China and the Cook Islands’ relationship “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”, says Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun, as opposition leaders in Rarotonga express a loss of confidence in Prime Minister Mark Brown.
In response to questions from the Associated Press about New Zealand government’s concerns regarding Brown’s visit to Beijing this week, Guo said Cook Islands was an important partner of China in the South Pacific.
“Since establishing diplomatic relations in 1997, our two countries have respected each other, treated each other as equals, and sought common development, achieving fruitful outcomes in exchanges and cooperation in various areas,” he said.
“China stands ready to work with the Cook Islands for new progress in bilateral relations.”
Guo said China viewed both New Zealand and the Cook Islands as important cooperation partners.
“China stands ready to grow ties and carry out cooperation with Pacific Island countries, including the Cook Islands,” he said.
“The relationship between China and the Cook Islands does not target any third party, and should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party.”
Information ‘in due course’ Guo added that Beijing would release information about the visit and the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement “in due course”.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun . . . “China stands ready to grow ties and carry out cooperation with Pacific Island countries.” Image: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs/RNZ
However, Cook Islanders, as well as the New Zealand government, have been left frustrated with the lack of clarity over what is in the deal which is expected to be penned this week.
United Party leader Teariki Heather is planning a protest on February 17 against Brown’s leadership.
He previously told RNZ that it seemed like Brown was “dictating to the people of the Cook Islands, that I’m the leader of this country and I do whatever I like”.
Another opposition MP with the Democratic Party, Tina Browne, is planning to attend the protest.
She said Brown “doesn’t understand the word transparent”.
“He is saying once we sign up we’ll provide copies [of the deal],” Browne said.
“Well, what’s the point? The agreement has been signed by the government so what’s the point in providing copies.
“If there is anything in the agreement that people do not agree with, what do we do then?”
Repeated attempts by Peters New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs office said Winston Peters had made repeated attempts for the government of the Cook Islands to share the details of the proposed agreement, which they had not done.
Peters’ spokesperson, like Browne, said consultation was only meaningful if it happened before an agreement was reached, not after.
“We therefore view the Cook Islands as having failed to properly consult New Zealand with respect to any agreements it plans to sign this coming week in China,” the spokesperson said.
Prime Minister Brown told RNZ Pacific that he did not think New Zealand needed to see the level of detail they are after, despite being a constitutional partner.
Ocean Ancestors, an ocean advocacy group, said Brown’s decision had taken people by surprise, despite the Cook Islands having had a long-term relationship with the Asia superpower.
“We are in the dark about what could be signed and so for us our concerns are that we are committing ourselves to something that could be very long term and it’s an agreement that we haven’t had consensus over,” the organisation’s spokesperson Louisa Castledine said.
The details that Brown has shared are that he would be seeking areas of cooperation, including help with a new inter-island vessel to replace the existing ageing ship and for controversial deep-sea mining research.
Castledine hopes that no promises have been made to China regarding seabed minerals.
“As far as we are concerned, we have not completed our research phase and we are still yet to make an informed decision about how we progress [on deep-sea mining],” she said.
“I would like to think that deep-sea mining is not a point of discussion, even though I am not delusional to the idea that it would be very attractive to any agreement.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
For many observers of the 2024 US presidential election, Donald Trump’s ability to harness so much of the Latino vote remains one of the more puzzling issues. Latino voters – men in particular – swung decisively towards Trump last November: increasing by 16 points from 2016 to 42% of the bloc in 2024.
This despite Trump’s consistent history of antagonistic remarks about Latino immigrants. It also appears to fly in the face of the fact that his policies on tariffs, border militarisation and mass deportations will likely affect Mexico, Panama and several other Latin American countries.
Clearly, Latinos swung towards Trump for the same reason many other voters did. Many were unhappy with the economy (particularly inflation). There was also widespread anxiety about a marked increase in immigration at the southern border.
But there are more profound reasons driving the dramatic shift in the Latino vote. A closer look at some of the historical dynamics that have shaped the Latino electorate gives a clue for the reason behind this seeming paradox.
The Latino vote comprises about 14.7% of all eligible US voters. Yet it is far from a monolith. It is a heterogeneous group of people who trace their roots to Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the rest of the 21 Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Each of these countries has a different political landscape. They are made up of vastly different people with a different background and distinct cultures. And these differences shape disparate Latino identities in the United States. The term “Latino” itself is a blanket term. It can include extremely different populations: Afro-Dominicans in the Bronx, white Cubans in Miami, indigenous Mexicans in Los Angeles, mestizo Salvadorans in Washington DC and a vast array of others.
Even within these national groups, there are also significant divisions. Partly, this is based on a person’s time of arrival in the US. Mexican-Americans whose families immigrated to California from border cities like Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez in the early 1940s as seasonal (and legal) agricultural workers will have different experiences and priorities than Mexicans who arrived more recently from the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca and settled in New York City without any legal pathway to citizenship. Meanwhile, Nicaraguan-American families who arrived in Miami in the 1980s fleeing the Sandinista revolution will have a different economic outlook from those escaping Daniel Ortega’s current dictatorship.
There’s no such thing as a generic “Latino” voter. The Latino population in the US needs to be understood as a heterogeneous one, made up of people with different experiences, priorities and preferences.
Latino conservatism
For many decades, Latinos were reliable Democratic voters – and many pundits predicted that they would stay that way, tipping the political scales decisively away from the Republican Party. But there has always been a strong strain of Latino conservatives voting Republican.
Religion plays a key role here. The majority of people of Latino heritage are Catholic. But there is a growing population of Evangelicals and other Christian denominations, reflecting a growth of those groups in some Latin American countries.
In El Salvador, for example, the rise of Evangelical religions has produced an increasingly culturally conservative population, who support the “mano dura” (strong hand) policies of Nayib Bukele. A similar trend can be found among Latino communities in the US, where Latino Evangelicals strongly supported Trump in 2024.
The political history of many Latin American countries is a clue to the make-up for migrants to the US. Mexico’s Cristero War in the 1920s prompted thousands of Catholics to flee the country’s anti-clerical government by migrating northwards. Three decades later, the Cuban revolution of 1959 produced large refugee flows of conservative and anticommunist migrants. These exiled groups – most notably, Cubans in South Florida – would ally with Republicans based on their punitive policies towards Cuba. This has helped turn Florida into a Republican stronghold.
More recently, 7 million Venezuelans fled the left-wing government of Nicolás Maduro. This has led to a more general antipathy among many Latino voters towards left-wing politics and politicians. Trump’s condemnation of Maduro and Venezuela has endeared him to politically conservative Latino voters of all national backgrounds.
Race, class, and immigration
Interestingly, it was also clear that some Latino voters are suspicious and resentful of newer waves of migrants, particularly recent asylum-seekers from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
This dynamic between earlier arrivals and new immigrants is nothing new in the US. Earlier waves of immigrants and their descendants, such as Irish or Italian immigrants, also adopted nativist attitudes towards newer arrivals. In some ways, each generation of immigrants has tried to “pull up the bridge” to the generation that comes after them.
Yet these negative reactions also relate to racial and class hierarchies both within and between Latin American countries. Like the US, Latin American countries have a long history of racism and colour discrimination, as well as deep class divides and very high rates of income inequality.
New immigrants who have arrived in recent years from places such as Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba and Nicaragua are poorer than earlier generations of immigrants – and often have darker skin. As a result, cultural divides may impede a strong sense of solidarity between earlier generations of Latino immigrants and recent arrivals.
This is not to suggest that racism and classism are the dominant drivers behind Latino support for Trump. But it may help explain why Trump’s campaign comments about recent Latino immigrants were not a dealbreaker for every Latino voter.
Ultimately, the Latino Trump supporter may not represent such a paradox after all. The so-called “Latino voter” is really a multiethnic, diverse bloc of people. While they share common linguistic and cultural features, Latinos are also motivated by a wide variety of religious, political and cultural factors that can be traced back to their own or their families’ experiences in Latin America.
The Latino vote is complex. Politicians who want to win their support would do well to understand how these complicated identities inform their political decisions and allegiances. It appears at the moment the Republicans are doing this better than their Democratic rivals.
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.
But while the era of dating apps is on the decline, people aren’t ditching the search for love altogether. There’s enough heart-shaped chocolates, red lingerie and silicone toys to keep us going for decades. The real question is: who or what is filling the void left by the dating app industry?
The answer is artificial intelligence.
Tech companies have woven AI into everything from facial recognition software to voice-activated assistants and sexbots. Now, it’s being inserted into online dating. As an anthropologist who writes about sexuality, dating and technology, this generates a lot of questions for me.
For instance, what are some of the ethical dilemmas this technology raises in terms of privacy and safety? What can we do instead of giving ourselves over to artificial intelligence when it comes to love and romance? As we navigate the complexities of love in the digital age, these questions demand thoughtful answers.
No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.
AI has been quietly reshaping the dating landscape for years. Marketed as a hyper-efficient solution to securing optimum matches in record time, it’s easy to see how AI is more appealing than traditional apps. Who wouldn’t want to avoid the monotony of endless swiping or the possibility of ghosting?
AI tools like ChatGPT can also generate dating conversations and optimize user profiles. However, the results can be hit-or-miss. One writer said ChatGPT made her “sound like someone’s 50-year-old uncle on Facebook.”
Then there’s Meeno, a relationship advice app founded by former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg. It uses generative AI and is designed to address loneliness among young people, especially men, who are statistically less likely to access help-seeking resources.
AI tools like ChatGPT can help users write dating profiles. (Shutterstock)
The most popular AI dating assistant at the moment is Rizz, an app that had more than 20,000 daily downloads in 2024. Rizz analyzes screenshots of conversations on other platforms and crafts reply suggestions.
Interestingly, men are twice as likely as women to consider an AI partner. This trend may be driven by differences in how men and women engage with technology, differences in societal expectations or a greater curiosity among men about combining AI with relationships.
Given the pronounced gender inequities already present in our society and the rise in sexual violence perpetrated by men against women through technology, AI dating platforms risk deepening these systemic inequities.
AI’s impact on how young people learn about sex and dating is another important topic. A recent scoping review highlighted the dangers of AI resources that reflect conservative and unscientific worldviews about sex and romance. When exposed to such views, youth become at risk of developing internalized shame for being curious about sex, dating and cybersexual activities.
Another troubling aspect of AI in dating is the proliferation of fraudulent dating apps that employ chatbots. These apps lure users into installing a dating app and paying subscription fees to chat with existing users. However, the sole purpose of these apps is to cheat new users into paying money to fake accounts that are managed by chatbots.
Getting more groove in our hearts
More technology doesn’t necessarily mean better lives. If anything, it can actually contribute to the current “loneliness pandemic” that’s caused, in part, by our over-reliance on devices.
Selective doses of AI can be helpful to bounce ideas off of, or to help work through an unrequited crush, but if we permit AI to take over this vital aspect of life, our hearts could become lined with hollow connections. That’s the last thing we all need.
Dating app platforms like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge are becoming passe for millennials and Gen Z. (Shutterstock)
Vintage thrifting, cooking, game nights and do-it-yourself art projects are effective and fun ways to resist the AI creep, whether in dating or in daily life.
However, creating these options isn’t something you should have to do alone. Community organizers, cultural leaders and thoughtful influencers also have roles to play in AI-free activities and opportunities that foster connection. Think old school cultural events tailored towards niche demographic groups, like queer, gender-diverse and women-only spaces.
By creating and participating in these kinds of activities, you can cultivate experiences that help you make decisions about love and life on your own terms, versus being directed by what aggressive capitalist corporations want you to do.
Treena Orchard 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 Norman W. Park, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health, York University, York University, Canada
The demand for electricity is growing rapidly as the world transitions from fossil fuels to low carbon-emitting forms of energy. However, making this transition will be difficult.
Ontario is projected to require 75 per cent more electricity by 2050, spurred by increasing demand from the industrial sector, data centres, electric vehicle (EV) adoption and households, according to the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO).
To meet this demand, Ontario Energy Minister Stephen Lecce has proposed transforming the province into an “energy superpower” by aggressively expanding nuclear energy and natural gas while cutting support for wind and solar renewable energy.
This plan was spelled out in a policy directive from Lecce instructing the IESO to consider bids from all energy sources, opening the door to allow bids from natural gas and nuclear energy.
This is a departure from previous policies. Previously, under former Energy Minister Todd Smith, the IESO had stipulated bids for the electrical grid should only be from wind, solar, hydro or biomass.
The Ontario government should reconsider these plans. Non-renewable energy sources are costly, rely on new, expensive technologies, ignore the harm to human health and ignore the consequences for global warming.
Expanding nuclear
A central pillar of the Ontario government’s energy plan is the aggressive expansion of nuclear power. The province has committed to refurbishing 14 CANDU reactors at Bruce, Darlington and Pickering, and has proposed constructing new reactors at Bruce.
Ontario is also the first jurisdiction in the world to contractually build a BWRX–300 small modular reactor project at Darlington, despite not knowing its projected cost.
The cost of this small modular reactor may be much higher than similarly sized solar, wind and natural gas projects. This is unsurprising, given that the costs of nuclear projects are often much higher than projected.
Ontario encountered a similar issue when the Darlington nuclear generating station was constructed. The actual costs of nuclear projects were more than double projected costs and took almost six years longer to complete than projected.
Given these historical challenges and uncertainties, the province’s push for nuclear expansion is a cause for concern.
Opposition to wind and solar
Despite significant cost reductions in utility-scale wind and solar farms, which makes them less expensive than nuclear and fossil fuels in many parts of the world, Ontario’s recent policy directive reduced support for these non-emitting renewable energy sources.
The directive is a continuation of the government’s antipathy to wind and solar energy. Shortly after winning its first election in 2018, the Doug Ford government cancelled 750 renewable energy contracts at a cost of $230 million to Ontario residents. Ford defended this decision by saying it saved taxpayers $790 million and that wind turbines had “destroyed” Ontario’s energy file.
By curtailing support for renewable energy, Ontario risks missing out on the economic, environmental and technological benefits these energy sources offer. In other words, it may hinder the province’s ability to transition to a cleaner and more sustainable energy future.
Support for natural gas
Instead of investing in wind and solar to power Ontario’s electrical grid, the province has increased its reliance on natural gas. This expansion has tripled the percentage of energy provided by gas-fired turbines from four per cent in 2017 to 12.8 per cent in 2023. It’s projected to grow to 25 per cent by 2030.
According to Health Canada, outdoor air pollution has a total economic cost in Canada of $120 billion per year, and it resulted in 6,000 premature deaths per year in Ontario and 15,300 deaths in Canada. That’s about eight times higher than the annual number of motor vehicle fatalities in Canada.
Shifting focus from natural gas to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar could reduce these environmental and health impacts in Ontario.
Reconsidering Ontario’s energy transition
Ontario’s energy transition must involve supplying more energy to an expanding electrical grid while ensuring it remains reliable and resilient. The current government’s plans to turn the province into an “energy superpower” will commit Ontario to decades of costly expenditures and relies on unproven new technologies.
The government’s proposal to increase natural gas to supply the electricity grid and new buildings will increase the risk of premature death and serious illness to Ontarians and will increase greenhouse gas emission, undermining efforts to combat global warming.
Lecce should reconsider his current policy directive to the IESO. Future bids for the electrical grid should instead be evaluated for their impacts on the health of Ontario residents and climate change.
Ontario’s energy policies should also be guided by knowledgeable experts outside of government, rather than solely by politicians. Establishing a blue-ribbon committee comprising energy scientists and environmental specialists would provide needed oversight and ensure the province’s energy strategy is cost-effective, technologically sound and aligned with climate goals.
Ontario has an opportunity to lead by example in balancing energy needs with environmental and health priorities.
Norman W. Park receives no funding from any organization that would benefit from this article. He is affiliated with Seniors for Climate Action Now.
YouTube’s algorithm is extremely powerful. If the company were to direct some of its users’s attention to pro-climate content, this would likely have positive consequences on a large scale.(Shutterstock)
Have we tried everything to tackle the climate crisis? At least one simple idea has hardly been explored: prioritizing climate content on social media.
The climate crisis is seriously aggravated by a lack of attention, including in the recent United States presidential election campaign. But algorithmic recommenders could help, as they are responsible for a significant proportion of how human attention online is allocated. Algorithmic recommenders are artificial intelligence systems that suggest content, such as news feeds, music or videos, to people based on their behaviour and preferences.
Take YouTube, where hundreds of millions of users watch billions of hours of content each day. That’s a huge amount of brain time. But how do these users select the handful of videos they watch, out of the billions of uploaded content online? Well, in 70 per cent of cases, they merely follow YouTube’s automated recommendations. This system determines a massive proportion of human attention.
Effectively leveraging this attention could help achieve vital advances in climate action across the political spectrum.
What kind of videos could be recommended? Educational videos on climate change are clear candidates, but so are conferences by climate activists, as well as content that encourages viewers to mobilize or change their behaviour, for example by promoting public transport, plant-based cooking or climate demonstrations. The two per cent figure is a proposal, not a dogma. It’s far from invasive, but it’s still significant.
Another fundamental question is: who decides which videos are good for the climate? From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to relevant non-governmental organizations to video hosting platforms themselves, there are potential avenues for determining climate-positive content. In any of these cases, transparency will be key to effectiveness.
Algorithmic recommenders are responsible for a significant proportion of how human attention online is allocated. (Shutterstock)
Ethical analysis of YouTube recommendations
Firstly, as American researcher Tarleton Gillespie explains in his book Custodians of the Internet, YouTube is already doing moderation, which is a central part of its business. For example, it removes pornographic, violent or illegal content in the name of user safety and well-being, and in accordance to copyright or local laws. Our proposal is merely an extension of these efforts.
Currently, YouTube’s algorithmic system appears not to be programmed to push relevant content for the climate, which is endangering the viability of climate content creators. Its own researchers report that it instead maximizes user engagement.
YouTube’s algorithm is extremely powerful. If the platform were to direct some of its users’ attention to pro-climate action content, it would likely go a long way toward boosting awareness and encouraging action on climate change. There is a strong argument to be made for programming the algorithm along these lines. Simply put, a significant potential benefit for us all is possible at relatively little cost.
Research has also found that YouTube has, in the past, contributed to spreading false information about the climate crisis. A 2024 report found that YouTube earned millions of dollars a year from content that promoted climate denial.
YouTube says that it won’t show ads on “content that crosses the line to climate change denial.” However, video-sharing platforms have a moral responsibility to also promote information that is factual. This could be done by amplifying climate videos as we propose.
YouTube’s algorithm may be likened to a librarian who is tasked with deciding how the library’s books are displayed. In the context of the climate crisis, a wise and informed librarian should put forward at least some books on this issue. Online algorithms should be designed less like an attention-grabbing machine and more like a responsible librarian.
Recommendation algorithms as part of the solution
Our proposal would likely not be without detractors. For example, would it amount to manipulating users? Our proposal is overtly about influencing people’s attitudes in favour of tackling the climate crisis. But it’s not about imposing specific content on the user, who remains free to choose whether to watch the content. The nudge is very gentle — and hardly all that different from the algorithmic nudges taking place all across the internet.
Our proposed intervention merely acts on a small fraction of recommendations. No one will force viewers to watch videos with Greta Thunberg, David Suzuki or Michael Mann. On the other hand, if successful, our proposal could help avoid the serious problems that would result from climate inaction.
In the face of the growing environmental crisis, recommendation algorithms like YouTube’s could help us build climate bridges across political divides, promote action and raise awareness — all essential tools to building a more just future.
Lê Nguyên Hoang is the President of the nonprofit Tournesol Association, which is mentioned in the paper.
He is also the YouTube content creator of the Science4All channel, which sometimes produce climate-related videos.
He was previously a researcher at EPFL, with a salary derived from an AI Safety research grant.
Martin Gibert and Maxime Lambrecht 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.
There are many difficulties in converting any biological research into a medicine that will treat patients. Because of the complexity involved, these difficulties apply especially to translating cell research in the laboratory to a successful treatment for heart failure, where the heart is unable to pump blood around the body properly.
The definitive treatment for heart failure is a heart transplant – a difficult and costly procedure. Pills are prescribed for the condition, but they only delay death and are not effective in changing the cause of the disease.
Fifteen to 20 years ago, scientists started enthusiastically exploring the use of heart muscle precursor cells grown in the laboratory to transplant to the failing heart in the hope that they might make new heart muscle. Although results in animal tests were positive, they all failed in humans. Included in the failures was the one that my colleagues and I conducted.
We’d had success with animal studies and even some positive results in small groups of patients. Buoyed by these results, we organised a randomised controlled trial – the gold standard for medical studies in humans.
Our study was funded by the European Commission and entailed a massive effort by a large group of researchers across Europe. The result was that the therapy, which entailed injecting bone marrow cells into the heart muscle of patients who had had a heart attack, did not work.
The authors of the article report growing patches of heart muscle in the lab from precursor cells and then applying those patches to the hearts of monkeys that had had an induced heart attack, producing heart failure.
A woman who’d had a heart attack in 2016 also had the procedure. Three months later, she had a heart transplant, allowing the researchers to analyse her heart.
As this was the only case of a human receiving this treatment, and the procedure had failed, as the heart was removed from the patient, the title of the Nature article is perhaps too wide in its scope: Engineering heart muscle allografts for heart repair in primates and humans.
It is noted that a senior author of the article declares that he has shares in the company that will commercialise any success. This conflict may have been declared, but it is still a potential conflict.
Heart arrhythmia
The article does not discuss previous attempts to use heart muscle precursor cells for treating heart failure in humans. In particular, the pioneering work in Paris of the surgeon Philippe Menasché who in 2003 reported in the Lancet that he had injected heart muscle precursor cells into the myocardium (heart muscle) of a patient with apparent success.
He then published the results of a study where he repeated the same procedure in a larger group. The study was not successful. Menasché noted that some of the patients suffered from cardiac rhythm abnormalities following the procedure.
There was much discussion in the field that the junctions between the transplanted cells and the patient’s own heart muscle cells might give rise to abnormal electrical activity that would unpredictably produce potentially fatal heart rhythm change.
Because of the history of failure of cell therapy in human trials after positive tests in lab animals, the objective reader should regard results from animal experiments with scepticism.
John Martin received funding from the European Commission for the BAMI trial.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Malvika Gupta, DPhil Candidate in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford
Ecuador’s presidential election will go to a second round after the current president, Daniel Noboa, and the candidate for the left-wing Revolución Ciudadana (RC) party, Luisa González, received nearly identical shares of the vote.
After more than three-quarters of the ballots had been counted, Noboa led the 16 candidates with 44.6% of the vote – short of the 50% needed to win outright. González trailed with 44.02%. A run-off to decide the winner is scheduled to take place in April.
The election, which saw voters head to the polls for the third time in four years, took place against the backdrop of violence. Under Noboa’s two predecessors, who like him entered office with a neoliberal agenda, Ecuador became a narco-trafficking hub.
It now has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. This fact was laid bare by the 2023 assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, one of the candidates in the snap presidential election called that year when the former president, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved congress in an attempt to escape impeachment.
Noboa defeated González in an October 2023 runoff vote to see out Lasso’s term and then declared an “internal armed conflict” against criminal groups. He believed the only way to stop his country becoming a “narco-state” was with a hardline crackdown on organised crime groups.
But the militarisation of Ecuador’s streets and prisons has led to serious human rights violations by security forces. In late 2024, for example, four Afro-Ecuadorian boys died in the coastal town of Guayaquil after being detained by the military. Human rights groups say this case has prompted a shift in public attitudes to Noboa’s war on the gangs.
The rampant violence has been compounded by an energy crisis. Rolling blackouts instigated by a severe drought have raised questions about under-investment in Ecuador’s energy sector.
A raid on the Mexican embassy in capital city Quito in April 2024 led to the detention of Ecuador’s fugitive former vice-president Jorge Glas. This has prompted concern about Noboa’s lackadaisical attitude towards international law.
The result of the latest election was narrower than many polls had predicted. This suggests that the second round will be hard to call. But there are signs that the Ecuadorian left-wing, which has been divided for more than a decade, could be set to rally around González’s candidacy.
A key reason for the spate of neoliberal presidents in Ecuador is the division between those supportive of the country’s former leftist leader, Rafael Correa, who led the country from 2007 to 2017, and those who oppose him.
Indigenous voters, who make up roughly one-quarter of Ecuador’s electorate, helped Correa first come to power. And his government was successful in reducing extreme poverty and economic inequality.
But conflict soon arose over his policies to fund social services through the extraction of natural resources. In 2012, Correa accused the country’s main Indigenous organisation, Conaie, of trying to destabilise Ecuador by protesting against mining plans.
Correa also alienated Ecuador’s Indigenous movement by dismantling their hard-won intercultural bilingual education system in favour of mining revenue-funded education, as well as attempting to take control of water resources away from individual communities and give it to a new state agency.
In response to protests, Correa’s government prosecuted Indigenous leaders, saying they were saboteurs and terrorists. So, since 2017, many Indigenous voters have combined with the right-wing to keep RC from power. The RC candidate has lost the last two elections despite entering the second round because they did not have the Indigenous vote.
To break this impasse, RC participated in a dialogue with various left-wing parties, including the Indigenous-aligned Pachakutik political movement, to forge a unified electoral alliance for the 2025 election. These efforts did not result in a joint presidential bid. But they did lead to two favourable outcomes for the Ecuadorian left-wing.
RC and Pachakutik agreed a pact not to attack each other or the smaller left-wing candidates during the election campaign. And they also pledged to consider supporting the candidate of the other party should they reach the second round.
But this will, among other things, depend on how they manage their divergent positions on extractivism. RC sees the extraction of natural resources as one of the main economic pathways for Ecuador, while Pachakutik remains staunchly opposed.
González has said she wants to accelerate the transition to clean energy, but has also recognised the importance of oil and gas to Ecuador. She supported the “no” vote during the 2023 referendum where Ecuadorians voted to halt oil drilling in the Yasuní national park, arguing that exploration should continue in the area.
Pachakutik, on the other hand, seeks a post-extractive economic transition. The campaign of Pachakutik’s presidential candidate, Leonidas Iza, proposed boosting national agricultural and industrial production as an alternative to extractive capitalism. Iza envisions an economy based on harmony between humans and nature.
A plurinational tide?
Another area where RC and Pachakutik diverge is in their vision of plurinationality. Ecuador became the first country in the world to define itself as “plurinational” in 2008, adopting a new constitution that acknowledged the rights of nature as well as strengthening rights for Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups.
But, since then, the application of plurinationalism has faced major obstacles – not least because of the commitment of successive governments to resource extraction.
Pachakutik’s plurinational ethos was reflected in Iza’s election campaign. It featured images of a poncho-sporting Amazonian capybara threatened by extractivism, as well as rap songs of support by Afro-Ecuadorians living in coastal city slums. Plurinationalism was absent from – or certainly not central to – the electoral campaigns of most other candidates.
Ecuador’s Indigenous movement will probably determine who becomes Ecuador’s next president. Whether or not RC will now take plurinationalism seriously and forge an alliance with Pachakutik remains to be seen.
Malvika Gupta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ben Purvis, Research Associate, Sustainability Assessment, University of Sheffield
Most of this fuel is currently made from used cooking oil.Scharfsinn / shutterstock
The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has described so-called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as a “game changer”. As she announced government support for a series of airport expansions, she said that the fuel “can reduce carbon emissions from flying by 70%”.
This number is misleading. Optimistic estimates do suggest that fully replacing fossil jet fuel with its sustainable alternative could lead to total savings of around 70%. But it will be hard to produce enough SAF to make a difference on that sort of scale. Even if the UK meets its ambitious targets, an annual saving of 7% by 2030 is more plausible.
SAF is synthetic liquid fuel derived from something other than fossil fuels. These inputs have to be processed into a liquid that can be burned safely while also storing a lot of energy for its weight, since minimising weight is crucial. This is why long-haul electric battery-powered planes are unlikely to take off any time soon.
The UK classifies three major pathways for creating sustainable aviation fuel. It can be derived from oils or fats, including used cooking oil or tallow. It can come from other sorts of material, such as municipal solid waste, agricultural residues, or sewage. Or it can be made from hydrogen and captured carbon using renewable electricity.
SAF can also be produced from bioenergy crops, and products such as palm oil. However the UK won’t certify it as sustainable, due to concerns about land use and impacts on wildlife.
Emissions that would have occurred anyway
Burning SAF actually emits a similar amount of CO₂ to fossil jet fuel. Instead, most savings come from how we account for the waste and renewable energy that is used to produce it.
Waste emits greenhouse gases anyway, sustainable fuel supporters argue. So why not have those emissions do something useful, like power a plane? Jenya Smyk/shutterstock
SAF fundamentally relies on assumptions that if waste or energy crops were not used to make this fuel, they would be incinerated, would degrade, or would in some way release their embodied carbon anyway. In the case of fuel derived from renewable energy and captured carbon, it assumes that carbon came from the atmosphere in the first place. This allows these emissions to be deducted from the total impact of SAF, leading to lower emissions than conventional aviation fuel.
Is sustainable aviation fuel even sustainable?
Estimates of how much greenhouse gas SAF could cut vary greatly due to the many different ways it can be produced, and the complexities of accounting for emissions across the entire life cycle from waste, to fuel production, to plane engine. A 2023 review by the Royal Society illustrates this nicely. It found SAF could at best produce effectively negative emissions (a 111% reduction), while at worst it could be more carbon intensive than fossil kerosene jet fuel (a 69% increase).
While policy incentives are likely to encourage increased production, there remain serious concerns that will need to be addressed before SAF can become a serious competitor for conventional jet fuel. There are hard limits to the amount of used cooking oil available for instance, and the use of other feedstocks is still in its infancy.
Meanwhile any renewable energy used to make the fuel will have to compete with growing demand from electric vehicles, AI data centres and more. And there are big worries the industry simply won’t be profitable enough to attract initial capital investment, let alone take on its well-established rival.
UK SAF production
Coming into effect in January, the UK’s SAF mandate sets legal obligations for aviation fuel suppliers in the UK to progressively increase proportions of sustainable fuel, from 2% of total jet fuel in 2025 to 10% in 2030, and 22% in 2040.
As of 2023, 97% of the UK’s supply is derived from used cooking oil, with the rest from food waste. Only 8% of this cooking oil is sourced from the UK, with most being imported from China and Malaysia. The UK also comprises 16% of the global SAF market, despite representing only 1% of total passengers.
Let us assume that Rachel Reeves’ 70% saving is deliverable if fossil jet fuel was fully replaced with SAF. That’s optimistic in itself, but not beyond the realms of possibility.
Getting hold of that much sustainable fuel is less plausible, however – the total demand for jet fuel in the UK is more than ten times the current global production of SAF. But let’s assume that the rocky global market can deliver the UK’s ambitious demand of 10% SAF use by 2030.
Reeves’ figure then becomes an optimistic value of 7% savings across the UK industry. If we then correct for anticipated growth of passenger numbers, assuming plans for airport expansion, those savings are likely to vanish.
While SAF has a role to play in decarbonisation, growth sits in clear opposition to its impacts and potential. If the UK has any hope of meeting its climate targets, it should instead be seeking alternatives to flying where possible.
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The social housing sector in England houses 4 million tenants (16% of the country’s households). The sector is home to some of the UK’s most vulnerable and poorest households, and paying rent is one of the biggest challenges they face. If they do not pay, they risk being evicted from their homes.
Recent research we carried out for the Nuffield Foundation highlights the difficulties many tenants face paying their rent, and the sacrifices they have to make to do so.
We surveyed more than 1,200 tenants across 15 neighbourhoods in England, and found that 9% were in rent arrears. However, this figure dramatically underestimates the number of tenants who were finding it difficult to pay their rent: 61% had gone without essentials, such as food and heating, in order to pay it in the last year.
The financial situation of tenants has become more difficult in recent years due to a combination of cost-of-living increases, including rapidly rising food and energy prices, and real-term reductions in salary due to increasingly precarious employment. Some 43% of tenants we surveyed regularly ran out of money before their next wage or benefit payment.
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In-depth interviews revealed that many tenants ran out of money before their basic needs (rent, household bills, food, clothing and travel to work or school) had been met. In these cases, they had to make difficult decisions, sometimes choosing between paying their rent – the highest priority payment for most – or meeting other basic needs.
Nearly half (46%) of tenants had made the difficult decision to cut back on their heating expenditure so they could pay their rent. Tenants reported turning off appliances and using hot water sparingly:
“I had to turn the heating off today. As the last bit of money I had was used to buy packed lunch things for my daughter for school.”
They reported a range of strategies for keeping warm without using their gas or electricity, including sitting in sleeping bags, wearing thermal clothing and thick jumpers indoors, covering themselves with blankets and fleeces and using hot water bottles.
Those who did use their heating reported putting it on for just one hour. One woman with a seven-month-old baby reported using the “heating minimal, mainly at night when the temperatures really drop, so I just keep him wrapped up usually.”
Tenants also reported using their electricity minimally, not watching television, boiling the kettle if I need to do the washing up and sitting with the lights off:
“[We] switch everything of … We would switch the TVs off … We’d just switch everything off as much as we could. We wouldn’t use the lights. We’d just use the torches on our phones.”
‘One meal a day’
Some 43% of tenants reported that they had cut back on their food spending in order to pay their rent. Some reported that they skipped meals – “I eat I’d say one meal a day at teatime,” – or not eating adequately, for example, eating insufficient portions or toast in place of an evening meal.
One woman reported going without meals at one point in order to pay rent: “I’d sooner do without food myself to do the council [rent] cos they’re on your back.”
Tenants reported running out of money for food or replacing substantial cooked dinners with snacks:
“Well, I used to do myself a proper meal every evening, but now I just do it two times a week … and I have beans on toast or something like that.”
There were also many examples of participants doing without nutritious food because it was more expensive than processed food. These tenants were very aware of the lower nutritional value of the food they were buying and lamented not being able to afford the fresh food they preferred.
This included pregnant women and people with children, for whom nutritious food is particularly important. Recognising this, some talked about buying healthier food for their children than for themselves when they could.
Participants in our study reported that they bought unhealthy processed foods because they could not afford fresh food. 1000 Words/Shutterstock
National income and tenancy standards
Our research shows that most tenants are committed to paying their rent, prioritising it at a cost to their and their family’s health and wellbeing. Only by improving tenants’ financial circumstances will the situation change.
One step towards this would be for the government to endorse the minimum income standard, a level of income that allows people to “thrive” and not merely “survive”. The government should use this standard to determine benefit rates and the national minimum wage, alongside measures to provide people with greater job security.
Our research has shown that many tenants have only been able to sustain their tenancies by going without. But can we really say someone is sustaining their tenancy, if their home is cold and damp because they cannot afford to heat their homes? They are using mobile phones torches for lighting? They are skipping meals?
Social housing landlords must rethink how they understand tenancy sustainment. It shouldn’t just be about how long tenants stay in a property, but about the quality of their life while in it.
The research discussed in this article was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Paul Hickman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The research discussed in this article was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Kesia Reeve 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.
In an unprecedented decision on December 6 2024, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the November 25 presidential elections after it received credible intelligence of large-scale external interference rigging the results of the first round in favour of a hardly-known far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu.
Georgescu’s massive last-minute surge was largely blamed on the creation of thousands of paid-for Russian-controlled bots on TikTok and illegal campaign financing.
This may seem like last year’s news, but with elections coming up in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and possibly even Ukraine, there’s plenty to worry about – apart from a new US president who is disrupting Washington (and the world) with a flurry of executive orders and foreign policy initiatives that feel more like real estate sales pitches.
Concerns about Russian election interference are nothing new, but so far the picture of Moscow’s success is rather mixed.
Back in January 2017, the US intelligence community was confident that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential elections to get Donald Trump elected. The following year, similar accusations arose in the context of presidential elections in France. But in France, the Kremlin failed to prevent the victory of Emmanuel Macron.
By contrast, despite alleged Russian interference in Moldova, the country’s pro-western president won a second term in November 2024. A referendum on a constitutional commitment to EU membership was supported by a razor-thin majority of voters.
Opinion polls on perceptions of Russia and Vladimir Putin across western democracies also offer some solace. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in 2024, positive views of Russia and its leader remain very low across EU and Nato member countries. At the same time, approval ratings of the EU and Nato remained high among member countries’ citizens.
But these relatively comforting headline figures mask important, and somewhat worrying, trends. In Germany, which holds early parliamentary elections on February 23, positive views of Putin more than doubled from 8% in 2023 to 17% in 2024. This is still a far cry from the 76% who approved of Putin in 2003 or even the 36% who did so in 2019, according to the same survey. The German increase is an outlier among the 13 EU members, but in only one of them – Italy – did support for Putin drop, compared with the previous year.
The same goes for support for the EU and Nato. The median level of support for the EU across nine member states surveyed stands at 63%, with 36% of participants holding unfavourable views. Germany, with 63% favourable views, however, recorded the second consecutive decline, down from 78% in 2022 and 71% in 2023. And Germany is less of an outlier here – favourable views of the EU among member states have generally declined somewhat over the past two years.
Musk speaks at an AfD rally.
When it comes to Nato, 63% of survey participants in 13 member countries thought more positively of the alliance, while 33% had more negative views. But again, with the exception of Hungary and Canada (where favourability went up), the share of those with favourable views had declined by between two and eight percentage points since last year.
Does this mean that Putin is winning? No, at least not yet. Attitude surveys are less important than election results.
Russia appears to have had some recent success in changing election outcomes, for instance in Romania where Romanian intelligance services discovered evidence of voter manipulation. But the Romanian example (in annulling the election) is also illustrative of how important it is for democracies to fight back – and even more importantly to take preventive action.
And this is a lesson that seems to have sunk in. On January 30, the foreign ministers of 12 EU member states sent a joint letter to Brussels urging the European Commission to make more aggressive use of its powers under the Digital Services Act to protect the integrity of democratic elections in the bloc. Article 25 of that act, crucially, establishes an obligation on online platforms to design their services free from deception and manipulation and ensure that users can make informed decisions.
While the commission has yet to demonstrate its resolve under the Digital Services Act, a Berlin court on February 7 2025, ordered that X must hand over data needed to track disinformation to two civil society groups who had requested it.
Musk and Putin: shared values?
If Putin is winning, he is not winning on his own. Democracies are not only under threat from Russia. Musk – an unelected billionaire wielding unprecedented influence under Donald Trump – has repeatedly been accused of interfering in European debates and election campaigns. Of his comments on the German election, Musk has argued that as he has significant investments in Germany he has the right to comment on its politics and that the AfD “resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment”.
What Musk and Putin have in common is their deep dislike of open liberal democracies and a cunning ability to employ technology to further their goals by promoting political parties and movements that share their illiberal views.
Where they differ is that Musk focuses on the far right – Germany’s AfD or the UK’s Tommy Robinson. But Putin tends to back whoever he sees as serving Russian interests in weakening western unity and influence. This leads to the Kremlin lending support to leaders on both the far right and far left.
But often Putin’s and Musk’s proteges are the same. In the case of the German AfD, it was no accident that Putin echoed comments from a speech Musk gave at an AfD election rally, saying that Germans should move beyond their war guilt. Both were keen to remove the stain of being too close to Germany’s Nazi past from the AfD and make it not just electable but also respectable enough to bring into a coalition, much like Austria’s far-right Freedom Party which has a long history of friendly relations with Putin.
And what Musk can do openly on X, Putin tries to achieve with a campaign of his bot army on the platform.
Perhaps the most significant similarity between Musk and Putin – and others who have been accused of election interference – is that they tap into a growing reservoir of discontent with liberal democracy.
According to a 2024 survey of 31 democracies worldwide, 54% of participants were dissatisfied with how they saw democracy working. In 12 high-income countries – Canada, US, and 10 EU member states – dissatisfaction was even higher with 64% and has been increasing for the fourth consecutive year.
Pushing back against the kind of blatant election interference by the likes of Putin and Musk is clearly important. But it will not be enough to reverse persistent trends of decline in the support for democracy and its standard bearers including the EU and Nato. It is right to resist and prosecute election rigging. But it is also crucial to ask why people are dissatisfied with democracy – and to do something about it.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
Water bills are going up in England and Wales, even after the series of scandals around water companies. Last year water firms paid £158 million in fines following a record-breaking number of sewage dumps in rivers and seas.
Severn Trent Water and United Utilities alone reportedly made 1,374 illegal sewage spills over two years. (Both companies took issue with the analysis that led to this figure but acknowledged concerns about sewage discharges.)
There have been other notable incidents. Whistleblowers have told of water companies that fail to treat legally required amounts of sewage and divert that sewage to public waterways. To add to the disgrace, water companies have generally failed to invest enough in the UK’s water infrastructure.
Research suggests that governments have been pressured to become more “business-like”. This has given rise to the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to run important public services, such as water, transport and even prisons. Water companies in England and Wales are private companies that bid for their contracts, while in Scotland, the water provider is a public organisation.
While other findings show that PPPs can support important public service needs, such as public health, research by my colleagues and I examines a consistent pattern in UK PPP scandals and wrongdoing. Over the past decade and a half, billions of pounds of taxpayers’ funds are unaccounted for. This appears to be largely because private interests have been prioritised over public needs.
As a researcher of PPP wrongdoing, the reasons for many of the scandals seem obvious. My colleagues and I studied parliamentary inquiries and reports that have scrutinised PPP wrongdoing. This research can tell us a great deal about the UK’s predicament with regard to the failings in the water industry.
The first lesson is that, in general, many PPPs are motivated actually to reduce the quality of the services they deliver. One parliamentary inquiry found that contracting services out from the public to the private sector had become a “transactional process” where cost-cutting is favoured and the “knock-on cost” to users results in a lower-quality public service.
Other findings showed that companies regularly reduced the quality of a service to maximise profits. One way was to bid for a public service at a low price. A Public Accounts Committee member observed that companies coming in with low quotes for contracts can end up damaging services by under-investing in them.
Another example is Sodexo – a private prison management provider. It cut employee numbers by around 200 and a subsequent BBC Panorama documentary detailed escapes and widespread drug use in the prisons they managed and also criticised a lack of safety for both prisoners and prison officers. Sodexo acknowledged the programme had highlighted problems and said it would investigate, but added that there had been “positive actions and improvements” already.
Similar practices were observed at a children’s prison run by security firm G4S, where an officer was left with brain damage after an attack by inmates. G4S admitted liability for the officer’s injuries and agreed a settlement with him.
Pay the fine, it’s cheaper
The second lesson is it can be cost-effective to breach contracts and pay fines. Companies sometimes breach the terms of their public-private contracts because it’s in their economic interest. This even has a name – economists call it “efficiency breach”.
When observing the fines in comparison to the profitable contracts, it’s easy to posit what the motivations of many in the UK’s public service system are. In 2017, despite previous indictments of wrongdoing, G4S won £25 million of government contracts.
In 2020 the firm won another £300 million contract to run Wellingborough “mega-prison” in England. Despite some raised eyebrows, G4S said at the time it aimed to make the site a blueprint for “innovation, rehabilitation and modernisation” in the prison service.
Pay the shareholders, invest later
The third lesson is that shareholders are more important than long-term investments in a service. This is perhaps the most notable feature of the UK’s public service system, where a vast array of shareholders benefit from the profits made by PPPs. In one of the parliamentary reports we analysed, which details the collapse of the facilities management firm Carillion, it was clear that shareholders’ interests trumped good management and long-term investment.
As was noted in the report, despite Carillion’s collapse, the firm paid out £333 million more to shareholders than it generated in cash between 2012 and 2017. Often, this shareholder primacy can even go against a firm’s own employees rather than just the state and taxpayers. One MP noted that despite its pension scheme being in deficit, shareholders were still receiving dividends.
Often, shareholders are prioritised because of short-term thinking. These processes can lead to firms passing these bad practices down their supply chains.
The behaviour of water companies is suggestive of these dynamics. Since water companies have been privatised, they have loaded themselves up with debt (£64 billion) but paid out £78 billion to shareholders. Some 70% of these shareholders are “foreign investment firms, private equity, pension funds and businesses lodged in tax havens”.
So what should be done? There are plenty of ways to enhance and improve the UK’s PPP problems. The most obvious may be to renationalise public services and renew the quality of public services through New Deal-style investments. After all, this is what what most of the UK electorate wants.
There are other options. An innovative and exciting frontier is opening for businesses to recognise their environmental responsibilities – initiatives in New Zealand, India and Ecuador are giving the status of personhood to rivers and ecosystems, for example.
Outdoor fashion brand Patagonia has “the Earth” as its only shareholder, and hair and skincare brand Faith in Nature has appointed nature to its board. Imagine if the UK’s water companies had the rivers and seas represented.
In the end, only time will tell how water companies will be held accountable. But for the moment it’s the UK taxpayer and consumer paying the price.
G4S was approached about this article but declined to comment.
Daniel Fisher receives funding from the Leverhulme/British Academy for his work with heritage steam train drivers, which is unrelated to his research on PPP wrongdoing.
In the second world war, the physician Henry Beecher observed that some of his soldier patients, despite being injured on the battlefield, required no strong painkillers to manage their pain. In some cases, the injury was as severe as losing part of a limb.
A truly remarkable phenomenon had come into play – the effects of fear, stress and emotion on the brain had switched off their pain. But how does this work – and how can we use it to our advantage?
We all struggle with pain at times. The burning of indigestion, the wince of a scald from the kettle. The sharp stabbing of a sliced finger.
But despite its unpleasantness, pain has a critically important purpose, designed to protect the body rather than harm it. A fundamental concept to first understand is that you do not detect pain – it is a sensation. A sensation that your brain has created – from information it receives from the countless neurons (nerve cells) which supply your skin.
These specialised neurons are called nociceptors – they detect stimuli which are noxious, or potentially damaging to the body. This stimulation might range from a mechanical cut or crush injury, to extreme hot or cold temperatures.
So, if you touch a hot iron, or stand on a sharp nail, the correct reaction is to move your hand or foot away from it. The brain responds to pain by initiating muscle contractions in your arm or leg. In doing so, any further damage is averted.
The course of information, rushing along one neuron to another in a relay, is carried as electrical currents called action potentials. These begin at the skin, travel along nerve highways and into the spinal cord. When the information reaches the uppermost level of the brain – the cerebral cortex – a sensation of pain is generated.
Blocking pain signals
Many different factors can interfere with this transmission of information – we don’t perceive pain if the route to the cortex is blocked. Take the use of anaesthetics, for instance.
Local anaesthetics are injected directly into the skin to deactivate nociceptors (like lidocaine) – perhaps in A+E to perform stitches. Other agents induce a loss of consciousness – these are general anaesthetics, for more extensive surgical operations.
Pain is also a very variable experience. Commonly, we ask patients to quantify their pain by giving a value along a scale of nought to ten.
What one person would consider a five out of ten pain, another might consider a seven – and another a two.
Some patients are born without the ability to sense pain – this rare condition is called congenital analgesia. You might think this confers an advantage, but the truth is quite the opposite. These individuals will be unaware of circumstances where their bodies are being damaged, and can end up sustaining more profound injuries, or missing them entirely and suffering the consequences.
How to trick your brain
What is more extraordinary is that we all possess an innate ability to control our pain levels. In fact, a natural painkiller is found deep within the nervous system itself.
The secret lies in a structure located in the very middle of your brain: the periaqueductal grey (PAG). This small, heart-shaped region contains neurons whose role is to alter incoming pain signals reaching the cerebral cortex. In doing so, it is able to dampen down any pain that would otherwise be experienced.
Let’s consider this in practice using the extreme example of the battlefield. This is an instance where sensing pain might actually prove more of a hindrance than of help. It might hamper a soldier’s ability to run, or assist comrades. In temporarily numbing the pain, the soldier becomes able to escape the dangerous environment and seek refuge.
But we encounter many examples of this ability coming into action in our everyday routines. Ever picked something in the kitchen that you suddenly realise is extremely hot? Sometimes that casserole dish or saucepan descends to the floor, but sometimes we are able to hold on just long enough to transfer it to the stove-top. This action may be underpinned by the PAG shutting off the sensation of clasping something too hot to handle, just long enough to prevent dropping it.
The substances which generate this effect are called enkephalins. They are produced in many different areas of the brain (including the PAG) and spinal cord, and may have similar actions to strong analgesics such as morphine. It has also been suggested that long term or chronic pain – which is persistent and not useful to the body – might arise as a result of abnormalities within this natural analgesic system.
This begs the question: how might you go about hacking your own nervous system to produce an analgesic effect?
There is growing evidence to suggest that the release of painkilling enkephalins can be enhanced in a variety of different ways. Exercise is one example – one of the reasons why prescribed exercise might be able to work wonders for aches and pains (backache for instance) instead of popping paracetamols.
Besides this, stressful situations, feeding and sex might also affect the activity of enkephalins and other related compounds.
So, how could we go about it? Take up strength or endurance training? Alleviate our stress? Good food? Good sex? While more work is needed to clarify a role for these options in pain management, their reward might be greater than we thought.
Pain remains a complex, poorly understood experience, but the future is bright. Only last month, the FDA approved the use of a new medication Journavx for managing acute pain.
Developing new painkilling treatments relies on the work of pain researchers to help unravel the intricate neuronal circuitry and function. There is no denying that this is going to be difficult task. But in considering the neuroscience of how our bodies generate and suppress pain, we can hope to understand how they can act as their own healers.
Dan Baumgardt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has put the issue of compensation for content producers back on the table.
Generative AI offers undeniable benefits but raises familiar fears tied to disruptive technologies. In the cultural and creative sectors, concerns are mounting over the potential replacement of human creators, the erosion of artistic authenticity and risks of copyright infringement. Legal battles are already emerging worldwide, with intellectual property owners and AI developers clashing over rights. Alongside these legal and ethical concerns lies the economic question: how should revenues generated by AI be fairly distributed?
Copyright law (droits d’auteur), which is traditionally based on the reproduction or representation of specific works, may not be a fit for this question. Individual contributions to AI-generated outputs are often too complex to quantify, making it difficult to apply the principle of proportional remuneration, which holds that payment for an individual work is tied to the revenue it generates.
An asymmetrical relationship
The disputes surrounding generative AI echo long-standing tensions between digital platforms and content creators. Platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and TikTok dominate the music industry; Netflix and Apple lead in film and television; Steam in gaming; and Google and Meta in news media.
These platforms wield enormous power in reshaping industries, influencing consumption patterns and establishing new power dynamics. On the one hand, they amplify the reach of creative works, but on the other, they rely on an inherently unequal relationship. For example, if Spotify removes a song, the artist’s reach and revenue may decline sharply, but Spotify itself is unlikely to suffer significant consequences–perhaps losing a few subscribers to competitors, at most.
A Nobel Prize for platform economics
The economics of digital platforms have been widely studied. This includes platforms’ two-sided market structure–a concept for which economist Jean Tirole won a Nobel prize in 2014. In this model, platforms act as intermediaries between two groups that benefit from each other: the more content a platform offers, the larger its audience grows, and the larger audience, in turn, attracts more content creators. This dynamic often leads to market concentration, and to platform strategies that subsidise one side to grow the other.
However, most research in this area has not fully addressed the complexities of platforms’ relationships with different types of content. High-value “premium” content, such as live sporting events, holds a singular status compared to more common offerings. These distinctions are often overlooked, particularly when assessing the value different types of content bring to a platform’s economy.
This question of value is central to the conflicts between platforms and content providers, as well as the emerging disputes between AI operators and content owners. The disputes underscore the need for a new framework, as traditional tools are proving inadequate for addressing these complex issues.
The challenge of valuing content
The news industry provides a clear example of the complex relationship between platforms and content providers. News publishers worldwide have long sought compensation from platforms such as Google and Meta for featuring their content. Google, for instance, indexes news articles alongside other types of content to enhance search relevance and platform value. However, the exact contribution of news content to Google’s business model is difficult to determine due to its layered, interconnected nature.
Google’s ecosystem relies on indexing vast amounts of content, some of which is ad-supported, while other elements–such as Google News–do not generate direct revenue. Additionally, data collected across Google’s services improve ad targeting and search accuracy, further complicating efforts to isolate the value of specific content.
Depending on user behaviour, content may either appear as a hypertext link directing users to the original publisher, or as a summary that keeps users within Google’s environment. In cases where users stay on Google, the platform effectively acts as a content provider, displaying excerpts in a crowded layout in which individual contributions are unclear. When users click through, Google serves as a traffic driver, sending readers to the publisher’s site. As a recommender, Google adds value to content; as a content provider, it extracts value from it. This dual role blurs the lines of compensation and also complicates efforts to determine how much an individual piece of content contributes to a platform’s overall success.
A new paradigm
Print media has been particularly affected by the rise of digital platforms, which profit significantly from news content. Disputes over how to measure the value of individual articles or publishers to platforms such as Google and Meta remain unresolved.
These conflicts vary by country, with outcomes influenced by legal jurisdictions, power dynamics and negotiations. Some agreements are struck only to be later challenged, while in other cases, platforms respond by removing news content altogether. Courts often avoid setting explicit guidelines on revenue sharing, leaving many questions unanswered.
This uncertainty reflects a broader shift. In the platform economy, individual content, or even entire categories of content, no longer has a clear, measurable contribution to overall value. Given the importance of platforms in the economies of cultural industries, developing a new framework to address these complexities is increasingly urgent.
We were consulted on an occasional basis, in the context of a case mentioned, by a lawyer for one of the parties.
In recent decades, museums and galleries have made a sensory turn when it comes to designing displays and engaging visitors.
Museums like the Metropolitan in New York offer multi-sensory activities so visitors so can smell, touch and hear art, and museums have curated exhibitions about the senses.
The move is part of larger efforts to make public institutions more accessible.
In my forthcoming study, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum, I examine the influence of exhibition designer and painter Harley Parker (1915-92) on this “sensory turn” in museum curatorial practices.
Parker was head of design at the Royal Ontario Museum for 11 years from 1957-68. By applying media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s ideas to museums, Parker created what has become known as “multi-sensory museology.” It is only beginning to be recognized as a precursor to the sensory museology in practice today.
Head of design at the ROM
Beyond being head of design at the ROM, Parker was an influential media thinker and a longtime collaborator of McLuhan’s.
Parker’s name is not yet well known. One reason is that his book manuscript, The Culture Box: Museums Are Today, was lost for almost 50 years.
Working with Parker’s children, I uncovered a typescript and will be bringing it into print. Retitled The Culture Box: Museums as Media, it contains detailed discussions of how Parker conceived of exhibition display through the lens of McLuhan’s idea that all media were sensory extensions of human capacities.
Multisensory design
For Parker, the museum became a laboratory in which a designer could experiment with multi-sensory exhibition designs. These reflected McLuhan’s claim that new electronic media supplanted an older visually oriented linear model with a non-linear, aural-tactile environment.
Between 1963 and 1967, Parker was considering designing with alternative orchestrations of perception, especially with regard to displays of Indigenous artifacts. He didn’t, however, achieve a fusion of what current sensory studies scholars call “sensory decolonization.”
In museums, “sensory decolonization” refers to shifting sensory and cultural perceptions around the meaning of “artifacts” from Indigenous or Global South communities. It means revisiting assumptions about protocols for engaging with or handling these, and developing new ethical protocols in relationship with communities.
Parker investigated the necessity of changing sensory assumptions around the display of artifacts, but lacked a decolonial critique.
Hypothetical exhibits
In the early 1960s, Parker published essays on hypothetical exhibits of Indigenous artefacts in the museum’s holdings.
He considered using recordings of Indigenous languages, visitor-controlled heating, cooling and lighting, odours, as well as multi-media projections. He tried to provoke, through design, some empathetic correlation between the mental modes of a contemporary museum visitor and the sensory attitudes of an Indigenous maker and creator of objects.
He linked the reordering of the senses with calls for greater community involvement in museums. He also expressed frustration about museum elitism and the gulf between philanthropic culture and visitors’ concerns.
Parker developed a vanguard idea: build what he called a “newseum” where multimedia and multi-sensory exhibitions would take place.
This is not about educating people about a free press (like the former American Newseum). Rather, Parker’s newseum imagined exhibition centres adjacent to large, prestige museums. These would utilize museum artifacts and materials to mount topical displays based on discoveries, advances or events.
Such displays would be community-driven and participatory. The buildings themselves would be flexible, inside and out. They would have three wings: a current topical public exhibition; an exhibition in process; and a preparatory area for gathering materials for a new exhibition.
In The Culture Box Parker asked us to think about museums beside the box in terms of “process” over “product,” inspired by McLuhan. It was Parker’s goal to get the museum out of the museum and to get relevant communities into this displaced museum as full participants bearing important expertise.
Parker experimented with galleries inside existing museum spaces at the ROM and the Museum of the City of New York to reorient visitors’ perception, but Parker’s newseum was never realized.
Revisiting Parker today
Today, revisiting a Parker-influenced newseum could further collaboration with Indigenous curators and cultural experts.
We can look back at Parker’s tentative efforts and recognize that his hypothetical galleries were never constructed.
Together with his unbuilt newseum, they await development for newly remodelled museum galleries flexibly built, bearing in mind his contributing ideas about multimedia and multi-sensory spaces. These could be attuned to the most topical concerns of our time, and the ethical purpose of decolonization and Indigenization, with the full range of available digital technologies.
Gary A Genosko 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.
In 2020, in response to the riots that followed the murder of 46-year-old Black man George Floyd, Donald Trump declared himself the “president of law and order.” During the same speech, he threatened to use the military to suppress the civil unrest that erupted after a police officer killed Floyd.
“We’re going to get approval, hopefully, to get them the hell out of our country, along with others. Let them be brought to a foreign land and maintained by others for a very small fee, as opposed to being maintained in our jails for massive amounts of money.”
The history of exile
I’m a scholar in public policy administration, law and ethics. Trump’s exile proposals in the wake of his pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters reveal significant ethical lapses.
In the modern era, exile is regarded as problematic. But in ancient times, like during the Roman Empire, voluntary exile was an alternative to capital punishment, underscoring its severity.
Similarly, in England, James II, a Catholic king, was the last monarch involuntarily removed from power during the Glorious Revolution. Jacobitism, the political movement aimed at restoring James and his descendants to the throne, stemmed from his exile.
In modern times, people who go into exile are typically deposed heads of state like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, those avoiding legal issues such as Julian Assange or Asil Nadir, or those escaping violence or persecution, such as Salman Rushdie.
Other charges included trespassing, disrupting Congress, theft, weapons offences, making threats and conspiracy, including seditious conspiracy — the most serious offence.
Violent protesters, loyal to then-President Donald Trump, storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Unlike those whose Black Lives Matter protests Trump found disorderly back in 2020, the vast majority of the Jan. 6 convicts are not from racialized communities.
The irony of Trump’s position on pardons, repeat offenders and exiles is apparent. The very people he pardoned are now potential candidates for his proposed exile program due to their repeat offender status.
Similarly, Enrique Tarrio, who received a 22-year prison sentence for his role in the riots, declared after his pardon: “It’s going to be retribution.”
Karma in terms of Trump’s exile proposals may be awaiting the pardoned rioters, however, amid this pattern of defiance. Their emboldened sentiments following Trump’s pardons could suggest they’re at a higher risk of becoming repeat offenders, making them prime candidates for the president’s proposed exile program — that is, of course, unless he pardons them again.
US president Donald Trump has taken a series of decisions that have delivered body blows to the global management of health. He has announced that the US will leave the World Health Organization. And a 90-day freeze has been placed on money distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAid) pending a review by the US State Department. This includes funds for the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar). The decisions have triggered alarm in the global health sector.
Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, outlines which countries are most at risk and which health programmes will suffer the most damage.
What does the US exit mean for Africa?
The US exit from the WHO and the freeze announced on USAid funding are devastating moves that will have drastic effects on the health of millions of people in Africa.
The US is by far the WHO’s largest state donor, contributing approximately 18% of the agency’s total funding.
US development aid is used to run large-scale health programmes on the continent. For example, Nigeria received approximately US$600 million in health assistance from the US, over 21% of the 2023 health budget.
The WHO is a global health body that synthesises scientific research and develops guidelines that countries in Africa rely on to shape their own policies and practices.
The biggest loss for Africa under the USAID umbrella will be funding for Pepfar, which is used for HIV-related programmes including prevention, testing and treatment. Through Pepfar, the US government has invested over US$110 billion in the global HIV/Aids response.
Firstly, technical guidance. The WHO provides technical guidance to countries on issues ranging from TB management to cost-effective malaria control.
Secondly, the ability to mobilise resources. The WHO has the mandate and mechanisms to assemble experts from across the globe to evaluate new therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines. They can evaluate new evidence on emerging patterns of new bugs, resistance to current treatments, and so on.
Thirdly, the WHO has tools and mechanisms that have been key to African countries’ health policy decisions. These include:
the WHO’s list of Essential Medicines to inform decision-making on critical drugs
a similar mechanism to evaluate new vaccines, resulting in guidance that makes regulatory approval faster and easier in African countries which don’t have strong systems.
Fourth, the WHO also provides resources for emergency response, as in the event of disease outbreaks such as Ebola and COVID-19. The WHO is able to quickly mobilise experts and funds and to coordinate emergency responses.
Fifth, the WHO provides evidence-informed guidelines. It does this by gathering and sharing information like the causes of outbreaks, while monitoring signals of potential outbreaks and coordinating efforts to develop new technologies, such as vaccines and medical devices.
Sixth, the WHO’s ability to support critical programmes in tuberculosis prevention and emergency response will be reduced.
Seventh, the withdrawal of US citizens working in these global agencies – and the orders to stop sharing data – mean the US is essentially excluded from global information-sharing mechanisms that keep us all safe. It will be harder to share information about emerging health threats in the US with the rest of the world and vice versa.
Which countries will be most affected?
Many African countries are heavily reliant on the support provided by Pepfar and USAID to fund programmes in the health sector and for humanitarian assistance.
Countries which will be most affected are those with a high burden of HIV, TB and malaria and those with large populations of refugee and internally displaced people.
Currently the top eight USAid recipients in Africa are: Nigeria, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Without funds being rapidly mobilised to fill the gap left by the US withdrawal, the effect on the health of millions of Africans is at stake. Failure to prevent new infections, and the threat of drug resistance developing because of disrupted treatment, will have far-reaching consequences.
In Uganda, where about 1.4 million people are living with HIV/Aids, 60% of the spending on its HIV/Aids programme was from Pepfar, and about 20% from the Global Fund (partly funded from Pepfar).
A drastic reduction in funding will be devastating for patients and the greater health system.
The Pepfar programme, a lifeline for millions of Africans, has been under threat since before the most recent aid freeze. In 2024, the American congress only gave a one-year authorisation instead of the typical five-year funding authorisation.
A conservative backlash against this programme has been growing for years with concerns that some funds may be used to fund abortion. The current authorisation expires in March 2025 and falls within the 90-day aid review period. With the current approval expiring next month, and in light of the current atmosphere, it is very likely that it may not be renewed.
There has a been a lot of discussion around jobs and lives lost, but not much around what happens next: how African governments are planning on mitigating shortfalls in their health budget in the short term and foreseeable future.
Therefore we need to ask our governments what that means for us and how they are planning to ensure that we do not reverse the gains made so far. This includes preventing millions of HIV infections, improved testing and provision of life-saving antiretroviral treatment.
The sudden and drastic decisions taken by the Trump administration have been hailed by several commentators as the wake-up call the continent needs – to wean itself off dependency on a flawed “development aid” system that is admittedly a tool for geopolitical influence.
The disbelief and chaos in the global health sector should be rapidly mobilised into citizen action, for governments to invest in a critical sector that has depended on foreign assistance for too long. In the absence of sustained investment, the gains in the health sector may be lost, reversing decades of progress in global health.
Lastly, Africans, especially scientists and academics, need to stand up to the worrying anti-science trend that underlies some of these drastic policies. The growing mistrust in science and scientific institutions will not abate unless it is challenged.
It is ridiculous that a continent of 1.3 billion people is reliant on the whims of one man many kilometres away; on his signature on a single document.
The world needs to wake up. We need to wake up.
Catherine Kyobutungi works for the African Population and Health Research Center which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, Wellcome, and the Gates Foundation
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tim Glawion, Senior research fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, Freiburg, Germany, University of Freiburg
Since it became independent in 1960, the Central African Republic has grappled with poverty, instability and governance challenges.
A decade into former president François Bozizé’s corrupt rule, a rebellion broke out and toppled the president in 2013. What followed was a devastatingly violent civil war with thousands of people killed and a fifth of the populace displaced.
To halt violence against civilians, numerous international actors intervened, including the African Union, the United Nations, the European Union and France. From 2014 onward they put thousands of boots on the ground and pushed rebels from most towns, while protecting and supporting the interim administration.
But by 2016 all actors had retreated, save the United Nations (UN). The mission – Minusca – was not able to contain a resurgence in rebellion, and the newly elected president Faustin-Archange Touadéra turned to Russian paramilitaries to stabilise his rule in 2017.
These paramilitaries started out only as “trainers” but took on more prominent and direct combat roles as the years passed, making the country a geopolitical playing field. The Russian paramilitaries and national army again pushed the rebels out of most towns and into the countryside.
I have studied the Central African Republic’s politics for over a decade, conducting research in towns across the country. I wanted to find out why some areas were more affected by violence than others and how people locally lived together. I believed that in such local stories we might find missing links as to why all the actors involved failed to provide the protection from violence and provision of services that people desired.
To study people’s expectations of peacekeepers, I used a method I call the “qualitative” survey. This type of survey asks open questions, for example “what do you expect of international actors?”. This leaves space for people to say things that researchers might not have expected. It also included more typical closed questions like “how safe do you feel, on a scale from 1 to 5?”.
With a team of Central African researchers, I conducted these surveys in four places in 2019 and in two places in 2023 and 2024. At this stage respondents had experienced foreign peacekeeping missions and Russian paramilitary presence.
We found that peacekeeping missions were losing popular support because they were not fulfilling the expectations of people in the Central African Republic.
People wanted peacekeepers to confront armed actors. When peacekeepers failed to do so, they criticised them, even requested them to leave.
Russian paramilitaries offered the forceful response that autocratic regimes and many locals wanted. However, they provided a too simplistic answer to people’s demands, based only on the present. People also had future expectations: they wanted armed actors to be kicked out so that people might be treated fairly and witness the return of a caring state in the near future.
Thus, while peacekeepers frustrated initial expectations and Russian paramilitaries might fulfil them, the Central African state and their Russian paramilitary allies were not building the future people expected.
Expectations
The overall results of the survey showed that people had the most confidence in local institutions, while harbouring high expectations for the state (when it returns), and being broadly disappointed by international peacekeepers.
The results varied strongly according to local experiences with the state and international actors. Most intriguingly, respondents did not necessarily feel safest in those localities that had the fewest violent incidents. I call this the “security paradox” and it has much to do with unmet expectations for which we need to dig into individual responses.
Take the example of a middle-aged woman in the Central African Republic’s north-eastern and long rebel-held town of Ndélé, who made two points in early 2019. First, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, Minusca, was inactive in the face of aggression. Second, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were doing a good job:
Partner organisations such as Minusca who reside among our population do not seem to be there to ensure our protection, as we hear on the radio. A person may well be raped, and they do not even react to rescue the person in danger, even if they know about it. On the other hand, the NGOs are doing a very good job, and it is thanks to them that Ndélé is doing well today.
However, my own analysis showed that, objectively speaking, both peacekeepers and aid organisations were doing a mediocre job. Under the peacekeepers’ watch few violent incidents occurred and the aid organisations were only covering a fraction of local needs, much less than in other studied localities.
The difference in perception, I argue, stems from the fact that local people have certain expectations for security and different expectations for service provision in the Central African Republic.
Security in the Central African Republic is marked by an abundance of armed groups threatening people’s livelihoods. Dozens are currently active, of which a handful have been roaming for more than a decade, controlling trade routes and resources, as well as wielding local political power.
Services like schooling, health and electricity are almost entirely absent in many areas outside the capital; not even the state provides them.
Thus, in the security sector, people expect confrontation of armed actors by either the UN peacekeeping mission or the Russian paramilitary, whereas in services they want NGOs to substitute for government failings. Or in the words of an Ndélé trader:
The international actors can help us during these absences of state authority.
However, Minusca was not ready to forcefully oppose armed actors as they pursued an approach based on negotiating peace agreements and pursuing voluntary integration or disarmament. What my study shows is that doing too little in the eyes of the population can quickly turn the rumour mill, as this woman in Ndélé suggested:
As for Minusca, we do not see its work in favour of our well-being, and we even want it to leave since we have seen that it is the cause of our current division and suffering.
But would confrontation have brought more popular support to Minusca? Well, it did to another actor that stepped in, as a national staffer of an aid organisation stated in early 2022 in Bambari:
Minusca patrols do not have the confidence of the population. Because in front of Minusca forces, the rebels kill the population. For seven years, Minusca was unable to secure the town. Within minutes, the Central African Armed Forces and their Russian allies managed to dislodge them from the town of Bambari, which is now secure.
Reality
I did not judge whether people’s expectations of interventions were realistic.
Given the state’s history in the Central African Republic, it was surprising how many people wanted a state and army to return.
However, people were hoping for a “benevolent” state return. This has not happened.
And as for the Russian “allies”, as they are called in the Central African Republic: their confrontational approach has caused heavy collateral damage and has failed to stabilise former rebel areas. Rebellion is again on the rise.
My study shows how important it is to analyse expectations in-depth, and to take them as a starting point of intervention policy. Not understanding people’s expectations is what caught peacekeepers by surprise when people started demonstrating in front of their bases and even calling for their withdrawal.
While there might be good reasons not to pursue a forceful approach against rebels, interveners must be aware that they thereby deceive public expectations and should thus proactively listen to and engage the population about their demands.
The dilemma is that fulfilling people’s initial expectations does not automatically lead to the future they desire. So there must be difficult and open discussions about what is and what is not feasible in peacekeeping.
Tim Glawion receives funding from the public German Science Foundation (DFG, project number: 437386574).
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi, Faculty member, Department of Political Science, Lagos State University
With France fast losing its influence in west Africa’s Sahel region and an unpredictable US president in power, will China fill the vacuum?
The Sahel region covers 10 countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.
French troops have been expelled from three of these – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – after military coups. Chad, Senegal and Ivory Coast have also expelled French troops. The troops were there because of the security threat from extremist groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province.
Niger also ended an agreement to keep about 1,000 US troops involved in a counter-terrorism mission. Niger’s military government described the US as having a “condescending attitude”.
While it has been rightly argued that the presence of the western powers did not resolve the security challenges of the region, their withdrawal creates a vacuum.
I am a political science and international relations researcher who has been studying China-Africa relations for over a decade.
I argue that Beijing could take advantage of the vacuum in the Sahel in at least three ways: expansion of investments in critical minerals; resolution of the Ecowas crisis (when Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali exited the regional bloc); and increased arms sales.
This is especially so as China is not new to the Sahel region of west Africa. For instance, China is constructing a US$32 million headquarters for Ecowas in Abuja, Nigeria.
Three ways China could benefit
First, China could expand its influence – and the next four years hold enormous opportunities in this regard.
US president Donald Trump’s likely transactional and unpredictable approach to international relations may force African countries to look to China. For instance, they may need China to help fill the void created by the US decision to dismantle USAID and freeze international development aid.
Nigeria joined Brics as a partner country a few days before the inauguration of Trump. Brics is a group of emerging economies determined to act as a counterweight to the west and to whittle down the influence of global institutions. It was established in 2006 and initially composed of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. This decision by the largest economy in the Sahel is an expression of its commitment to China – with potential implications for other Sahelian countries.
The vacuum offers Beijing the opportunity to strengthen its investment and position as a top beneficiary of the critical minerals, such as gold, copper, lithium and uranium, in the Sahel region.
In 2024, west African gold production was estimated to be 11.83 million ounces. Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Republic of Guinea and Mali were the major contributors.
Second, China is in a unique position to push for a resolution of the Ecowas crisis.
Following military coups, the Ecowas regional economic bloc sanctioned Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Ecowas even threatened Niger with a military invasion. The three countries then decided to leave Ecowas to form the Alliance of Sahel States.
As a neutral actor whose non-interference policy accommodates both civil and military regimes, Beijing is in a position to bring Ecowas and the Alliance of Sahel States into negotiation before the final departure date of 29 July 2025.
If it succeeds, China would look more like a peaceful power, an image that is contested by others.
This is what it did in the case of the Tazara railway project, where China supported Tanzania and Zambia to build a railway line together. It supported the African countries when the US and Europe had failed, were reluctant or were not interested.
Third is Chinese arms sales.
Chinese arms are already in the Sahel. In 2019, Nigeria signed a US$152 million contract with the China North Industries Corporation Limited (Norinco) to provide some of the weapons needed to fight the Boko Haram terror group. Since then, Chinese drones and other equipment have become a feature in Nigeria’s counter-terrorism response.
The Chinese arms market could receive a major boost beyond Nigeria with the withdrawal of western countries from the Sahel. Western countries are likely to be reluctant to sell arms to the countries that have evicted their military.
Sanctions on Russia have also increased the likelihood of Chinese arms in the Sahel.
For example, a few months after France and the US left the region, some reports suggested that Russian mercenaries in the Sahel region were using Chinese weapons. Norinco – China’s top arms manufacturer and seventh largest arms supplier in the world – has opened sales offices in Nigeria and Senegal.
In June 2024, Burkina Faso received 100 tanks from China. Three months after, Mali signed an agreement with Norinco to bolster its fight against terrorism.
Bumpy road ahead
China’s non-interference can accommodate both civil and military governments in the Sahel. This is an advantage for Beijing in some ways. But it could also have unexpected impacts.
There are competing local interests in the Sahel and Beijing’s deepening involvement could be (mis)interpreted as supporting one over the other.
This could make Chinese interests a target in the violence.
It is also unclear if China is capable or willing to fill the vacuum created by the evicted western powers. But it looks as though China can benefit from the situation in the Sahel in the short term.
Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi has previously received research funding or travel support from organisations like the KU Leuven, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Lagos State University, Chatham House (i.e. Robert Bosch Stiftung), Centre for Population and Environmental Development (CPED), Think Tank Initiative, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Coimbra Group Scholarship Programme, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TetFund), Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF), American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program (ACLS-AHP), Merian Institute of Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), Development Studies Association (DSA) UK, Collective for the Renewal of Africa (CORA), Ford Foundation, Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), and Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS). However, I must clearly and strongly state that none of these funders have at any time sought to influence or influenced my writings or public engagement. Thus, this article is one of my many expressions of my academic freedom.
Jack Lemmon kisses Lee Remick’s neck in a scene from the 1962 film ‘Days Of Wine And Roses.’Warner Brothers/Getty Images
I broke its neck.
When making a vase at the potter’s wheel, I torqued its slippery neck clear off the pot as I tried to thin it into a graceful curve.
I find vases gratifying to make and their shapes especially pleasing to the eye. But vases also must be handled with particular care because one part of their “body” – the neck – is often so narrow that it can be easily broken.
That day at the wheel, I realized that it was not unlike the human neck. Though only a small portion of the human body – about 1% by surface area – our necks have an outsize influence on our psyche and culture.
From selfies to formal portraits, the neck positions the head in expressive poses. The neck’s vocal cords vibrate to make meaningful words and moving songs. We passionately kiss it and spritz it with alluring perfume. We use it to nod our head in agreement, tilt our head in confusion and bow our head in prayer.
Ornaments such as necklaces can express fashion sense as well as signal wealth and status. Collars can accent the face in portraits as well as denote occupational class, blue collar versus white collar.
Yet, for all its aesthetic and expressive potency, the neck is also a site of fear and deep vulnerability. Villains and vampires zero in on the neck. Stressful days at work make us clench our neck muscles until they ache. A pleasant meal can be jolted into terror if a morsel slips into the wrong tube in the neck, sending us into a coughing fit.
For millennia, people in power have oppressed their subjects by exploiting the narrowness and fragility of the neck – a dark history of dominating and terrorizing one another using shackles, noosesand guillotines. The widely circulated video of George Floyd’s murder was a brutal reminder that violent asphyxiation is hardly confined to the distant past.
As I became aware of the significance of the neck in culture, I began to explore how these two attributes – its expressive vitality and unnerving vulnerability – could coexist and be concentrated so intensely in one small region of the body. Eventually, it became a book.
I am foremost a biologist, and in writing my book, I came to see that the neck’s vitality and vulnerability are rooted in its biology: The neck performs an especially wide variety of crucial functions, and it is the product of a quirky evolutionary history.
The neck does so many things, all at the same time. For example, it transports over 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) of blood, air and food between the head and the torso every single day. It moves the head every six seconds on average to direct our visual attention. Its vocal cords vibrate hundreds of times per second with every spoken word.
But this multifunctionality, this vitality, is possible only because of its vulnerability. To be mobile and flexible, the neck must be narrow, and so it is easily strained. Its crucial transport tubes – the windpipe, esophagus and blood vessels – must also be thin and near the surface, making them easily punctured and compressed.
From water to land
Our vertebrate ancestors “invented” this peculiar contraption as they evolved from water to land.
Our fish ancestors had no neck because they needed a single rigid axis to move efficiently through water. Since moving around on land did not require a stiff spinal column, early terrestrial vertebrates evolved flexibility just behind the head, enabling them to widely scan the environment and to direct their mouths toward prey without moving their whole bodies. Picture a zebra swinging its head side to side surveying the savanna for predators, or a lizard tilting its head down and to the side to snap up a crawling bug.
Early land vertebrates also evolved lungs, and this transformation freed up the gill structures that fish used for breathing to evolve into various useful – and sometimes problematic – neck structures, such as the voice box, tonsils and the little flap that separates the windpipe and esophagus.
This repurposing of scraps left over from the gills of our distant ancestors contributed to the diverse capacities of our neck. But as products of a quirky evolutionary “renovation,” humans and other land vertebrates live with a jerry-rigged design that fates us to carry many collateral vulnerabilities at the neck.
The peculiar human neck
While the human neck retains the basic design of our ancestors, it’s nonetheless quite unusual among vertebrates.
Most land vertebrates elevate their bodies on four legs, so their necks must be long enough to lower their heads to the ground to feed and strong enough to raise it up high to look around. Again, think of a zebra feeding on the savanna.
Because humans walk on two legs, we balance our head atop our spine. Since we use our hands to grab our food, we don’t need strong neck muscles to move the head around. So, compared with most mammals our size, our necks are relatively weak, making them more prone to strain and injury.
The neck epitomizes the dual nature of the human condition, the ways in which beauty and frailty are often entwined, two sides of the same coin in our biology, in our relationships – and, yes, even in ceramic vases.
Kent Dunlap 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.
Beyond renaming its “supplier diversity” team – now called “supplier engagement” – and ending “diversity-focused surveys,” Target hasn’t said what the change will mean for the many Black entrepreneurs who sell everything from coffee to sunscreen on its shelves. The webpage for the retailer’s Black Beyond Measure initiative, which highlights dozens of Black-founded brands and connects business owners to a program designed to “democratize access to retail education,” remains active.
But Target’s critics, including Minneapolis-based civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, view the move as a surrender to the new presidential administration’s attack on equity programs. In a news conference outside Target’s Minnesota headquarters on Jan. 30, 2025, Armstrong called for a nationwide boycott of the store to begin on the first day of Black History Month.
While many social media users posted in support of the boycott, some Black founders whose brands are stocked by Target – and there are dozens of them – have been more conflicted. Tabitha Brown, whose products can be found in various aisles, from books to cooking appliances, asked customers to reconsider boycotting Target. Withholding their dollars, Brown insisted, will hurt Black businesses far more than the corporations that sell their products.
This request for restraint garnered a mixed response on social media. Some Black consumers accused Black business owners of selling out the very racial community that contributed to their success.
So, why would a Black business owner ask consumers to patronize a retailer that signaled it doesn’t care about Black customers? And how did something as mundane as where people buy toilet paper and shampoo become a litmus test for racial consciousness in the first place?
Black consumers and the fight for dignity
The marketplace has long been a battleground where Black Americans have sought to assert their citizenship. Most of the nation’s biggest household brands didn’t begin to take African American consumers seriously until after World War II. Before that shift, advertisements and product packaging were more likely to feature degrading Black caricatures to appeal to white shoppers, than to address Black consumers directly.
This segregated commercial landscape reinforced the belief among some community members that Black people would not be taken seriously as citizens until they were taken seriously as consumers. They would need to vote with their dollars, patronizing only those brands and retailers that respected them.
In my research on marketing campaigns aimed at Black women, I’ve examined how the struggle for consumer citizenship complicated the dynamic between Black entrepreneurs and consumers. On the one hand, businesses have long leveraged Black ownership as a unique selling proposition in and of itself, urging shoppers to view Black brand loyalty as a path to collective racial progress.
Unlike their larger competitors, Black entrepreneurs relied on their racial community to stay afloat. Patronizing African American businesses could therefore be framed as a racial duty. Conversely, as African American advertising pioneers made clear, recognition from big brands was a political victory of sorts because it signaled that Black dollars were just as valuable as anyone else’s.
A short documentary from The Advertising Club of New York featuring iconic ads from African American marketer Tom Burrell.
Competing for Black dollars
Corporate attention to Black consumers ebbs and flows in a cycle that is especially noticeable in the beauty and personal care industry. In seasons of limited competition for African American customers, entrepreneurs typically thrive, even while they struggle to meet the capital demands of a growing brand. Their success, however, beckons larger corporations, which then seek to capitalize on consumer niches they previously ignored.
Two common approaches that mass market brands pursue to compete for Black dollars include acquiring smaller, established Black brands and developing their own niche products. Large corporations deployed both strategies during a period of intense expansion into the beauty market of the 1980s.
Nevertheless, many Black entrepreneurs sold their brands, and by 1986 nearly half of the Black hair care market was no longer Black-owned.
A linked fate
Parsing winners and losers within the world of Black enterprise is as difficult now as it was in earlier periods. African American business owners often possess a cultural consciousness that distinguishes their brands, even when they can’t match the resources of larger competitors. And as they figure out how to survive an uneven playing field, Black entrepreneurs sometimes face accusations of betraying their racial community.
In a market governed by the law of supply and demand, Black consumers benefit from increased competition. Yet, racial loyalty sometimes asks that they eschew these benefits for the sake of keeping Black dollars in Black hands.
Four years ago, when Target launched its Black Beyond Measure funding initiative, it seemed that the retailer had struck a rare balance in supporting Black brands and their customers. In addition to curating a collection of products to lure shoppers, Target used the campaign as an opportunity to position entrepreneurs to flourish well beyond Black History Month.
Now, as Black consumers and business owners weigh varying responses to the retailer’s decision to reverse their commitment to DEI values, one question endures: Do Black dollars matter?
Timeka N. Tounsel 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 Narcisa Pricope, Professor of Geography and Land Systems Science and Associate Vice President for Research, Mississippi State University
Valentine’s Day often conjures images of chocolates and romance. But the crop behind this indulgence faces an existential threat.
Regions like northeastern Brazil, one of the world’s notable cocoa-producing areas, are grappling with increasing aridity – a slow, yet unrelenting drying of the land. Cocoa is made from the beans of the cacao tree, which thrives in humid climates. The crop is struggling in these drying regions, and so are the farmers who grow it.
This is not just Brazil’s story. Across West Africa, where 70% of the world’s cacao is grown, and in the Americas and Southeast Asia, shifting moisture levels threaten the delicate balance required for production. These regions, home to vibrant ecosystems and global breadbaskets that feed the world, are on the frontlines of aridity’s slow but relentless advance.
Over the past 30 years, more than three-quarters of the Earth’s landmass has become drier. A recent report I helped coordinate for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification found that drylands now cover 41% of global land, an area that expanded by nearly 1.7 million square miles (4.3 million square kilometers) over those three decades — about half the size of Australia.
This creeping dryness is not just a climate phenomenon. It’s a long-term transformation that may be irreversible and that carries devastating consequences for ecosystems, agriculture and livelihoods worldwide.
What causes aridity?
Aridity, while often thought of as purely a climate phenomenon, is the result of a complex interplay among human-driven factors. These include greenhouse gas emissions, land use practices and the degradation of critical natural resources, such as soil and biodiversity.
These interconnected forces have been accelerating the transformation of once-productive landscapes into increasingly arid regions, with consequences that ripple across ecosystems and economies.
Greenhouse gas emissions: A global catalyst
Human-induced climate change is the primary driver of rising aridity.
Greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, increase global temperatures. Rising temperatures, in turn, cause moisture to evaporate at a faster rate. This heightened evaporation reduces soil and plant moisture, exacerbating water scarcity – even in regions with moderate rainfall.
This process is particularly stark in regions already prone to dryness, such as Africa’s Sahel region and the Mediterranean. In these areas, reduced precipitation – combined with increased evaporation – creates a feedback loop: Drier soils absorb less heat, leaving the atmosphere warmer and intensifying arid conditions.
The number of people living in dryland regions has been rising in each region in recent years. Years 1971-2020. Scales vary. UNCCD
Unsustainable land use practices: A hidden accelerator
Unsustainable agricultural practices, overgrazing and deforestation strip soils of their protective vegetation cover, leaving them vulnerable to erosion. Industrial farming techniques often prioritize short-term yields over long-term sustainability, depleting nutrients and organic matter essential for healthy soils.
For example, in cocoa-producing regions like northeastern Brazil, deforestation to make room for agriculture disrupts local water cycles and exposes soils to degradation. Without vegetation to anchor it, topsoil – critical for plant growth – washes away during rainfall or is blown away by winds, taking with it vital nutrients.
These changes create a vicious cycle: Degraded soils also hold less water and lead to more runoff, reducing the land’s ability to recover.
Aridity can affect the ability to grow many crops. Large parts of the country of Chad, shown here, have drying lands. United Nations Chad, CC BY-NC-SA
The soil-biodiversity connection
Soil, often overlooked in discussions of climate resilience, plays a critical role in mitigating aridity.
Healthy soils act as reservoirs, storing water and nutrients that plants depend on. They also support biodiversity below and above ground. A single teaspoon of soil contains billions of microorganisms that help cycle nutrients and maintain ecological balance.
However, as soils degrade under aridity and mismanagement, this biodiversity diminishes. Microbial communities, essential for nutrient cycling and plant health, decline. When soils become compacted and lose organic matter, the land’s ability to retain water diminishes, making it even more susceptible to drying out.
By 2100, up to 5 billion people could live in drylands – nearly double the current population in these areas, due to both population growth and expansion of drylands as the planet warms. This puts immense pressure on food systems. It can also accelerate migration as declining agricultural productivity, water scarcity and worsening living conditions force rural populations to move in search of opportunities.
A map shows average aridity for 1981-2010. Computer simulations estimate that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities caused a 1.2% larger increase in the four types of dry regions combined for the periods between 1850 and 1981–2010 than simulations with only solar and volcanic effects considered. UNCCD
Aridity’s ripple effects also extend far beyond agriculture. Ecosystems, already strained by deforestation and pollution, are stressed as water resources dwindle. Wildlife migrates or dies, and plant species adapted to moister conditions can’t survive. The Sahel’s delicate grasslands, for instance, are rapidly giving way to desert shrubs.
On a global scale, economic losses linked to aridification are staggering. In Africa, rising aridity contributed to a 12% drop in gross domestic product from 1990 to 2015. Sandstorms and dust storms, wildfires and water scarcity further burden governments, exacerbating poverty and health crises in the most affected regions.
The path forward
Aridity is not inevitable, nor are its effects completely irreversible. But coordinated global efforts are essential to curb its progression.
Communities can manage water more efficiently through rainwater harvesting and advanced irrigation systems that optimize water use. Governments can reduce the drivers of climate change by investing in renewable energy.
Continued international collaboration, including working with businesses, can help share technologies to make these actions more effective and available worldwide.
So, as you savor chocolate this Valentine’s Day, remember the fragile ecosystems behind it. The price of cocoa in early 2025 was near its all-time high, due in part to dry conditions in Africa. Without urgent action to address aridity, this scenario may become more common, and cocoa – and the sweet concoctions derived from it – may well become a rare luxury.
Collective action against aridity isn’t just about saving chocolate – it’s about preserving the planet’s capacity to sustain life.
Narcisa Pricope is a member of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Science-Policy Interface, which works to translate scientific findings and assessments into policy-relevant recommendations, including collaboration with different scientific panels and bodies.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Joyce Valenza, Associate Teaching Professor of Library and Information Science, Rutgers University
The School District of Philadelphia has 250 district and alternative schools – but only a few have libraries with certified librarians.Lisa5201/E+ Collection via Getty Images
Years ago, as a high school librarian in suburban Philadelphia, I hosted a group of honors students from a high school just across the nearby city border. With the support of their alumni association, the city students planned to build a library at their school.
While our 30,000-volume physical collection impressed them, it was our virtual library, websites designed to support student projects, and subscription-based digital collections and databases that evoked the most profound reaction.
When I asked the students what they were researching, in unison, they responded “Hamlet criticism.” When I showed them results from an e-book database from the POWER Library web portal, I heard gasps.
One young man pulled a dog-eared book out from his backpack. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Do you mean that we’ve been passing this single book around when all of those e-books are available to us free?”
His parting words haunted me: “We will never be able to compete with those students when we go to college.”
Consider, for example, this startling figure: The School District of Philadelphia has just four certified librarians for its nearly 118,000 students across 250 schools. The district confirmed this number in an email to The Conversation U.S.
The gap discovered by the students I hosted that day wasn’t just about one book versus many. It was about not having the same high-quality, paywalled tools for research, and the guidance of trained librarians to help them navigate the research process.
Duke University librarian Hannah Rozear offers examples of what information privilege looks like for high school and college students. Hannah Rozear, CC BY-NC-SA
As part of my work on an information equity initiative for the International Society for Technology in Education, I enhanced the diagram. I wanted to expand the notion of equity of information access and equity of information experiences in K-12 education.
The author expanded the Information Privilege backpack concept to apply to K-12 students. Joyce Valenza, CC BY-NC-SA
In addition to simply having access to a variety of high-quality resources, students with information privilege learn to critically and ethically use information to create and share meaningful research projects with the knowledge they build.
That student’s realization of what he didn’t know he didn’t have sparked my development of a three-year research project with colleagues across six New Jersey colleges. Our team of academic librarians, library and information science educators, and high school librarians followed students who had certified high school librarians into their first college year.
The students who had certified high school librarians consistently reported feeling fully prepared for college-level research. They were confident in navigating academic databases. They arrived at college able to identify information needs, understand information genres, search effectively, and craft thoughtful arguments from their research. They were also better able to meet the standards for information literacy at the college level.
Due in part to the lack of school librarians, many Philadelphia parents and students haven’t yet been introduced to the freely available resources of the POWER Library.
In Pennsylvania, if your school has a library, the librarian will have ensured that students can easily log in to the POWER Library during school hours.
Pennsylvania students in schools without a library or a librarian can independently access the POWER library at any hour of the day using the barcode on their public library card, or by signing up for a POWER Library eCard.
Here are five of my favorite tools from the collection that support students’ academic research:
1. EBSCO eBooks – This collection of more than 16,000 e-books includes nonfiction, textbooks, specialized subject area encyclopedias, literary criticism, and college prep and other study guides.
2. AP Newsroom – With more than 3,000 media items added daily, AP Newsroom allows students to visually explore 185 years of world history and breaking news through on-the-scene, high-quality photography, sound, video and graphics. Topics cover major events as well as sports, culture and entertainment. Students will find primary source content to track developing stories and support research and analysis of historic events. Over 20 million royalty-free stock images are included.
3. Gale eBooks – Gale, a well-respected publisher, offers students a complete library reference section available from anywhere. The high-quality encyclopedias and multivolume reference sets span literature, American and global history, social issues, science, biography, business and much more.
4. Gale OneFile: High School Edition – This research portal connects students to magazines, journals, newspapers, reference books and engaging multimedia that cover the wide range of subjects they might encounter in a high school curriculum. It also prepares them for the academic databases they’ll encounter at college. Gale In Context: Elementary, meanwhile, offers a similar range of kid-friendly content for younger researchers.
5. SIRS Discoverer – For upper-elementary and middle schoolers, SIRS Discoverer engages students’ curiosity and critical thinking in such areas as animals, countries, states and biographies. Don’t miss the “Issues” section, which covers topical issues like global warming, artificial intelligence and cellphones in schools with contextual information, vocabulary and organized viewpoints.
Libraries offer democratic access to critical information by providing free entry to digital resources that would otherwise be too costly for most people. This is true whether you’re a student or not.
In addition to the POWER Library, anyone who lives, works, pays taxes or attends school in Philadelphia can use the extensive digital resources offered by the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Residents outside Pennsylvania can use this map to identify similar resources in their state, or they can explore the databases provided by public libraries around the country.
Joyce Valenza 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.
In 2021, about 48% of LGBQ females considered suicide, compared with roughly 20% of heterosexual females, data shows.bymuratdeniz/iStock/Getty Images Plus
However, a well-known source of stress that now affects more teenagers compared with a decade ago has been overlooked in explanations for this increase – stress related to sexual identity.
As scholars focused on education policy, we conducted research showing that the increase in suicidal thoughts and behaviors corresponds with a dramatic rise in the number of female high school students who identify as LGBQ – lesbian, gay, bisexual or questioning.
A double bind for LGBQ teens
While some LGBQ youth are growing up in supportive environments, our findings suggest that an increasing number may be experiencing a double bind – a communication dilemma in which a person receives two or more mutually conflicting messages.
Many LGBQ youth may believe it’s safe to “come out” due to greater access to information and the increased visibility of LGBQ people in U.S. society. But coming out earlier in life could expose them to discrimination and social stress in their schools, families and communities.
Between 2015 and 2021, the percentage of high school girls identifying as LGBQ jumped from 15% to 34%. During this same period, all females who reported they thought about suicide increased from 23% to 29%. Creating a plan to commit suicide rose from 19% to 23%.
But looking at the data more closely reveals something crucial: Girls who identified as LGBQ consistently reported much higher rates of thinking about, planning and attempting suicide.
In 2021, about 48% of LGBQ females considered suicide, compared with roughly 20% of heterosexual females. When we accounted for this difference statistically, we found the overall rise in female suicidal thoughts and behaviors were explained by more students identifying as LGBQ.
Today’s teenagers, regardless of sexual orientation, have more language and representation to help them make sense of their experiences than previous generations did. Some teens have supportive parents and attend schools that are supportive of their sexual orientation.
While more young people feel able to openly identify as LGBQ, many still face substantial challenges that can affect their mental health. kieferpix/iStock/Getty Images Plus
However, identifying as LGBQ may still come with significant challenges for many youth.
Studies incorporating several generations of LGBQ people over the past 50 years find that, despite more societal acceptance, LGBTQ+ people born in the 1990s reported stressors at least as high as older generations born in the 1950s-80s. And younger generations reported the highest rate of suicide attempts.
Our findings highlight a critical point. The rising rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among all teenage girls cannot be understood in isolation from their social context and identities. While more young people feel able to openly identify as LGBQ, many still face substantial challenges that can affect their mental health.
We believe this understanding has important implications for how we address the crisis. Simply implementing general suicide prevention programs may not be enough. Experts may need to craft targeted support that addresses the specific challenges and pressures faced by LGBQ youth.
The need for supportive school environments
Schools play a crucial role in supporting student well-being.
Other states, such as Montana, Tennessee and Arizona, don’t outright ban this curriculum. But they severely restrict how educators can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity by adding additional burdens on educators, including parental notification requirements.
Our research suggests this approach could be dangerous.
If we want to address rising suicidal thoughts and behaviors among teenage girls, we need to understand and support LGBQ youth better.
Rather than reducing support, schools, parents and youth advocates could maintain and expand their resources to support LGBQ youth. This includes efforts to create safe and affirming school environments, and training staff and teachers to support LGBQ students effectively.
Joseph Cimpian receives funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.
Dr. McQuillan has been hired by the ACLU to provide expert testimony in court cases. Dr. McQuillan has also received funding from the Spencer Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, and the Wisconsin Partnership Project.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ming Xie, Assistant Professor of Emergency Management and Public Health, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Hurricane Ian caused widespread damage in Florida in 2022, estimated at over $112 billion. This scene was once a shopping center.Giorgio Veira/AFP via Getty Images
Imagine a world in which a hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. has no federal agency prepared to quickly send supplies, financial aid and temporary housing assistance.
Could the states manage this catastrophic event on their own?
Normally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, is prepared to marshal supplies within hours of a disaster and begin distributing financial aid to residents who need help.
FEMA was created in 1979 with the job of coordinating national responses to disasters, but the federal government has played important roles in disaster relief since the 1800s.
During a disaster, FEMA’s assistance can begin only after a state requests an emergency declaration and the U.S. president approves it. The request has to show that the disaster is so severe that the state can’t handle the response on its own.
FEMA’s role is to support state and local governments by coordinating federal agencies and providing financial aid and recovery assistance that states would otherwise struggle to supply on their own. FEMA doesn’t “take over,” as a misinformation campaign launched during Hurricane Helene claimed. Instead, it pools federal resources to allow states to recover faster from expensive disasters.
During a disaster, FEMA:
Coordinates federal resources. For example, during Hurricane Ian in 2022, FEMA coordinated with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Defense and search-and-rescue teams to conduct rescue operations, organized utility crews to begin restoring power and also delivered water and millions of meals.
Provides financial assistance. FEMA distributes billions of dollars in disaster relief funds to help individuals, businesses and local governments recover. As of Feb. 3, 2025, FEMA aid from 2024 storms included US$1.04 billion related to Hurricane Milton, $416.1 million for Hurricane Helene and $112.6 million for Hurricane Debby.
Provides logistical support. FEMA coordinates with state and local governments, nonprofits such as the American Red Cross and federal agencies to supply cots, blankets and hygiene supplies for emergency shelters. It also works with state and local partners to distribute critical supplies such as food, water and medical aid.
When wildfires swept through Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023, FEMA provided emergency grants to cover immediate needs such as food, clothing and essential supplies for survivors.
The agency arranged hotel rooms, rental assistance and financial aid for residents who lost homes or belongings. Its Direct Housing Program has spent $295 million to lease homes for more than 1,200 households. This comprehensive support helped thousands of people begin rebuilding their lives after losing almost everything.
FEMA also helped fund construction of a temporary school to ensure that students whose schools burned could continue their classes. Hawaii, with its relatively small population and limited emergency funds, would have struggled to mount a comparable response on its own.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, center, and then-FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell speak to reporters in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Aug. 12, 2023, while assessing the wildfire damage there. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
Larger states often need help, too. When a 2021 winter storm overwhelmed Texas’ power grid and water infrastructure, FEMA coordinated the delivery of essential supplies, including water, fuel, generators and blankets, following the disaster declaration on Feb. 19, 2021. Within days, it awarded more than $2.8 million in grants to help people with temporary housing and home repairs.
Which states would suffer most without FEMA?
Without FEMA or other federal support, states would have to manage the disaster response and recovery on their own.
States prone to frequent disasters, such as Louisiana and Florida, would face expensive recurring challenges that would likely exacerbate recovery delays and reduce their overall resilience.
Smaller, more rural and less wealthy states that lack the financial resources and logistical capabilities to respond effectively would be disproportionately affected.
“States don’t have that capability built to handle a disaster every single year,” Lynn Budd, director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, told Stateline in an interview. Access to FEMA avoids the need for expensive disaster response infrastructure in each state.
States might be able to arrange regional cooperation. But state-led responses and regional models have limitations. The National Guardcould assist with supply distribution, but it isn’t designed to provide fast financial aid, housing or long-term recovery options, and the supplies and the recovery effort still come at a cost.
Members of the National Guard and a FEMA search-and-rescue team work together in the disaster response after Hurricane Florence pounded Wilmington, N.C., in September 2018. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Wealthier states might be better equipped to manage on their own, but poorer states would likely struggle. States with less funding and infrastructure would be left relying on nonprofits and community-based efforts. But these organizations are not capable of providing the scope of services FEMA can.
Any federal funding would also be slow if Congress had to approve aid after each disaster, rather than having FEMA already prepared to respond. States would be at the mercy of congressional infighting.
In the absence of a federal response and coordinating role, recovery would be uneven, with wealthier areas recovering faster and poorer areas likely seeing more prolonged hardships.
What does this mean?
Coordinating disaster response is complex, the paperwork for federal assistance can be frustrating, and the agency does draw criticism. However, it also fills an important role.
As the frequency of natural disasters continues to rise due to climate change, ask yourself: How prepared is your state for a disaster, and could it get by without federal aid?
Ming Xie 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 Bible story of the Good Samaritan is more than a mainstay of Sunday school courses. “Good samaritan” is the catch-all way to describe a do-gooder – someone who stops to change the tire of a stranded motorist, helps a lost child find their parents in a store and gives money to disaster relief programs.
But as an ethicist, I’d argue that the parable’s moral vision is much more radical than merely advising people to help out when they can. The parable raises profound philosophical questions about what it means to love another person, and our sometimes astonishing capacity to feel connected to others.
Love thy neighbor
The parable of the Good Samaritan occurs in the Gospel of Luke, in a part of the Bible where Jesus is attracting followers and preparing them to spread his movement.
During one of these sessions, a religious scholar asks him to explain the fundamental commandment in Jewish ethics: “You will love God with all of your heart, all of your mind, and all of your strength. And you will love your neighbor as yourself.” In response, Jesus tells the now-iconic story:
One time a man was traveling down the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Bible describes absolutely nothing else about this man, but the tradition assumes he is Jewish. The man was attacked and beaten within an inch of his life. As he lay in a ditch, a temple priest and a temple functionary both noticed him but hurried past.
Then a member of another tribe, a Samaritan, saw him. The Samaritan was immediately moved and rushed over, hoisted the man onto his donkey, took him to a nearby inn and stayed up with him all night, nursing him back to life. The next morning he paid the innkeeper two denarii – Roman silver coins, about two days’ salary – and offered to pay the tab for anything else the man might require as he recuperated.
Jesus turns the question back to the scholar: Who loved their neighbor? The scholar concedes the point – the Samaritan who had mercy.
“Go and do likewise,” Jesus replies.
What exactly did the Samaritan do that reveals the core of the love ethic? Jesus says specifically that the Samaritan’s “guts churned” when he saw the man in need: the Greek word used in the text is “splagchnizomai.”
The term occurs in other places in the Gospels, as well, evoking a very physical kind of emotional response. This “gut-wrenching love” is spontaneous and visceral.
Mortal and immortal
Ancient philosophers spent plenty of time trying to understand the ways humans love, often using highly intellectual frames. “The Symposium,” a dialogue by Plato, depicts Socrates drunkenly debating the essence of erotic love with his friends. Aristotle beautifully theorizes about friendship, “philia,” in his teachings about ethics. He introduces the idea that when we truly love a friend, we think of them as our “second self” – the lives of your closest friends become entangled within your own.
Many of the early Christian philosophers debated the nature of “agape,” the Greek word the New Testament uses to describe the selfless, unconditional love that characterizes the very nature of God. Saint Augustine introduced the concept of “amoris ordo,” the order of loves: that morality compels someone to first love the highest good, which is God, and then organize the rest of their loves to serve this highest love.
These concepts present love as an intellectual attitude that is often reserved for a select group, such as God, or one’s family, or one’s countrymen. And Christian notions of “agape” specifically put love just out of reach, only possible for a divine being, though humans should aspire to it and can experience its effects.
Splagchnizomai is different – such a physical emotion is only possible for creatures like us, with bodies. And as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows, it is an emotion that can be triggered by anyone, at any time, if we are – like the Samaritan – ready to be so moved.
A relief in St. Paul’s Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is one of countless artworks that reference the Good Samaritan. Hantsheroes/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Love and modern moral thinking
Much like their ancient counterparts, philosophers of the past century have struggled to explain how love can be one of the most morally significant elements of our lives, while also being so extraordinarily partial, biased and seemingly arbitrary.
To resolve the tension, many treat love not as a source of insight but as a messy feature of human psychology – an impediment that ethical reasoning must navigate around.
Indeed, the most prominent recent movements in applied ethics are wholly oriented around rational efficiency. The Effective Altruism movement argues that people should use evidence to transform themselves into the most efficient do-gooders they can possibly be. Proponents discourage college graduates looking to make a difference from pursuing public service and recommend high-paying jobs instead, arguing that they can have a bigger impact giving away wealth than directly caring for others. Emotions are viewed with suspicion, as sources of potential bias – not sources of moral wisdom.
In the book “Against Empathy,” psychologist Paul Bloom warns that such emotions “do poorly in a world where there are many people in need and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute.”
Compare that to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which portrays ethics as an emotional, deeply personal and almost absurdly inefficient matter. Those two denarii were a weighty sum – they could have been used to beef up security on the road and prevent other robberies, rather than save a single man. Nor did the Samaritan off-load the injured man onto a local healer. He cared for him directly, the way someone might sit with a gravely ill family member.
Neighbors and fences
In Jesus’ time, as in our own, there was significant debate about how to understand the commandments to love one’s neighbor. One school of thought considered a “neighbor” to be a member of your community: The Book of Leviticus says not to hold grudges against fellow countrymen. Another school held that you were obligated to love even strangers who are only temporarily traveling in your land. Leviticus also declares that “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself.”
In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus seems to come down on the side of the broadest possible application of the love ethic. And by emphasizing a particular type of love – the gut-wrenching kind – Jesus seems to indicate that the way of progress in ethics is through emotions, rather than around them.
My current work focuses on the upshots of reading this parable as a philosophical guide to ethics in our own time. For instance, if the love ethic is right, preparing students to make progress on complex social issues requires more than cost-benefit analysis. It also requires helping them to recognize and cultivate emotions, especially loving compassion.
There are clear parallels between the original parable of the good Samaritan and pressing political issues today, especially migration – and also, I believe, polarization. His story calls closer attention to humans’ innate capacity to love beyond the limits of familiar relationships or “tribes” – and just how much is lost when we do not.
Meghan Sullivan 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.
For patients with psychiatric conditions from addiction to mood disorders such as depression, disrupted sleep can often exacerbate symptoms and make it harder to stay on treatment.
Despite the important role circadian rhythms and sleep play in addiction, neuroscientists like me are only now beginning to understand the molecular mechanisms behind these effects.
Sleep and addictive drugs have an entangled relationship. Most addictive drugs can alter sleep-wake cycles, and sleep disorders in people using drugs are linked to addiction severity and relapse. While this poses a classic “chicken-or-egg” dilemma, it also presents an opportunity to understand how the sleep-addiction connection could unlock new treatments.
Circadian rhythms and health
At the center of the connection between sleep and mental health lies circadian rhythms: your body’s internal clock.
These rhythms align your bodily functions with your environment, synchronizing your body to day and night down to the molecular level. It does this through a series of proteins that interact in a feedback loop, turning genes on and off in regular patterns to support specific functions. Although your sleep-wake cycles are the most visible expression of circadian rhythms, these rhythms orchestrate most of your physiology.
If you have ever traveled across time zones, you have likely experienced a common form of circadian disruption called jet lag. This misalignment impairs your sleep and concentration, and can leave you feeling irritable.
A major focus of my lab is on opioid addiction, a disease that has claimed nearly 80,000 lives a year since 2021 in the U.S. and has limited treatment options.
Importantly, poor sleep is common throughout a person’s experience with opioid use disorder, from actively using to withdrawal from opioids, and even while on treatment. This complication can have profound consequences. Studies have linked sleep disruption to a 2.5-fold increased risk of relapse among those undergoing treatment.
Unlocking the clock for opioid addiction
Using brain tissue from deceased donors and experiments in mice, my team is identifying molecular changes associated with psychiatric disorders in people. We model these changes in mice to explore how they affect disease severity and behavior.
Through genetic sequencing and computer modeling, my lab is able to profile all the RNA molecules in a brain region and understand how their rhythmicity – the peaks and troughs of their activity across the day – changes due to opioids. This provides a complete snapshot of which genes change at what time, allowing my team to peer into the molecular mechanics that may drive opioid addiction.
For example, we looked at two brain regions strongly associated with addiction: the nucleus accumbens and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We found that patients with opioid addiction had completely different gene expression patterns in these brain regions compared with those without addiction. Some genes had adopted a completely different rhythm of activity, while others had lost their rhythmicity altogether.
Genes that lost rhythmicity included those involved in various components of the molecular clock and those linked to sleep duration. This further highlights how circadian disruption is a symptom of opioid use while beginning to uncover its underlying mechanisms.
In work that is pending peer review, my team focused on one major gene that lost rhythmicity in patients with opioid addiction: NPAS2. This component of the molecular clock is highly active in the nucleus accumbens and important for sleep and circadian regulation. We found that blocking functional NPAS2 formation led to increased fentanyl-seeking behavior in mice. Interestingly, we observed that female mice were willing to press a lever more times than male mice to obtain fentanyl, reflecting documented sex differences in opioid addiction among people. In another study, we also found that lack of NPAS2 exacerbated sleep disruption in mice that were administered fentanyl.
Together, our findings reinforce the role circadian rhythms play in addiction. Future work may clarify whether targeting NPAS2 could treat opioid addiction symptoms. Quality sleep isn’t just about waking up refreshed – it could also lead to reduced opioid use and fewer overdoses.
Ryan Logan receives funding from National Institutes of Health.
Mackenzie Gamble 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.
Russia President Vladimir Putin sent a guarded message of congratulations to Donald Trump on inauguration day, but then held a long direct call with his “dear friend,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Moscow is hoping for a more positive relationship with the current White House occupant, who has made his desire for a “deal” to end the Ukraine war well known.
But talk of exit scenarios from this 3-year-old conflict should not mask the fact that since the invasion began, Putin has overseen one of the worst periods in Russian foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
Transatlantic unity
The war in Ukraine has foreclosed on options and blunted Russian action around the world.
EU-Russian trade, including European imports of energy, has dropped to a fraction of what it was before the war.
The two Nordstrom pipelines, designed to bring Russian gas to Germany without transiting East Europe, lie crippled and unused. Revenues from energy sales are roughly one-half of what they were two years ago.
While Russia has evaded some restrictions with its “shadow fleet” – an aging group of tankers sailing under various administrative and technical evasions – the country’s main savior is now China. Trade between China and Russia has grown by nearly two-thirds since the end of 2021, and the U.S. cites Beijing as the main source of Russia’s “dual use” and other technologies needed to pursue its war.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has moved from an energy-for-manufactured-goods trade relationship with the West to one of vassalage with China, as one Russia analyst termed it.
Hosting an October meeting of the BRICS countries – now counting 11 members, including the five original members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South America – is unlikely to compensate for geopolitical losses elsewhere.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and China President Xi Jinping toast their friendship in March 2023. Pavel Byrkin/AFP via Getty Images
Problems at home …
The Russian economy is deeply distorted by increased military spending, which represents 40% of the budget and 25% of all spending. The government now needs the equivalent of US$20 billion annually in order to pay for new recruits.
But probably the greatest humiliation is that this putative great power with a population of 144 million must resort to importing North Korean troops to help liberate its own land.
… and in its backyard
Moscow’s dedication to the war has affected its ability to influence events elsewhere, even in its own neighborhood.
In the Caucasus, for example, Russia had long sided with Armenia in its running battle with Azerbaijan over boundaries and population after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Moscow has brokered ceasefires at various points. But intermittent attacks and territorial gains for Azerbaijan continued despite the presence of some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers sent to protect the remaining Armenian population in parts of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan’s forces abruptly took control of the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 100,000 Armenians fled in the largest ethnic cleansing episode since the end of the Balkan Wars. The peacekeepers did not intervene and later withdrew. The Russian military, absorbed in the bloody campaigns in Ukraine, could not back up or reinforce them.
Feeling betrayed by Russia, the Armenian government has for the first time extended feelers toward the West — which is happy to entertain such overtures.
Losing influence and friends
Russia’s loss in the Caucasus has been dwarfed by the damage to its military position and influence in the Middle East. Russia supported the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad against the uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011 and saved it with direct military intervention beginning in 2015.
Yet in December 2024, Assad was unexpectedly swept away by a mélange of rebel groups. The refuge extended to Assad by Moscow was the most it could provide with the war in Ukraine having drained Russia’s capacity to do more.
Russia’s possible withdrawal from the Syrian naval base at Tartus and the airbase at Khmeimim would remove assets that allowed it to cooperate with Iran, its key strategic partner in the region.
Stalemate in Ukraine and Russian strategic losses in Syria and elsewhere have prompted Moscow to rely increasingly on a variety of other means to try to gain influence.
Disinformation, election meddling and varied threats are not new and are part of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But recent efforts in East Europe have not been very productive. Massive Russian funding and propaganda in Romania, for example, helped produce a narrow victory for an anti-NATO presidential candidate in December 2024, but the Romanian government moved quickly to expose these actions and the election was annulled.
Nearby Moldova has long been subject to Russian propaganda and threats, especially during recent presidential elections and a referendum on stipulating a “European course” in the constitution. The tiny country moved to reduce its dependency on Russian gas but remains territorially fragmented by the breakaway region of Transnistria that, until recently, provided most of the country’s electricity.
Despite these factors, the results were not what Moscow wanted. In both votes, a European direction was favored by the electorate. When the Transnistrian legislature in February 2024 appealed to Moscow for protection, none was forthcoming.
When Moldova thumbs its nose at you, it’s fair to say your power ranking has fallen.
Wounded but still dangerous
Not all recent developments have been negative for Moscow. State control of the economy has allowed for rapid rebuilding of a depleted military and support for its technology industry in the short term. With Chinese help and evasion of sanctions, sufficient machinery and energy allow the war in Ukraine to continue.
And the inauguration of Donald Trump is likely to favor Putin, despite some mixed signals. The U.S. president has threatened tariffs and more sanctions but also disbanded a Biden-era task force aimed a punishing Russian oligarchs who help Russia evade sanctions. In the White House now is someone who has openly admired Putin, expressed skepticism over U.S. support for Ukraine and rushed to bully America’s closest allies in Latin America, Canada and Europe.
Most importantly, Trump’s eagerness to make good on his pledge to end the war may provide the Russian leader with a deal he can call a “victory.”
The shrinking of Russia’s world has not necessarily made Russia less dangerous; it could be quite the opposite. Some Kremlin watchers argue that a more economically isolated Russia is less vulnerable to American economic pressure. A retreating Russia and an embattled Putin could also opt for even more reckless threats and actions – for example, on nuclear weapons – especially if reversing course in Ukraine would jeopardize his position. It is, after all, Putin’s war.
All observers would be wise to note that the famous dictum “Russia is never as strong as she looks … nor as weak as she looks” has been ominously rephrased by Putin himself: “Russia was never so strong as it wants to be and never so weak as it is thought to be.”
Ronald H. Linden has in the past received funding from Fulbright, DAAD, German Marshall Fund, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Woodrow Wilson Center, US Institute of Peace.
It’s a fascinating question that intrigues millions of pet owners, animal lovers, veterinarians and scientists all over the world: Just how smart are animals?
Scientists once believed a brain with billions of neurons was a requirement for intelligence. After all, that’s why you’re able to think – neurons are the nerve cells in the brain that connect and transmit messages to each other.
Yet the more that scientists like me study animal emotion and cognition – the ability to learn through experiences and thinking – the more we find that humans are not very special at all. Many nonhuman species can do these things too.
Right now, there’s no agreement on how to decide whether a particular animal species is intelligent. But most scientists who study animal cognition have observed that many animals are able to solve problems, use tools, recall important information about their environment and recognize themselves in the mirror.
Measuring an animal’s intelligence is harder than you might think.
That kind of recall – known as episodic memory – is the ability to remember an event, including when and where it occurred. Until recently, scientists thought only humans had it. But now researchers have learned that some birds, cats, rats, monkeys and dolphins have it too.
Animals may not remember every experience – neither do people – but they do recall things critical to their survival. For example, birds know where they stored food. Monkeys know the presence of a predator.
Scientists once thought tool use was an exclusively human ability, but that’s not so. Chimpanzees use sticks to catch termites and stones to crack nuts open. Crows can even manufacture tools. By bending a wire, they can make a hook to retrieve a food reward that’s otherwise out of reach.
Researchers presented eight captive brown bears with this food challenge: Three objects – a large log, a small log and a box – were placed in an outdoor enclosure. A food reward was suspended above them. Six of the eight bears were able to move the logs and box into positions that enabled them to fetch the reward. Essentially, they used the three objects as tools.
Chimps use gestures and facial expressions to communicate.
Dolphin, chimpanzee communication
Language is another measure of intelligence. People, of course, have enormously sophisticated communication skills. But dolphins have complex dialects in the form of crackles, squeaks and whistles. Many researchers say the noises are a language. Chimpanzees and gorillas have used sign language to express emotions and ask for things from people.
Self-awareness – the ability to recognize yourself as an individual – signals intelligence. Babies don’t recognize themselves in the mirror until they are about a year and a half old. Up until then, they probably think the mirror image they see is another baby.
Many other species, including dolphins, ravens and elephants, recognize themselves in the mirror. Researchers put a red dye mark on chimpanzees under anesthesia; once awake, the chimps saw their reflection in a mirror. Instead of touching the red mark on their reflection in the glass, they touched the red mark on themselves, indicating self-recognition.
Just because animals can’t do certain things, it doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent. After all, humans can’t fly like a bird or swim like a fish. Nor is there a need for us to have the incredible sense of smell a dog has. We’d be sniffing hundreds of different smells from miles away – the scents from perfumes and pollution, gardens and garbage. From an evolutionary standpoint, that wouldn’t help us much. Plus, we’d get sick of it very quickly.
But all animals, including humans, have developed a wide range of capabilities so they can succeed in the environment they live in. Put simply, we’re all using our brains. Now that’s intelligent.
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.
Leticia Fanucchi 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.
AI has made it easier than ever to find information: Ask ChatGPT almost anything, and the system swiftly delivers an answer. But the large language models that power popular tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude were not designed to be accurate or factual. They regularly “hallucinate” and offer up falsehoods as if they were hard facts.
Yet people are relying more and more on AI to answer their questions. Half of all people in the U.S. between the ages of 14 and 22 now use AI to get information, according to a 2024 Harvard study. An analysis by The Washington Post found that more than 17% of prompts on ChatGPT are requests for information.
One way researchers are attempting to improve the information AI systems give is to have the systems indicate how confident they are in the accuracy of their answers. I’m a computer scientist who studies natural language processing and machine learning. My lab at the University of Michigan has developed a new way of deriving confidence scores that improves the accuracy of AI chatbot answers. But confidence scores can only do so much.
Popular and problematic
Leading technology companies are increasingly integrating AI into search engines. Google now offers AI Overviews that appear as text summaries above the usual list of links in any search result. Other upstart search engines, such as Perplexity, are challenging traditional search engines with their own AI-generated summaries.
The convenience of these summaries has made these tools very popular. Why scour the contents of multiple websites when AI can provide the most pertinent information in a few seconds?
AI tools seem to offer a smoother, more expedient avenue to getting information. But they can also lead people astray or even expose them to harmful falsehoods. My lab has found that even the most accurate AI models hallucinate in 25% of claims. This hallucination rate is concerning because other research suggests AI can influence what people think.
It bears emphasizing: AI chatbots are designed to sound good, not give accurate information.
Language models hallucinate because they learn and operate on statistical patterns drawn from a massive amount of text data, much of which comes from the internet. This means that they are not necessarily grounded in real-world facts. They also lack other human competencies, like common sense and the ability to distinguish between serious expressions and sarcastic ones.
All this was on display last spring, when a user asked Google’s AI Overviews tool to suggest a way to keep cheese from sliding off a pizza. The tool promptly recommended mixing the cheese with glue. It then came to light that someone had once posted this obviously tongue-in-cheek recommendation on Reddit. Like most large language models, Google’s model had likely been trained with information scraped from myriad internet sources, including Reddit. It then mistakenly interpreted this user’s joke as a genuine suggestion.
While most users wouldn’t take the glue recommendation seriously, some hallucinated information can cause real harm. AI search engines and chatbots have repeatedly been caught citing debunked, racist pseudoscience as fact. Last year, Perplexity AI stated that a police officer in California was guilty of a crime that he did not commit.
Showing confidence
Building AI systems that prioritize veracity is challenging, but not impossible. One way AI developers are approaching this problem is to design models that communicate their confidence in their answers. This typically comes in the form of a confidence score – a number indicating how likely it is that a model is providing accurate information. But estimating a model’s confidence in the content it provides is also a complicated task.
How confidence scores work in machine learning.
One common approach to making this estimate involves asking the model to repeatedly respond to a given query. If the model is reliable, it should generate similar answers to the same query. If it can’t answer consistently, the AI is likely lacking the information it needs to answer accurately. Over time, the results of these tests become the AI’s confidence scores for specific subject areas.
Other approaches evaluate AI accuracy by directly prompting and training models to state how confident they are in their answers. But this offers no real accountability. Allowing an AI to evaluate its own confidence leaves room for the system to give itself a passing grade and continue to offer false or harmful information.
My lab has designed algorithms that assign confidence scores by breaking down a large language model’s responses into individual claims that can be automatically cross-referenced with Wikipedia. We assess the semantic equivalence between the AI model’s output and the referenced Wikipedia entries for the assertions. Our approach allows the AI to quickly evaluate the accuracy of all its statements. Of course, relying on Wikipedia articles, which are usually but not always accurate, also has its limitations.
Publishing confidence scores along with a model’s answers could help people to think more critically about the veracity of information that these tools provide. A language model can also be trained to withhold information if it earns a confidence score that falls below a set threshold. My lab has also shown that confidence scores can be used to help AI models generate more accurate answers.
Limits of confidence
There’s still a long way to go to ensure truly accurate AI. Most of these approaches assume that the information needed to correctly evaluate an AI’s accuracy can be found on Wikipedia and other online databases.
But when accurate information is just not that easy to come by, confidence estimates can be misleading. To account for cases like these, Google has developed special mechanisms for evaluating AI-generated statements. My lab has similarly compiled a benchmarking dataset of prompts that commonly cause hallucinations.
But all these approaches verify basic facts – there are no automated methods for evaluating other facets of long-form content, such as cause-and-effect relationships or an AI’s ability to reason over text consisting of more than one sentence.
Developing tools that improve these elements of AI are key steps toward making the technology a source of trustworthy information – and avoid the harms that misinformation can cause.
Lu Wang 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.
Sixty years ago, on January 24, Britons gathered around their radios to listen to the sombre BBC announcement that Sir Winston Churchill had died at the age of 90. Others learned about the news at church, as they listened to prayers for the life of the former prime minister, admired by many for leading Britain through the second world war. Later that day, radio and television schedules were suspended to make way for the flood of tributes.
Around this time in villages around England and Wales, Women’s Institute (WI) members were just beginning a year-long scrapbooking project in honour of the WI’s golden jubilee year in 1965. A branch-based voluntary organisation,
founded in 1915, the WI was set up to bring country women together.
This scrapbook project was one way in which the organisation sought to foster a sense of community in rural areas. Members were invited to chronicle everything that happened in their village during that year. Although not every entry featured a tribute to Churchill, several WI members decided to mark the former leader’s death.
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Today, many of these scrapbooks survive in county record offices, while others remain cherished volumes kept by WIs in their branch archives. Some branches, along with local history societies, have digitised their scrapbooks and shared them online.
Scrapbooks are perhaps not what immediately spring to mind when we think about the 1960s. Traditionally, they conjure up images of brightly coloured printed clippings or pressed flowers, saved by Victorian women and children. But this is just one page in scrapbooking’s rich history.
In the 20th century, the rise of popular newspapers, magazines, domestic photography and television provided an array of material that could be transformed into personal archives. Scrapbooking proved a popular way for people to document what they found meaningful in their lives. Family, work, activism, stars of film, music and sport, royalty and even the weather were just some of the many topics covered.
In 1965, WI members in Woodford, the constituency Churchill represented for 40 years until 1964, decided to conclude their community scrapbook with a tribute to their former MP.
On a page of black sugar paper, members pasted a programme from a local memorial church service. Women also included a commemorative stamp, together with a photograph of floral tributes left at a bronze statue of Churchill on the village green, flanked by servicemen. Even though Churchill died at the beginning of the year, it was evidently the last thing Woodford Green’s WI members wanted their readers to encounter in their scrapbook.
Local and national newspapers published a plethora of obituaries and articles on Churchill’s life, providing scrapbookers, such as WI members in Stoke Ferry in Norfolk, with a wealth of visual material for their community volumes.
Local WI members crafted a photographic record of Churchill’s life, from childhood through to retirement, arranging the images in chronological order, mirroring the conventions associated with family photograph albums. They combined a series of press photographs and newspaper headlines with a handwritten note elaborating on what they felt was significant about Churchill’s death. WI women even went as far as to connect Churchill with their scrapbooking activities:
As we compile this Jubilee Scrap Book, we stop to wonder what life would have been like in this village in 1965 but for that great statesman and leader, Sir Winston Churchill. Would this book be the happy record of a free and thriving community?
On the following pages, they contrasted photographs from the funeral procession, with a shot of a bunch of pink tulips, given by a serviceman. In juxtaposing these images, they switched between ceremonial and more intimate forms of commemoration.
WI scrapbookers clearly felt strongly about recording the death of Churchill in their community volumes. The scrapbook genre allowed these women, at a significant moment in time, to shape the historical record in a way they found to be meaningful, with an eye to the future generations they expected to read their creations.
‘Cold lunches were the order of the day’
As relayed in many of these WI scrapbooks, Churchill was the first prime minister in the 20th century who was afforded a state funeral. It was broadcast around the world in a transmission of unparalleled significance – second only to the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
One woman in Whitchurch, Herefordshire, wrote a series of diary entries under the pseudonym of Ann Whitchurch for her WI’s competition entry. After an earlier entry (exploring the merits of new brightly coloured long johns) Whitchurch reflected on January 30:
Everyone seems to feel his loss as something that really matters. Whatever anyone’s politics are, he stood for England, especially for people of my generation who remember his great speeches during the War. It’s rather like the end of a chapter.
Whitchurch chose the more intimate format of the diary entry, as opposed to national newspaper coverage, to offer a personal tribute to Churchill. By declaring herself the spokeswoman for her generation, Whitchurch conveyed how she understood Churchill’s death as a moment of rupture and transition.
Over 100 miles away in the Cotswolds, a farmer’s wife in Chedworth shared what the day looked like from her rural farm:
Cold lunches were the order of the day, everyone was watching the funeral procession of Sir Winston Churchill – an unforgettable memory. Even the menfolk dashed in and out between essential jobs.
This WI member used her passage to show how the villagers’ commitment to watching the funeral upended their everyday routines at home and at work.
Sixty years on, browsing the pages of these community scrapbooks reveals more than just a reaction to Churchill’s death by a specific group of rural women. They provide a fascinating glimpse of how national mourning unfolded in English villages and the different ways in which country women documented this moment on behalf of their communities.
Cherish Watton-Colbrook works as an Archives Assistant for Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.
