cognitive dissonance. Some people find dissonance so distressing that it feels easier to reject or reinterpret the contrary information in a way that protects prior-held ideas and restores cognitive ease.
These confirmation biases allow the 10 per cent to redefine the word “annexation” to mean something else, such as peaceful political unification. That imagined definition turns Trump’s threat into a friendly proposal leading to greater prosperity and security.
That reinterpretation may reduce psychological distress, but it’s delusional.
Many of the 10 per cent are simply unaware of what “annexation” truly means, and could rationally change their position once they understand the facts. But a smaller subset of that group may reject the evidence entirely.
Belief perseverance causes some people to aggressively hold their original position, even when presented with disconfirming evidence.
While denial helps them feel safe in the moment, it also makes them dangerously unprepared to deal with real threats.
Denial through normalcy bias
Patriotic “elbows up” Canadians must also be wary of denial. For them, the issue is not identifying the threats, but comprehending their full implications.
Even among informed citizens, NATO, NORAD and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance are not easy to relate to. Trade wars show up on grocery bills, but these defence organizations keep peace in the background, which is harder to notice.
Canadians may intellectually understand that North American security is deteriorating, but that crisis may not seem as real as tariffs.
For the majority of Canadians who already take Trump’s threats seriously, the first step in countering the normalcy bias is to pay attention to new risks and fractures in existingsecurity co-operation.
There is no time to argue with people who remain cognitively confused. The majority of Canadians are ready to have a laser-focused discussion about the real security challenges on the horizon.
The good news is that Canada can fortify its security and deter threats in this perilous new world.
The rangeofoptions may not be as comfortable as the bygone era of friendly alliances and NATO supremacy. But through intelligentdebate, Canadians can develop realistic new approaches to national defence, and quickly.
Acceptance and adaptation are the keys to survival.
Aisha Ahmad receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Stacy L. Lorenz, Vice Dean and Professor, Physical Education and History, Augustana Campus, University of Alberta
When Canadian ice hockey centre Connor McDavid scored in overtime to lead Canada to victory over the United States in the National Hockey League’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in February, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted on social media, “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.”
Since the 4 Nations Face-Off ended, hockey analogies and imagery continue to dominate the conversation around Canada-U.S. relations. This time the focus is on Gordie Howe (or “Mr. Hockey” as he was widely known), whose strategic use of elbows on the ice has become a political rallying cry for Canadians.
A CBC News report on ‘Elbows Up’ becoming a rallying cry against Trump.
In particular, Howe’s practice of keeping his “elbows up” in the corners to ward off belligerents on the opposing team has become a focal point for Canadians’ actions against Trump’s aggression.
“We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. So the Americans, they should make no mistake: In trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.”
While it may be surprising to see such enthusiasm for an “elbows up” approach and for “dropping the gloves” as one would in a hockey fight, this kind of strategic employment of violence fits perfectly with Howe’s longstanding brand of hockey manhood.
“Mr. Elbows” and the “Bashful Basher”
Although Howe’s early nickname of “Mr. Elbows” has received the bulk of the public’s attention recently, his other moniker used extensively by the Detroit media during his first season in the NHL — the “Bashful Basher” — captures even more effectively the style of masculinity that Canadians are currently calling upon in their clash with Trump.
“Howe not only had proven himself an exceptionally promising rookie, but he also had established the fact that while he might be a malted milk devotee off the ice, he positively was no milk-sop on a hockey rink.”
Howe’s brand of violence was careful and calculated, rather than reckless or emotional. Even when he used his fists to batter an opponent — such as in his famous 1959 fight with New York Rangers enforcer Lou Fontinato — Howe presented himself as a reluctant and reasonable fighter who conformed to the idealized, manly “code” of hockey.
He resorted to fighting only to defend smaller teammates and to deter even more harmful forms of violence, such as stick attacks or overly aggressive hits. Far from a wild brawler, Howe was a calm protector, governed by a sense of honest accountability for his actions.
O’Reilly contrasts “the mild-mannered, smiling, innocent-faced Howe, the clean-cut All-Canadian-American boy” with his more ruthless counterpart: “The guy who excels with his elbows as weapons, a man who, his opponents say, is skilled with the illegal high stick and so devious that the officials often fail to see the offense.”
“When Howe gets knocked down, he looks like he doesn’t care. But when he’s getting up, he looks for the other guy’s number. A little later, the guy will have four stitches in his head.”
Howe’s strategic use of fighting also normalized the high level of violence in hockey by showing that it could be measured and purposeful, in accordance with the informal code of expectations that governed the game.
Although critics of fighting and violence have become more outspoken in recent years, these values remain integral to hockey culture at the highest level and an influential point of reference for what it means to be a “true” hockey fan and a patriotic Canadian.
In the current political climate, it is perhaps the title of the story that appeared in Life magazine in 1959 that resonates most clearly: “Don’t mess around with Gordie. Hockey’s tough guy (Lou Fontinato) discovers that the game’s best player (Gordie Howe) is a rough man in a fight.”
With their “elbows up,” Canadians are counting on a Gordie Howe-style response — rational, expert and effective — in a trade war with the United States that may just be getting started.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Across its nearly 250-year history, the United States has never had an official language. On March 1, U.S. President Donald Trump changed that when he signed an executive order designating English as the country’s sole official language. The order marks a fundamental rupture from the American goverment’s long-standing approach to languages.
“From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language,” Trump’s order states. “It is in America’s best interest for the federal government to designate one — and only one — official language.”
This new order also revokes a language-access provision contained in an earlier executive order from 2000 that aimed to improve access to services for people with limited English. Federal agencies now seem to have no obligation to provide vital information in other languages.
Despite some reactions in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, it remains unclear whether Trump’s executive order will face legal or political challenges. Amid continual attacks from the Trump administration on established norms, this decree may pass with relatively little resistance, despite a deeper meaning that extends far beyond language.
Multilingual realities and monolingual fantasies
The U.S. has a long multilingual history, beginning with the hundreds of Indigenous languages indelibly linked to these lands. The secondary layer are colonial languages and their variants, including French in Louisiana and Spanish in the Southwest. In all historical periods, immigrant languages from around the world have added substantially to the linguistic mix that makes up the U.S.
Today, New York is one of world’s most linguistically diverse cities, with other U.S. coastal cities not far behind. According to data from the Census Bureau, one-fifth of all Americans can speak two or more languages. The social, economic and cognitive benefits of bilingualism are well-established, and there is no data to support the assertion that speaking more than one language threatens the integrity of the nation state.
A building in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, which hosts speakers of diverse South Asian languages and their associations, April 17, 2017. (Ross Perlin)
The March 1 executive order is a crowning achievement for the “English-only movement.” Trump has tapped directly into this sentiment and its xenophobic preoccupations, rooted in white fragility and white supremacy.
In 2015, during his first bid for the Oval Office, Trump reprimanded Jeb Bush, the bilingual former governor of Florida, during a televised debate, stating: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language…These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Beyond the brazen untruths and intentional exaggerations, such statements only reflect weakness and fear. The March 1 executive order states that “a nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society.”
It is in fact a sign of strength that Americans have not needed such a mandate until now, effectively navigating their complex multilingual reality without top-down legislation.
English around the world
It’s instructive to compare the language policy of the U.S. with other settler colonial contexts where English is dominant.
In neighbouring Canada, the 1969 Official Languages Act grants equal status to English and French — two languages that were brought European migrants — and requires all federal institutions to provide services in both languages on request. Revealingly, only 50 years later did Canada finally pass an Indigenous Languages Act granting modest recognition to the original languages of the land.
While Australia’s constitution specifies no official language, the government promotes English as the “national language,” and then offers to translate some web pages into other languages.
Navigating the distinction between de facto and de jure, New Zealand has taken a more considered approach. Recognizing that English is unthreatened and secure, even without legal backing, New Zealand legislators have focused their attention elsewhere. Te reo Māori was granted official language status in 1987, followed by New Zealand Sign Language in 2006.
Even the colonial centre and origin point for the global spread of English, the United Kingdom assumes a nuanced position on language policy. Welsh and Irish have both received some official recognition, while in Scotland, the Bòrd na Gàidhlig continues to advocate for official recognition of Gaelic.
Principle and practice
Trump’s recent executive order is both practical and symbolic.
Practically, it remains unclear what the order means for Spanish in Puerto Rico, the Indigenous languages of Hawaii and Alaska — which have received official recognition — for American Sign Language and for all the multilingual communities that make up the nation.
Interpretation in courts, hospitals and schools is a fundamental human right. No one should be barred from accessing vital services simply because they don’t speak English, whether that’s when dealing with a judge, a doctor or a teacher. The consequences of government agencies abandoning their already limited efforts at translation and interpretation could have huge ramifications.
Symbolically, Trump’s order is red meat for his MAGA followers. Associating national integrity with the promotion of one language above others might seem to reflect American exceptionalism, but it in fact destroys the cultural and linguistic diversity that makes the U.S. exceptional.
Ironically, this executive order brings the U.S. into alignment with most of the world’s other nation-states — albeit not the ones that speak English as their first language — which seek to impose the standardized language of an ethnic majority on all of their citizens. The consequences can be both polarizing and homogenizing.
Most of the world’s people are resolutely multilingual and are only becoming more so. Americans will not stop speaking, writing and signing in languages other than English because of an executive order. The linguistic dynamism of the U.S. is essential to the country’s social fabric. It should be nurtured and defended.
Mark Turin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo.
Ross Perlin has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nicole Rosen, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions, University of Manitoba
United States President Donald Trump has recently been commenting on accents while meeting foreign leaders and taking questions from foreign journalists. Trump praised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “beautiful” accent, saying he would have been president 20 years ago if he’d had that accent.
What is a “beautiful” accent, and what makes one hard to understand? There is much evidence showing that opinions on language are not based in any objective standards of beauty or aesthetics, but rather on our attitudes about the people speaking them.
Accent attitudes reflect our biases
Consider long-standing attitudes regarding the southern American accent. Some might automatically assess an accent from Tennessee or Kentucky as sounding less smart than one from Michigan or California. However, there is no scientific relationship between accent and intelligence; these stereotypes are learned behaviour.
Research shows young children of about five or six, for example, do not discriminate between U.S. northern and southern accents. As they get older, they start to develop the same attitudes of the adults around them, and by age 10 they start to find that northern-accented speakers sound “smarter” and more “in charge” than southern-accented speakers.
“French, which had taken centuries to develop into a most subtle intricate form — the height of sophistication — was far too complex for these simple savages to learn. So they did their poor, primitive best and contrived a queer, simplified ‘pidgin’ French dialect of their own.”
It is quite clear this judgment is not based in scientific fact, but rather on racist attitudes toward Black people. Today, language attitudes may be more subtle in their racism or classism, but they persist, using our biases about a group of people to affect how we feel about their way of speaking.
When speakers are familiar with an accent or dialect, however, they use their social knowledge to make judgments about the esthetics, determining which is more pleasing than another. This means that it’s not always the actual phonetic aspects of the language that drive our preferences, but rather social knowledge about the people who speak with that accent that we are assessing.
In terms of foreign accents in particular, our native language shapes the way we categorize the sounds of other languages. When languages have unfamiliar sounds, our brains need a little more time to process the correspondences between the foreign accent and our own so we can accurately categorize the sounds in the foreign-accented speech. Understanding different accents is a skill that develops over time, and greater exposure to speakers with a particular accent helps us understand that accent more easily.
The attitude we have about foreign accents is affected by our social knowledge of a person, their accent and where they come from. Having more frequent and positive associations with people from a particular region will make us more likely to find the accent pleasing and worth deciphering. Our ability to understand reflects the cognitive load that our brain is put through in order to categorize the different sounds that we are hearing.
Putting these two together, it is easy to see how the historical prestige associated with European accents, as well as the political power of leaders like Emmanuel Macron of France, Starmer from the United Kingdom or Modi of India would be reflected in Trump’s positive attitude towards them.
Similarly, he might consider a foreign journalist’s position on the world stage to be far less worth doing the cognitive work necessary to understand them.
Fundamentally, there is no objective criteria for determining the “beauty” of someone’s accent. Our attitudes towards particular accents are often much more rooted in our biases and how we see others in our world.
Nicole Rosen 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.
