Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Middling, Assistant Professor of Accounting, Northumbria University, Newcastle
When billionaire Jim Ratcliffe took a 27.7% stake in Manchester United back in February 2024, he had big plans. He would, he said, take the club “back to the top of English, European and world football, with world-class facilities for our fans”.
A year later, those ambitions remain a distant dream. Results have not been great, and for many fans, the 2024-25 season is looking like one to forget.
But while the club has been far from ruthless on the pitch, it has been fairly ruthless off it. Cost-cutting measures led to the loss of 250 jobs in a bid to save £10 million a year
And now there is fresh tension between the club and its fan base after supporters were warned of a possible rise in ticket prices to prevent the club breaching the Premier League’s “profit and sustainability rules” (PSR).
These rules were put in place in 2011, with the aim of getting clubs to balance their spending against income. This includes an allowance for an “acceptable” loss level set at a cumulative £105 million over a rolling three-year period.
And some well-established clubs have been close to the limits of PSR, with both Nottingham Forest and Everton receiving point deductions in 2024 for spending breaches.
In their defence, football clubs are not immune from cost pressures, such as rising wages and energy bills, leading to price increases. Nor is Manchester United alone in raising ticket prices.
Fulham was criticised for its “completely misguided” ticket pricing strategy in 2023, and in 2016 Liverpool fans staged a stadium walk out against price hikes. Issues such as these have led to the Football Supporters’ Association’s “Stop Exploiting Loyalty” campaign.
But asking fans to help foot the bill to support the club’s PSR position raises a wider question around the “social contract” between a club and its supporters – and the responsibilities on each side.
Our research suggests that Manchester United’s planned price rise would probably break this social contract.
We found that two of a club’s key responsibilities were fair ticket pricing and maintaining financial sustainability (which PSR aim to control). By suggesting ticket price rises to cover the PSR position, Manchester United would be in breach of both those aspects, essentially using one to deal with the other.
There’s nothing illegal about this approach, but it’s a tactic that might backfire. Our research suggests that a relationship between the club and its supporters should involve everybody pulling in the same direction. However, United have already seen some fans turn away from the club, and further ticket price hikes (they already went up to £66 at the end of 2024) may alienate others.
Clarity
Transparency between club and fans is another issue. For it is difficult for fans to know how close the club are to a potential PSR breach – and how much a ticket price increase would alleviate any pressure.
Although Manchester United file detailed accounts, they do not include clear numbers on PSR calculations. These are only provided privately to Premier League officials.
And while it is understandable that internal club finances would be considered commercially sensitive or private, clubs could do more in terms of being transparent with their fan base. This could be through a broad explanation of PSR in their accounts, or in communication with supporters’ groups.
PSR may be a concern for the club, but should the fans have to help foot the bill for financial issues? Again, our social contract model would suggest not. We advocate that clubs are ultimately responsible for their own financial sustainability, and that they should be as transparent as possible, involving fans in decision-making wherever they can.
That said, our research also shows that fans do have a role to play in contributing to a club’s income, supporting its financial sustainability – but not to the extent that the cost to fans is excessive. Yet a recent BBC poll found that most fans were willing to pay “slightly” or “significantly more” for their tickets next season.
This may provide clubs with a sense of justification for ticket price increases, but they need to be aware of tipping points. Our research found that fans should hold clubs to account, with many well practised at this.
So club owners should take heed of the social contract when thinking about putting more financial pressure on their supporters. If, of course, they sympathise with the view that football without the fans “is nothing”.
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.
US Drug Enforcement Administration images accompanying a warning about the emergence of nitazenes in Washington DC, June 2022USDEA
In the early hours of September 14 2021, three men parked in a quiet car park in the southern English market town of Abingdon-on-Thames. The men, returning from a night out, had pulled over to smoke heroin.
Unknown to them, the drug had been fortified with a nitazene compound called isotonitazene, a highly potent new synthetic opioid. Two of the men, Peter Haslam and Adrian Davies, overdosed and went into cardiac arrest. The third, Michael Parsons, tried to save them and himself by injecting naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote. Despite paramedics also trying to resuscitate Haslam and Davies, both died at the scene.
Their deaths were among at least 27 fatalities linked to nitazenes that year in the UK. Since then, nitazenes – otherwise known as 2-benzylbenzimidazole opioids – have become more prevalent in the UK’s illegal drug supply, leading some experts to warn that they are a major new threat because of their extreme potency.
In June 2023, the UK’s most recent outbreak of deaths linked to synthetic opioids emerged in the West Midlands when drug dealers used nitazenes to fortify low-purity heroin. By August, there were 21 nitazene-related fatalities in Birmingham alone. In some cases, dealers also added xylazine (colloquially known as “tranq”), a non-opioid sedative used by vets.
The increasing availability of these and other synthetic drugs led the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) to warn in August 2024 that “there has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs”. Like Haslam and Davies, many heroin users are unaware they might also be consuming nitazenes, which significantly increase the risk of overdose.
Given their potency, only a small amount of nitazene is required to produce a fatal dose. While some studies have concluded that nitazenes are even more potent than the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which causes many thousands of deaths in the US, the NCA judges it a “realistic possibility” that the potency of both substances are “broadly equivalent” – making them roughly 50 times more potent than heroin.
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Officially, more than 400 deaths plus many non-fatal overdoses were linked to nitazenes in the UK between June 2023 and January 2025. But this is likely to be an underestimate because of gaps within forensic and toxicology reporting. These figures come amid record levels of drug-related deaths in England and Wales. In 2023, there were 5,448 deaths related to drug poisoning, an 11% increase on the previous year and the highest total since records began in 1993.
This is of particular concern given that the UK has the largest heroin market in Europe, comprising around 300,000 users in England alone. While nitazene-related deaths are still relatively low (although by no means insignificant) compared with those from heroin and other opioids, these new synthetic opioids are cheap and easy to buy, and offer dealers multiple advantages over traditional plant-based drugs.
Unlike opium, nitazenes and other synthetic opioids can be produced anywhere in the world using precursor chemicals that are often uncontrolled and widely available. Producer countries including China and India have not yet banned all nitazene compounds, meaning they are sold legally – mostly online. Chemical manufacturing companies in these countries can synthesise nitazenes at scale using a comparatively easy three or four-step process.
Opioid use death rates around the world:
Estimated deaths from opioid use disorders per 100,000 people in 2021. Our World In Data, CC BY
For the past 15 years, I have researched and advised on the international narcotics industry, especially the Afghan drug trade, as an academic, UK Home Office official and consultant. I’ve observed many shifts within global drug markets, and I believe the increasing availability of synthetic drugs in the UK and Europe may represent a new chapter in illicit drug use here – with the emergence of nitazenes only adding to these concerns.
A brief history of synthetic opioids
New synthetic opioids (NSOs) are one of the fastest-growing groups of new psychoactive substances around the world. The EU Drugs Agency (EUDA) currently monitors 81 NSOs – the fourth-largest group of drugs under observation.
NSOs largely fall into two broad groups: fentanyl and its analogues, and non-fentanyl-structured compounds – these include nitazenes, among many other substances.
Many of these “new” synthetic opioids have, in fact, existed for decades. Nitazenes were first synthesised in the 1950s by the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Ciba Aktiengesellschaft, as pain-relieving analgesics, although they were never approved for medical use.
Prior to 2019, there had only been limited reports of nitazenes in the illegal drug supply – including a “brownish looking powder” found in Italy in 1966; the discovery of a lab in Germany in 1987; several nitazene-related deaths in Moscow in 1998; and a US chemist illegally producing the drug for personal use in 2003. But since nitazenes re-emerged at the end of the last decade, over 20 variants have been discovered.
Paul Janssen, the Belgian chemist who first made fentanyl. Johnson & Johnson
The most common NSO in the illegal drug market, fentanyl, was first synthesised by Belgian chemist Paul Janssen in 1960. Fentanyl, which is roughly 100 times more potent than morphine, was approved in the US in 1968 for pharmaceutical use as an analgesic.
Over the next four decades, however, illegally produced fentanyl resulted in three relatively small outbreaks of deaths in the US. A fourth, larger fentanyl outbreak in Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia resulted in about 1,000 deaths between 2005 and 2007.
The current US fentanyl crisis started in 2013, expanding to affect much of the country. Between 2014 and 2019, Chinese companies were the main manufacturers of finished fentanyl substances in the US – to combat this, both the Obama and Trump administrations lobbied Beijing to curtail the fentanyl industry.
The Chinese government responded by controlling specific fentanyl analogues. However, every time an analogue was banned, chemists there would slightly adjust the formula to produce a new compound that mirrored the banned substance.
China finally banned all fentanyl-related substances in May 2019, prompting two significant changes in the drug’s supply: a slowdown in the development of new fentanyl analogues, and a reduction in their direct sale to the US from China. Instead, Chinese companies increasingly sent fentanyl precursors to Mexican drug cartels who would synthesise fentanyl (or counterfeit medication) in clandestine labs, before smuggling it across the US border. Consequently, Mexico is now the primary source of fentanyl in the US.
But these supply changes led to another shift in the global drugs arena, as China’s chemical and pharmaceutical businesses – keen to develop new markets – adjusted their focus to producing uncontrolled synthetic substances, including nitazenes. At the same time, they expanded their geographical focus from North America to include Europe and the UK.
The nitazene supply chain
Producing nitazenes is a relatively low-cost exercise. They are largely manufactured in laboratories – both legal and illegal – in China, before being smuggled to the UK and Europe via fast parcel and post networks.
Nitazenes’ high potency means only small quantities are required, making them easier to transport and harder for border officials to detect. Some Chinese vendors have reportedly been offering to hide nitazenes in legitimate goods such as dog food and catering supplies, to circumvent custom controls. All of this decreases the risk to sellers, and lessens the price of doing business.
In March 2024, two China-based sellers operating on the dark web were selling a kilo of nitazene for between €10,000 and €17,000 (£12,000-£20,000). During roughly the same period, a kilo of heroin at the wholesale level in the UK was selling for between £23,000 and £26,000. Once bought, nitazenes are largely used to fortify low-purity heroin, although the drug can also be made into pills.
Video by The Guardian.
Nitazenes are not limited to the dark web. They are widely and openly advertised on the internet, social media and music streaming platforms. In February 2024, one China-based e-commerce site displayed 85 advertisements for nitazenes. Such sites also sell a range of other synthetic drugs, including fentanyl analogues and precursors, xylazines, cannabinoids and methamphetamine.
This means drug dealers in the UK and across the world no longer need to have established connections to underworld figures to source illegal drugs. With a click of a mouse, they can have them delivered to their home address. In this sense, the internet has democratised the drug trade by widening access beyond “traditional” criminals.
In the UK, while the supply of nitazenes is currently assessed as “low”, a number of smaller-scale organised crime groups are importing them to fortify low-purity heroin, before largely dealing it at the “county lines” level. This involves organised crime groups moving drugs – primarily heroin and crack cocaine – across towns, cities and county borders within the UK, using mobile phones or another form of “deal line” to sell to customers.
In November 2023, Leon Brown from West Bromwich was imprisoned for seven years for dealing drugs containing nitazenes – a verdict described as “a great result in our ongoing efforts to tackle county lines drug dealing” by detective sergeant Luke Papps of the South Worcestershire county lines team.
A few larger UK criminal networks have also been involved in nitazene distribution. In October 2023, the police and Border Force conducted raids across north London, arresting 11 people. They dismantled a drug processing site and seized 150,000 tablets containing nitazene – the UK’s largest ever seizure of synthetic opioids – as well as a pill-pressing machine, a firearm, more than £60,000 in cash and £8,000 in cryptocurrency. The police suspected the group had been selling the tablets on the dark web.
Anecdotal reports suggest there have been mixed reactions to the introduction of nitazenes into the illegal drug supply. Richard, a recovering heroin user from Bristol, told Vice magazine that, given their potency, some “people are scared of [nitazenes]” while others are “actively seeking” them.
As has been the case with fentanyl in the US, users build up tolerance and therefore seek stronger doses. Manny, a heroin user from Bristol, told Vice: “I smoked [heroin cut with nitazenes] and it felt like the first time I’d ever taken drugs.”
Video by Vice.
UK-based criminals also use the dark web to export nitazenes abroad. In October 2023, the Australian Border Force identified 22 nitazene discoveries in packages shipped to the country via mail cargo from the UK. British criminals have also trafficked counterfeit medicines containing nitazenes to Ireland and Norway.
Use of nitazenes is now being detected all over the world. Within Europe, Ireland experienced several nitazene outbreaks in 2023-24 while in Estonia, nitazenes now account for a large share of overdose deaths – a trend also seen (to a lesser extent) in Latvia. Preliminary data suggests at least 150 deaths were linked to nitazenes in Europe in 2023.
Nitazenes have also been discovered in fake pain medication such as benzodiazepines, oxycodone and diazepam, which widens the number of people at risk to include those with no opioid tolerance. The death in July 2023 of Alex Harpum, a 23-year-old British student who was preparing for a career as an opera singer, was a stark reminder of the danger of buying fake medicine online that may have been contaminated with nitazenes.
The nitazene ‘boom’ and the global heroin trade
For decades, Afghanistan was the world’s largest opium producer and the source of most of Europe’s heroin. Then in April 2022, the ruling Taliban announced a comprehensive prohibition on the use, trade, transport, production, import and export of all drugs. As a result, poppy cultivation has fallen to historically low levels for a second consecutive year.
While this has not, as yet, translated into a shortage of heroin on European streets, including in the UK and Germany, some indicators suggest a slowdown in heroin supplies to the UK. In the year March 2023-24, the quantity of heroin seized in the UK fell by 54%, from 950kg to 441kg. This is the lowest quantity of heroin seized since 1989, when about 350kg was intercepted.
The NCA assesses that the Taliban ban has created market “uncertainty”. The wholesale price of heroin has increased from roughly £16,000 per kilo prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to about £26,000, while anecdotal reports suggest average heroin purity for users dropped to under 30% (often to 10-20%) in 2024, compared with around 35% in 2023 and 45% in 2022.
Video by UN Story.
Even without the Taliban’s ban, heroin is not easy to produce and supply. Cultivating opium poppy is labour-intensive, taking five or six months. The static nature of opium fields means they are visible and susceptible to eradication; poppy crops can also be negatively affected by blight or drought.
Converting opium into heroin base is also a labour-intensive process that can involve (depending on the production method) at least 17 steps. Acetic anhydride, the main chemical used to convert morphine into heroin, is relatively expensive compared with synthetic precursors. Moreover, heroin is a bulky product, which means it is harder to move in large volumes.
While the relationship between events in opiate-producer countries and the introduction of synthetic opioids to consumer markets should not be overstated, this new type of drug offers economic advantages to criminals whose “sole motivation is greed”.
For decades, Turkish, Kurdish and Pakistani criminal networks have been responsible for importing heroin into the UK. Once in the UK, both Turkish and British groups largely control its wholesale supply, with some participation of Albanian gangs.
To date, there is little evidence to suggest these groups have transitioned to supplying NSOs, including nitazenes. The shifting dynamics in the global drug supply chain, however, could upend traditional markets and the gangs who profit from them.
America’s synthetic drug crisis
The synthetic opioid fentanyl has devastated the US, having been linked to about 75,000 deaths in 2023 alone. It is the primary cause of death for Americans aged 18-49. Canada, too, has experienced a wave of deaths: between January 2016 and June 2024, there were 49,105 apparent opioid deaths there, with fentanyl implicated in a large proportion.
More than 4,300 reports of nitazenes have reached the US National Forensic Laboratory Information System since 2019. They are typically used to fortify fentanyl and other opioids, which can produce a fatal concoction.
Efforts to stem the flow of NSOs, including nitazenes, from China to the US and elsewhere will prove challenging. And even if China does implement stricter controls, other countries could step in to fill the void. According to the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking:
The overall sizes of these industries, limited oversight efforts and political incentives contribute to an atmosphere of impunity among firms and individuals associated with those industries.
While US and Chinese counter-narcotics cooperation ended in 2022 amid increasing geopolitical tensions, the following November’s summit in Woodside, California, between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping saw them agree to recommence collaboration.
As a result, China recently closed several chemical companies that were shipping fentanyl precursors and nitazenes to the US. These vendors used encrypted platforms and cryptocurrency to conduct the deals, and mislabelled the consignments to try to ensure the substances evaded border controls. China has also outlawed more chemicals and substances, including several nitazene variants.
But President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on imports from China – which sit alongside proposed taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico, in part for supposedly not doing enough to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and its precursors to the US – threatens this counter-narcotics cooperation.
While nitazenes are not yet widely available in the US, their presence within some fentanyl batches is complicating the US opioid crisis – and according to some experts, has the potential to further increase the already shocking number of synthetic opioid-related deaths.
The UK response to nitazenes
Successive UK governments have made tackling NSOs a high priority. Shortly after the most recent nitazene-related deaths were discovered in the UK in summer 2023, the NCA launched Project Housebuilder to lead and coordinate the law enforcement and public health response.
This was soon followed by the establishment of a government-wide Synthetic Opioids Taskforce “to improve…understanding, preparedness and mitigation against this evolving threat”. Chris Philp, then the UK’s combatting drugs minister, stated that “synthetic opioids are at the top of [this government’s] list because of the harm they cause”.
The taskforce has taken a range of measures, such as controlling more NSOs as class A drugs, conducting more intelligence operations at UK borders, widening access to naloxone, and enhancing the UK’s real-time, multi-source drug surveillance system. The government also worked with the US and Canada to learn from their experiences.
Recently, the current UK government banned a further six synthetic opioids and introduced a generic definition of nitazenes as class A drugs. And the UK’s current government, unlike its Conservative predecessor, has also indicated its willingness to consider evidence from the UK’s first drug consumption facility, which recently opened in Glasgow.
Other policy measures worthy of consideration include expanding drug checking services whereby drug users submit drugs to a lab to test what is in them, then are provided with information about the sample. These services offer vital information to the public and authorities about current drug trends.
While there is high uncertainty about what is going to happen next in the UK regarding illicit drug trends, the evolution of the US drug landscape over generations provides some important lessons.
Lessons from the US
The US fentanyl crisis shows drug markets can change quickly with long-lasting consequences. Most heroin on US streets contains – or has been replaced by – fentanyl. According to DEA seizure data, US heroin seizures declined by nearly 70% between 2019 and 2023, whereas fentanyl seizures have increased by 451%.
However, illegal drug markets evolve in different ways and at different paces. In May 1989, Douglas Hogg, a UK Home Office minister, travelled to the US and the Bahamas on a fact-finding mission about crack cocaine, a drug that was predicted to spread from the US to the UK. Upon his return, Hogg noted:
The ethnic, social and economic characters of many of our big cities are very similar to those in the US. If they have a crack problem, why should not we? … The use of crack in Great Britain is likely to develop very substantially over the next few years.
But this “crack invasion”, as some called it, did not materialise in the UK to the extent it had in the US – and the same was true about a predicted wave of methamphetamine use in the UK, which remains low compared with the US.
It is also unlikely the UK and Europe will experience a synthetic opioid crisis on the same scale as the US. The first wave of the US crisis was driven by extensive overprescription of opioids for pain relief. This increased the number of people addicted to opioids, some of whom later turned to heroin, before transitioning to fentanyl. In contrast, large-scale opioid prescriptions have not been a major issue in the UK or Europe, although there is some diversion of legal fentanyl into the illegal drug market in Europe.
Video by The Brookings Institution.
According to Alex Stevens, professor of criminology at the University of Sheffield, another factor differentiating the US and Europe is the provision of drug treatment and harm reduction programmes. Opioid users in Europe, and to a lesser extent in the UK, are much more likely to be in medication-assisted treatment than their US counterparts, thus reducing the number of people at risk. These interventions are reinforced by different socioeconomic factors in much of Europe, such as lower economic inequality, stronger social protections, and better healthcare systems.
None of this, though, means the nitazene threat in the UK and Europe should be underestimated, nor that use and supply of these drugs (and other NSOs) will not increase from its current relatively low base. As the NCA recently warned:
While a zero-tolerance approach from law enforcement, plus advice to users on the heightened dangers, may contain or slow the current uptake, we must prepare for these substances to become widely available, both unadvertised in fortified mixes and in response to user demand as a more potent high.
The future of new synthetic opioids
Predicting the future of NSO use and trafficking is a challenging task. Projections for Europe range from existing opiate stockpiles ensuring that heroin consumer markets remain serviced (assuming the Taliban ban is short-lived), to a heroin shortage which results in more drug dealers turning to NSOs to plug the shortfall, which in turn could lead to lasting changes in European drug markets (as happened in a few countries following the Taliban’s first opium ban in 2000-01).
In such a scenario, it is possible that Turkish criminal networks may exploit their links with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel to source NSOs. Mexican criminal gangs also operate in Europe, which may increase the likelihood of them trying to open a new NSO market on the continent.
There is also evidence that some Italian criminal organisations have entered the NSO marketplace. In November 2023, Italian authorities announced the seizure of 100,000 doses of synthetic drugs, including fentanyl, as part of operation Painkiller, a joint Italian-American initiative.
Given the many advantages for criminal groups of NSOs, it seems likely they are here to stay. A key question is whether nitazenes (or other NSOs) will supplant traditional heroin as the opioid of choice, as they have done in the US, or remain at relatively low levels in Europe, co-existing with or mixed into the heroin supply.
In December 2023, Paul Griffiths, the EUDA’s scientific director, told Vice: “We’re not seeing much new initiation of heroin use in Europe. So in five to ten years … as heroin users get older and more vulnerable, we’re not going to have much of an opiate problem left.”
But he warned that if heroin use does dry up: “You might then see opioids appearing in other forms and preparations, such as pills, that could potentially become popular among younger age groups who currently do not appear attracted to injecting heroin.”
While previous NSO outbreaks in the UK were relatively short-lived and limited in scale, the most recent nitazene outbreak, which started in summer of 2023, has been more sustained, covered more parts of the UK, and involved more fatalities. The broader trend in Europe also suggests the prevalence and variations of NSOs are increasing at a faster pace than in previous years.
Notwithstanding, nitazene use and supply in the UK currently remains relatively low. In fact, the rate of nitazene-linked deaths – at least those officially reported – decreased between spring 2024 and the end of the year.
In the short term, then, it seems unlikely there will be a nitazene “explosion”. Rather, criminal groups will probably try to increasingly embed nitazenes into the UK drug market at a similar pace to the last 18 months.
However, this situation could change rapidly in future, especially if larger criminal networks involved in heroin importation switch to smuggling NSOs, and there is a genuine shortage of Afghan heroin. This problem would be compounded if drug users start seeking nitazenes, thus creating demand for them.
Either way, the UK government, along with its European partners, should continue to reinforce the whole drug system, to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
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Philip A. Berry 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.
Donald Trump has hit the 30-day pause button on imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but is proceeding with slapping 10% tariffs on Chinese imports, and tariffs on the EU are still on his agenda.
Trump has declared that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. Yet as the president weighs up the sweeping consequences of his tariff fixation, he may want to throw out the dictionary and pick up a history book.
The magnitude and scale of the proposed tariffs hark back to the US Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act enacted in 1930.
For example, Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman told Bloomberg that “we’re really talking about tariffs on a scale that we … have not seen,” adding that “we’re talking about a reversal of really 90 years of US policy”.
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs were initially intended to provide support to the deeply indebted US agricultural sector at the end of the 1920s, and protect them from foreign competition – all familiar themes to the anti-free-trade rhetoric peddled by Trumpists today.
The advent of the Great Depression had generated widespread, albeit not universal, demands for protection from imports, and Smoot-Hawley increased already significant tariffs on overseas goods. Members of Congress were eager to provide protection, trading votes in exchange for support for their constituents’ industries.
Although at the time more than 1,000 economists implored President Herbert Hoover to veto Smoot-Hawley, the bill was signed into law. The resulting tariff act led to taxes averaging nearly 40% on 20,000 or so different types of imported goods.
The history of trade tariffs in the US.
The culmination led to a dramatic decline in US trade with other countries, particularly among those that retaliated, and is widely acknowledge as severely worsening the Great Depression. According to one estimate, the sum of US imports plummeted by nearly half.
What’s more, the impacts were felt globally. Protectionist policies are believed to have accounted for about half of the 25% decline in world trade, and indirectly helped create economic factors that led to the second world war.
The blowback against Capitol Hill was immense as well: the optics of vote trading over the tariff act resulted in Congress delegating control over trade policy to the president just four years later because the behaviour was regarded as so reckless.
All of this came against the backdrop of diplomatic American isolationism in the 1930s, which were not unlike many of Trump’s current efforts to retreat from – or even attack – multilateral institutions.
Despite President Woodrow Wilson winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his work initiating the League of Nations (a forerunner of the United Nations), for example, the US never became a member. The term “America first” was also used widely in this period to refer to a focus on domestic policy and high tariffs.
Fast forward to present day
Trump has said that his tariffs will cause “some pain” but are “worth the price that must be paid.” Based on recent estimates from the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s tariffs could drive up costs for the average US household more than US$1,200 (£963) per year.
Whether US voters will still stand behind Trump when actual prices begin to rise is still to be determined.
However, many Republicans on Capitol Hill have rushed to Trump’s defence. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney of New York told Fox News that she’s glad the US is “projecting strength for once on the world stage”. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri insisted that tariffs were “not a surprise,” emphasising that Trump had relentlessly campaigned on “improving our standing in the world.”
Perhaps the sharpest Republican rebuke came from Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who labelled the tariffs simply a “bad idea”.
Public opinion data show that tariffs are hotly contested, with partisanship shaping both general views toward tariffs and views on specific national targets.
According to a January 2025 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 52% of Americans overall approve of placing new tariffs on China, with 74% of Republicans in favour, but just 34% of Democrats.
Support is more modest for imposing tariffs on America’s neighbours. Only 40% of voters think tariffs on Canada and Mexico are a good idea, including 59% of Republicans and 24% of Democrats.
Tariffs rank low on a list of national priorities. A mere 3% of Americans think tariffs on Canada and Mexico should be a top priority for Trump in his first 100 days, while just 11% rank tariffs on China as a top priority.
Prospect of a broader trade war
What seems clear is that Trump’s proposed tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China could be just the opening salvos in a broader tit-for-tat that may extend to Europe, and beyond.
At home, the political challenge for Trump is to keep intact what increasingly looks like a fragile coalition – balancing the interests of hardline Maga supporters who reject free trade and tech titans who see tariffs as disrupting vital supply chains, especially to Asia.
After Trump’s election, former adviser and populist nationalist Steve Bannon warned that America would no longer be “abused” by “unbalanced trade deals.” “Yes, tariffs are coming,” he said. “You will have to pay to have access to the US market. It is no longer free, the free market is over.”
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has been mostly silent on the tariffs. While tech moguls are doubtlessly trying to curry favour for tariff exemptions or the reduction of tariffs altogether, it’s possible that they have been assured that the tariffs are about leverage and will be gone soon enough.
Regardless, Trump is showing that tariffs are a crucial part of his “America first” foreign policy, a kind of belligerent unilateralism that treats allies and adversaries alike as pieces to be moved around a chessboard.
Under Trump, the “art of the deal” means throwing America’s weight around as the world’s economic superpower, and waiting for the leaders of other nations to fold. Whether American voters will endure the economic costs necessary for his plans could determine his resolve.
Trump may think that tariff is a beautiful word now. But if even a glimmer of the 1930s repeats itself, its economic shadow could soon look grim.
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.
An international panel of medical experts have thrust Lucy Letby back into the spotlight. At a press conference convened by Letby’s legal team, the experts cast doubt over the former nurse’s conviction. Letby was given 15 whole-life sentences for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more.
Speaking at the press conference in London, retired neonatologist Dr Shoo Lee told the assembled reporters: “In all cases death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”
Why should we take Dr Lee’s word for it? Well, in part, because he is the author of a key paper on air embolisms, one of the methods that Letby was accused of using to kill babies, which formed a key part of the prosecution’s evidence at the trial.
He also claims that the paper’s findings were misinterpreted at the trial and that a newly updated version of the article would help exonerate Letby rather than convict her.
The Letby conviction has always attracted critical attention because there were no witnesses who could confirm they saw her attacking any of the babies she was convicted of murdering. Nor did anyone see her perform actions that could have constituted the attempted murders of seven others.
Consequently, the prosecution used statistics alongside the medical evidence the expert panel has now cast doubt upon. So how solid is that statistical evidence?
A key piece of statistical evidence is a chart which showed that Lucy Letby was on duty every time one of the crimes of which she was accused occurred, but that none of the other nursing staff were.
On the face of it, it seems quite damning. But when you think about it, it’s unsurprising that Letby’s column is the only one full of crosses. Any of the events at which she was not present she would not have been charged with and consequently wouldn’t appear on the chart.
This is an example of what is known in statistics as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
The fallacy is named for a story about a Texan cowboy who likes to head out to his barn after a few drinks for target practice. Invariably, the barn wall gets peppered with random bullet holes during the inebriated exercise, and purely by chance some of these holes are clustered.
One morning the savvy “sharpshooter” gets out his paint cans and daubs a target around this cluster of holes to give the impression of accuracy to anyone who didn’t see the process by which they were made and to draw attention away from the other more dispersed bullet holes.
The sharpshooter fallacy occurs when a conclusion is drawn based only on data consistent with a given hypothesis, ignoring data that doesn’t support the proposed conclusion.
Imagine, for example, you made a chart similar to the one used to convict Letby, this time including only those deaths at which a different member of the nursing staff was present. It’s entirely possible – for example, if they were present for deaths at which Letby was not – that their name would be above the only column full of crosses and not Letby’s.
Indeed, it later transpired that the table did not include six other deaths that occurred during the same period and with which Letby was not charged. The jury was not told about these other deaths.
As Jane Hutton, a professor of medical statistics at the University of Warwick argues: “If you want to find out what went wrong, you need to consider all deaths, not just a subset of them.”
The probability of so many deaths on a neonatal unit in such a short period should be quite low. At first glance, this might seem to make the alternative explanation of murder seem more likely. But this is a classic statistical error.
This mistake is so common in courtrooms that it is known as the prosecutor’s fallacy. The argument starts by showing that, if the suspect is innocent, seeing a particular piece of evidence is extremely unlikely.
For Letby, this is the assertion that if she was innocent of killing these babies, the probability of them dying due to other causes is extremely low. The prosecutor then deduces, incorrectly, that an alternative explanation – the suspect’s guilt – is extremely likely.
The argument neglects to take into account any other possible alternative explanations, in which the suspect is innocent, such as the death of these babies due to inadequate care. It also neglects the possibility that the explanation that the prosecution is proposing, in which the suspect is guilty, may be just as uncommon as the alternative explanations, if not more so.
By just presenting the low probability of these seven babies dying naturally, the inference that an untrained jury is invited to draw runs something along these lines: “The deaths of these babies from natural causes is extremely rare, so the odds that the deaths are the result of murder is correspondingly extremely high.”
However, it must also be taken into account, when weighing up the evidence, that multiple infant murders are also extremely uncommon. What really matters is the relative likelihoods of the different explanations. Weighing these very unusual events against each other is not an easy thing to do.
Criminal cases review
Other statistical issues with the case also deserve more attention: the high number of deaths at the Countess of Chester, even excluding the babies that Letby has been convicted of murdering. Or the possibility of false positive medical identifications of murder, for example.
Whether Letby’s team’s appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission will be successful or not remains to be seen. The statistical issues over the case, when taken alongside the doubts about the medical evidence, mean that there is certainly a possibility.
Throughout all this, it’s important to remember the families affected by the events at the Countess of Chester Hospital. Whatever the ultimate truth of the matter, this ongoing case will undoubtedly make dealing with their grief more difficult.
Christian Yates 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 Magdalena Frennhoff Larsén, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
It is not unusual for international leaders to be invited to meet with EU heads of state or government at the fringes of the European Council meetings. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has regularly been invited to address the EU leaders. And while Donald Trump was never invited during his first term as US president, his successor Joe Biden was.
But Keir Starmer’s February 3 visit was significant, because it was the first time since Brexit that a British prime minister was invited to join the EU leaders for their traditional post-summit dinner.
Even before the UK formally left the EU, while the two parties were negotiating the terms for Brexit, British prime ministers were excluded. Not only were they left out of the formal meetings where the other 27 leaders discussed Brexit, but they were also excluded from the post-summit dinner. This caused frustration in Downing Street, and led to complaints about the UK being sidelined.
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There were rumours that Boris Johnson would be invited to a European Council meeting in 2022, but these remained rumours. And even if UK-EU relations improved under the premiership of Rishi Sunak, it was not until the Labour government’s step-change in the signalling of the need for a Brexit “reset” that a dinner invitation was extended.
Symbolically, it was important. After eight rather tumultuous years, the UK and EU were having dinner together again. And against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and the changing geopolitical landscape, both parties recognised the need for closer cooperation on security and defence.
Starmer wants an ambitious security partnership with the EU. European Council president António Costa recognised that there is a great deal that the EU and the UK can do together in terms of defence and addressing global challenges.
Partners in security
The idea of a security partnership is not new. Already in the political declaration of 2019, which accompanied the withdrawal agreement, the UK and the EU agreed to negotiate such a partnership, including cooperation on foreign, security, and defence policies.
However, in his hurry to “get Brexit done”, Boris Johnson decided not to proceed on this track. As a result, the trade and cooperation agreement, which governs the EU-UK relationship, largely omits security cooperation.
Even without a formal security and defence structure in place, the EU and the UK have worked alongside each other in supporting Ukraine. But the Labour government has repeatedly stressed the need for more formal cooperation arrangements as part of its “reset”. To this end, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, has called for an ambitious and broad-ranging UK-EU security pact.
For the UK it is a relatively easy way to improve relations and rebuild trust with the EU. The EU and the UK face similar geopolitical challenges and are largely aligned in terms of values and interests on security and defence matters. A more coordinated EU-UK response would have greater impact, whether it is about supporting Ukraine, tackling cross-border crime or increasing energy security.
It is also an area where the UK can forge closer links with the EU without crossing its red lines on free movement of people, or membership of the customs union or single market. And the UK – as the only major European military power other than France – is an attractive security partner for the EU.
EU leaders do see potential in such an initiative. Already in the 2022 “strategic compass”, a document which sets out the EU’s security and defence agenda, the EU stressed that it remains open to closer cooperation with the UK.
This has become even more urgent in light of the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s future engagement with Nato and European security. If Trump makes good on his threat to downsize America’s security role in Europe, the EU needs to strengthen its own defence, and it cannot do so effectively without the UK.
However, the EU wants to see concrete proposals for what a security pact would look like. It questioned the genuine commitment to the “reset” after the UK rejected the EU’s proposal around a time-limited and visa-based youth mobility scheme – a move that disappointed the EU, for whom the issue was a top priority. The UK government worried that it could be misinterpreted as a return to free movement of people and rejected the proposal.
While the leaders left the dinner without concrete proposals, they agreed to talk further. There will be an institutional EU-UK summit in the UK in May, where the two parties will discuss what form the deeper security and defence cooperation could take.
European Council president Costa recognised that there is a new positive energy in the EU-UK relationship. It remains to be seen whether this energy, and the signalling about the UK’s commitment to a reset, will eventually translate into an actual EU-UK rapprochement – something both parties would benefit from. Rebuilding trust takes time – and a dinner invitation should be seen as positive sign in itself.
Magdalena Frennhoff Larsén 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.
Rural America faces many challenges that Congress and the federal government could help alleviate under the new Trump administration.
Rural hospitals and their obstetrics wards have been closing at a rapid pace, leaving rural residents traveling farther for health care. Affordable housing is increasingly hard to find in rural communities, where pay is often lower and poverty higher than average. Land ownership is changing, leaving more communities with outsiders wielding influence over their local resources.
Here are some ways we believe the Trump administration could work with Congress to boost these communities’ health and economies.
1. Rural health care access
One of the greatest challenges to rural health care is its vulnerability to shifts in policy and funding cuts because of rural areas’ high rates of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
Funding from those federal programs affects rural hospitals, and rural hospitals are struggling.
Nearly half of rural hospitals operate in the red today, and over 170 rural hospitals have closed since 2010. The low population density of rural areas can make it difficult for hospitals to cover operating costs when their patient volume is low. These hospital closures have left rural residents traveling an extra 20 miles (32 km) on average to receive inpatient health care services and an extra 40 miles (64 km) for specialty care services.
The government has created programs to try to help keep hospitals operating, but they all require funding that is at risk. For example:
The Low-volume Hospital Adjustment Act, first implemented in 2005, has helped numerous rural hospitals by boosting their Medicare payments per patient, but it faces regular threats of funding cuts. It and several other programs to support Medicare-dependent hospitals are set to expire on March 31, 2025, when the next federal budget is due.
The rural emergency hospital model, created in 2020, helps qualifying rural facilities to maintain access to essential emergency and outpatient hospital services, also by providing higher Medicare payments. Thus far, only 30 rural hospitals have transitioned to this model, in part because they would have to eliminate inpatient care services, which also limits outpatient surgery and other medical services that could require overnight care in the event of an emergency.
Rural emergency hospitals can get extra funding, but there’s a catch: They have no inpatient beds, so people in need of longer care must go farther. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
Services for pregnant women have also gotten harder to find in rural areas.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth – the ability to meet with your doctor over video – wasn’t widely used. It could be difficult for doctors to ensure reimbursement, and the logistics of meeting federal requirements and privacy rules could be challenging.
The pandemic changed that. Improving technology allowed telehealth to quickly expand, reducing people’s contact with sick patients, and the government issued waivers for Medicare and Medicaid to pay for telehealth treatment. That opened up new opportunities for rural patients to get health care and opportunities for providers to reach more patients.
However, the Medicare and Medicaid waivers for most telehealth services were only temporary. Only payments for mental and behavioral health teleheath services continued, and those are set to expire with the federal budget in March 2025, unless they are renewed.
Like their urban peers, rural communities face a shortage of affordable housing.
Unemployment in rural areas today exceeds levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. Job growth and median incomes lag behind urban areas, and rural poverty rates are higher.
Rural housing prices have been exacerbated by continued population growth over the past four years, lower incomes compared with their urban peers, limited employment opportunities and few high-quality homes available for rent or sale. Rural communities often have aging homes built upon outdated or inadequate infrastructure, such as deteriorating sewer and water lines.
Rental homes in older towns can become run down. Community maintenance of pipes and other services also requires funding. LawrenceSawyer/E+ via Getty Images
One proposal to help people looking for affordable rural housing is the bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, which calls for creating a new federal tax credit to spur the development and renovation of family housing in distressed urban, suburban and rural neighborhoods.
Similarly, the Section 502 Direct Loan Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which subsidizes mortgages for low-income applicants to obtain safe housing, could be expanded with additional funding to enable more people to receive subsidized mortgages.
3. Locally owned land benefits communities
Seniors age 65 and older own 40% of the agricultural land in the U.S., according to the American Farmland Trust. That means that more than 360 million acres of farmland could be transferred to new owners in the next few decades. If their heirs aren’t interested in farming, that land could be sold to large operations or real estate developers.
A farmer carries organic squash during harvest. Young farmers often struggle to find land to expand their operations. Thomas Barwick/Stone via Getty Images
Congress can take some steps to help communities keep more farmland locally owned.
The proposed Farm Transitions Act, for example, would establish a commission on farm transitions to study issues that affect locally owned farms and provide recommendations to help transition agricultural operations to the next generation of farmers and ranchers.
About 30% of farmers have been in business for less than 10 years, and many of them rent the land they farm. Programs such as USDA’s farm loan programs and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program help support local land purchases and could be improved to identify and eliminate barriers that communities face.
We believe that by addressing these issues, Congress and the new administration can help some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Efforts to build resilient and strong rural communities will benefit everyone.
Randolph Hubach receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Cody Mullen receives funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration. He is affiliated with the National Rural Health Association.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is expected to clear the final hurdles in his confirmation as President Donald Trump’s health secretary, and a host of health influencers have proclaimed that widely used cooking oils such as canola oil and soybean oil are toxic.
T-shirts sold by his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign now include the slogan, “make frying oil tallow again” – a reference to the traditional use of rendered beef fat for cooking.
Seed oils have become a mainstay of the American diet because unlike beef tallow, which is comprised of saturated fats that increase cholesterol levels, seed oils contain unsaturated fats that can decrease cholesterol levels. In theory, that means they should reduce the risk of heart disease.
But research shows that different seed oils have varying effects on risk for heart disease.
Furthermore, seed oils have also been shown to increase risk for migraines. This is likely due to their high levels of omega-6 fatty acids. These fats can increase inflammation, a heightened and potentially harmful state of system immune activation.
As a family physician with a Ph.D. in nutrition, I translate the latest nutrition science into dietary recommendations for my patients. When it comes to seed oils, the research shows that their health effects are more nuanced than headlines and social media posts suggest.
How seed oils infiltrated the American diet
Seed oils — often confusingly referred to as “vegetable oils” — are, as the name implies, oils extracted from the seeds of plants. This is unlike olive oil and coconut oil, which are derived from fruits. People decrying their widespread use often refer to the “hateful eight” top seed oil offenders: canola, corn, soybean, cottonseed, grapeseed, sunflower, safflower and rice bran oil.
These oils entered the human diet at unprecedented levels after the invention of the mechanical screw press in 1888 enabled the extraction of oil from seeds in quantities that were never before possible.
Evaluating the omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio
Omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids are essential nutrients that control inflammation. While omega-6s tend to produce molecules that boost it, omega-3s tend to produce molecules that tone it down. Until recently, people generally ate equal amounts of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. However, over the past century, this ratio has changed. Today, people consume 15 times more omega-6s than omega-3s, partly due to increased consumption of seed oils.
In theory, seed oils can cause health problems because they contain a high absolute amount of omega-6 fatty acids, as well as a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. Studies have linked an increased omega-6 to omega-3 ratio to a wide range of conditions, including mood disorders, knee pain, back pain, menstrual pain and even preterm birth. Omega-6 fatty acids have also been implicated in the processes that drive colon cancer.
However, the absolute omega-6 level and the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in different seed oils vary tremendously. For example, safflower oil and sunflower oil have ratios of 125:1 and 91:1. Corn oil’s ratio is 50:1. Meanwhile, soybean oil and canola oil have lower ratios, at 8:1 and 2:1, respectively.
Scientists have used genetic modification to create seed oils like high oleic acid canola oil that have a lower omega-6 to 3 ratio. However, the health benefit of these bioengineered oils is still being studied.
The upshot on inflammation and health risks
Part of the controversy surrounding seed oils is that studies investigating their inflammatory effect have yielded mixed results. One meta-analysis synthesizing the effects of seed oils on 11 inflammatory markers largely showed no effects – with the exception of one inflammatory signal, which was significantly elevated in people with the highest omega-6 intakes.
To complicate things further, genetics also plays a role in seed oils’ inflammatory potential. People of African, Indigenous and Latino descent tend to metabolize omega-6 fatty acids faster, which can increase the inflammatory effect of consuming seed oils. Scientists still don’t fully understand how genetics and other factors may influence the health effects of these oils.
The effect of different seed oils on cardiovascular risk
A review of seven randomized controlled trials showed that the effect of seed oils on risk of heart attacks varies depending on the type of seed oil.
This was corroborated by data resurrected from tapes dug up in the basement of a researcher who in the 1970s conducted the largest and most rigorously executed dietary trial to date investigating the replacement of saturated fat with seed oils. In that work, replacing saturated fats such as beef tallow with seed oils always lowers cholesterol, but it does not always lower risk of death from heart disease.
Taken together, these studies show that when saturated fats such as beef tallow are replaced with seed oils that have lower omega-6 to omega-3 ratios, such as soybean oil, the risk of heart attacks and death from heart disease falls. However, when saturated fats are replaced with seed oils with a higher omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, such as corn oil, risk of death from heart disease rises.
However, seed oils with less favorable ratios, such as corn oil and safflower oil, can be found in countless processed foods, including potato chips, frozen dinners and packaged desserts. Nevertheless, other aspects of these foods, in addition to their seed oil content, also make them unhealthy.
The case for migraines – and beyond
A rigorous randomized controlled trial – the gold standard for clinical evidence – showed that diets high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in omega-6 fatty acids, hence low in seed oils, significantly reduced the risk of migraines
In the study, people who stepped up their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids by eating fatty fish such as salmon experienced an average of two fewer migraines per month than usual, even if they did not change their omega-6 consumption. However, if they reduced their omega-6 intake by switching out corn oil for olive oil, while simultaneously increasing their omega-3 intake, they experienced four fewer migraines per month.
That’s a noteworthy difference, considering that the latest migraine medications reduce migraine frequency by approximately two days per month, compared to a placebo. Thus, for migraine sufferers — 1 in 6 Americans — decreasing seed oils, along with increasing omega-3 intake, may be even more effective than currently available medications.
Overall, the drastic way in which omega-6 fatty acids have entered the food supply and fundamentally changed our biological composition makes this an important area of study. But the question of whether seed oils are good or bad is not black and white. There is no basis to conclude that Americans would be healthier if we started frying everything in beef tallow again, but there is an argument for a more careful consideration of the nuance surrounding these oils and their potential effects.
Mary J. Scourboutakos 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 Mark S. Chandler, Professor of Practice and Director, Government Relations – Intelligence and Security Studies Department, Coastal Carolina University
U.S. intelligence workers gather information from around the world to help guide leaders’ decisions.da-kuk/E+ via Getty Images
The United States’ security depends on leaders who make well-informed decisions, including matters ranging from diplomatic relations around the world to economic relations, threats to the U.S., up to the deployment of military force. The nation’s intelligence community – 18 federal agencies, some military and others civilian – has the responsibility of gathering information from all over the world and delivering it to the country’s leaders for their use.
As a nearly 40-year veteran of the intelligence community, both in and out of uniform, I know that regardless of what leaders do with the information, the American people need them to have as thorough, unbiased, fact-based and nonpoliticized intelligence assessments as possible.
That’s because reality matters. Those tasked with gathering, analyzing and assembling intelligence material work hard to assemble facts and information to give leaders an advantage over other nations in international relations, trade agreements and even warfare. Reality is so important that a key policy document for the intelligence community tells analysts that their top two priorities are to be “objective” and “independent of political consideration.”
But an investigation into the intelligence community found that during the first Trump administration, intelligence workers at many levels made political value judgments about the information they assembled, and did not report the truest picture possible to the nation’s leaders.
Tulsi Gabbard is President Donald Trump’s choice to be director of national intelligence. AP Photo/John McDonnell
Analysts are a key defense against politicization
In general, each administration develops a national security strategy based on global events and issues, including threats to U.S. interests that are detailed and monitored by the intelligence community. Based on the administration’s priorities and interests, intelligence agencies collect and analyze data. Regular, often daily, briefings keep the president abreast of developments and warn of potential new challenges.
In a perfect world, the president and the national security team use that information to determine which policies and actions are in the nation’s best interests.
With the recent arrival of a new presidential administration, recent reports indicate that at least some workers in the intelligence community are feeling pressure to shift their priorities away from delivering facts and toward manipulating intelligence to achieve specific outcomes.
Current and former intelligence officials have publicly worried that President Donald Trump might be biased against the intelligence community and seek to overhaul it if analyses did not fit his policy objectives.
It happened in Trump’s first term. After Trump left office in 2021, Congress turned to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – which oversees the entire intelligence community – to investigate whether intelligence reports were politicized under Trump’s leadership.
The investigation determined that they were, up and down the intelligence system. The report found that some people who didn’t agree with the president’s policy views and objectives decided among themselves not to provide a full intelligence picture, while others tried to tailor what they showed the president to match his existing plans.
At times, individual analysts withheld information. And managers, even up to the most senior level, also edited analyses and assessments, seeking to make them more appealing to leaders.
For instance, the report found that top intelligence community officials, members of the National Intelligence Council, “consistently watered down conclusions during a drawn-out review process, boosting the threat from China and making the threat from Russia ‘not too controversial.’”
The ombudsman’s report pointed out that this type of event has happened before – specifically, in 2003 around questions of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – which it was ultimately found not to. As the report describes, “politicians and political appointees had … made up their mind about an issue and spent considerable time pressuring analysts and managers to prove their thesis to the American public.” That biased, politically motivated intelligence led to a war that killed nearly 4,500 U.S. service members, wounded more than 30,000 more, and cost the lives of about 200,000 Iraqi civilians, as well as more than $700 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.
Intelligence community leaders brief not only the president and others in the executive branch, but also members and committees in Congress. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Leaders don’t have to listen
At some point or other, almost every president makes decisions that run contrary to intelligence assessments. For instance, George H.W. Bush did not prioritize a crumbling Yugoslavia, and the challenges that presented, choosing to focus on Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the resulting U.S. military Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
President Bill Clinton inherited the Yugoslavia situation, in which a failing country was at risk of political implosion, and chose to ignore intelligence warnings until the ethnic cleansing in that country became too public to ignore, at which point he began a U.S.-led NATO air campaign to stop the fighting. Clinton also ignored several intelligence warnings about al-Qaida, even after its deadly attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998, and in 2000 on the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy destroyer. He chose more limited responses than aides suggested, including passing up an opportunity to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Elected officials are accountable to the American people, and to history, but I believe accountability is key to ensuring the intelligence community follows its own standards from top to bottom, from senior leaders to the most junior analysts. Failure to abide by those standards harms American national security, and the standards themselves say violations are meant to bring professional, and potentially personal, consequences.
A U.S. military helicopter flies above Kabul during the evacuation of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images
Perfection is elusive
It’s impossible for intelligence collection and analysis staff to get everything right – they don’t have a crystal ball. Leaders aren’t under any obligation to follow the intelligence community’s recommendations. But if intelligence officials and political leaders are to have effective relationships that safeguard the nation’s security, each must understand their role and trust that each is doing that work as best as possible.
Providing unvarnished truthful assessments is the job of the intelligence community. That means assessing what’s happening and what might happen as a result of a range of decisions the policymakers might choose. In my experience, putting aside my own views of leaders and their past decisions built trust with them and improved the likelihood that they would take my assessments seriously and make decisions based on the best available information.
It’s not that intelligence professionals can’t have opinions, political ideologies or particular perspectives on policy decisions. All Americans can, and should.
But as a second Trump administration begins, I think of what I told my colleagues and staff over the decades: National security requires us to keep those personal views out of intelligence analysis.
Mark S. Chandler 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.
Maps are ubiquitous – on phones, in-flight and car displays, and in textbooks the world over. While some maps delineate and name territories and boundaries, others show different voting blocs in elections, and GPS devices help drivers navigate to their destination.
But no matter the purpose, all maps have something in common: They are political. Making maps is about making decisions about what to omit and what to include. They are subject to selection, classification, abstractions and simplifications. And studying the choices that go into maps, as I do, can reveal different stories about land and the people who claim it as theirs.
Nowhere is this more true than in the contested regions that today include modern-day Israel and the Palestinian territories. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, different governmental and nongovernmental organizations and political interest groups have engaged in what can best be described as “map wars.”
Maps of the region use the naming of places, the position of borders and the inclusion or omission of certain territories to present contrasting geopolitical visions. To this day, Israel or the Palestinian territories may fall off some maps, depending on the politics of their makers.
This is not exclusive to the Middle East – “map wars” are underway across the globe. Some of the more well-known examples include disputes between Ukraine and Russia, Taiwan and China, and India and China. All are engaged in controversies over the territorial integrity of nation-states.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displays a map of Israel indicating the Golan Heights are inside the state’s borders. Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images
A short history of maps
Traditionally, maps have been used to represent cosmologies, cultures and belief systems. By the 17th century, maps that represented spatial relations within a given territory beaome important to the making of nation-states. Such official maps helped annex territories and determine property rights. Indeed, to map a territory meant to know and control it.
More recently, the tools for making maps have become more broadly accessible. Anyone with a computer and internet access can now make and share “alternative maps” that present different visions of a territory and make varied geopolitical claims.
And maps produced in a conflict region, such as Israel and the Palestinian territories, tell a rich story about the relationship between mapmaking and politics.
Mapping the Middle East
During the British Mandate of Palestine from 1917 to 1947, British surveyors mapped the territories to exercise their control over the land and its people. It was an attempt to supersede the more informal Ottoman land claims of the time.
A map shows the shaded areas of the Arab state recommended by the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine in 1947. The unshaded areas are parts of the proposed Jewish state. Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Maps also helped build the Israeli state. Surveyors and planners mapped the land to allocate land rights, and they helped build the state’s infrastructure, including roads and railroads.
But maps also helped create a sense of nationhood. Maps representing a nation’s shape by delineating its national borders are known as “logo” maps. They can enhance feelings of national unity and a sense of national belonging.
Once established, the Israeli state remade the maps of the region. An Israeli Governmental Names Commission came up with Hebrew names to replace formerly Arab and Christian names for different towns and villages on the official map of Israel. At the same time, formerly Palestinian topographies and places were omitted from the map.
Some Palestinian mapmakers, however, continue to make maps that include Palestinian named sites and depict pre-1948 historic Palestine – an area that stretches from River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Such maps are used to advocate for Palestinians’ right to land and foster a sense of national belonging.
A Palestinian woman holds up a map of the British Mandate of Palestine during a protest in Gaza City on Feb. 27, 2020. Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
At the same time, Palestinian cartographers who work with the Palestinian Authority – the government body that administers partial civil control over Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank – make official maps of the West Bank and Gaza in the hope of establishing a future state of Palestine. They align their maps with United Nations efforts to map the territories according to international law by demarking the West Bank and Gaza as separate from and as occupied by Israel.
After the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, map wars intensified, especially between different fractions within Israel. The left-wing “peace camp,” which was dedicated to territorial compromises with the Palestinians, was pitted against an Israeli right wing committed to reclaiming the “Promised Land” for ensuring Israeli security.
Such incompatible geopolitical visions continue to be reflected in the maps produced. “Peace camp” maps adhere to the delineation of the territories according to international law. For example, they include the Green Line – the internationally recognized armistice line between the West Bank and Israel. Official maps produced by the Israeli government, by contrast, stopped delineating the Green Line after 1967.
Broader and border disputes
Not only have different interest groups and political actors used maps of the region to put forth competing geopolitical claims, but maps have also played a central role in sporadic efforts to establish peace in the region.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, relied on maps to provide the framework for Palestinian self-rule in return for security for Israel. The aim was that after a five-year interim period, a permanent peace settlement would be negotiated based on the borders laid out in these maps.
A map of the West Bank with proposed Palestinian-controlled areas in yellow, as per the Oslo II Accords. Wikimedia Commons
Consequently, Palestinian planners and surveyors mapped the territory allocated to a future state of Palestine. With the Oslo Accords promising only a future state – but with its borders and level of sovereignty still uncertain – Palestinian experts nevertheless continue to prepare for governing the territories by mapping them.
The Oslo maps are used to this day to delineate geopolitical visions of Israel and a future state of Palestine that are based on international law. But for many Israelis, the Oslo vision of a two-state solution has died – the attack by Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist political organization that governs Gaza, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was its last blow.
The subsequent war between Israel and Hamas, currently subject to a cease-fire, has from the outset involved maps.
In December 2023, the Israeli military posted an online “evacuation map” that divided the Gaza Strip into 623 zones. Palestinians could go online – provided they have access to electricity and internet in a territory plagued by blackouts – to find out whether their neighborhood was called upon to evacuate. Israeli military commanders used this map to decide where to launch airstrikes and conduct ground maneuvers.
Maps aren’t just for making sense of the past and present – they help people imagine the future, too. And different maps can reveal conflicting geopolitical visions.
In January 2024, for example, various Israeli right-wing and settler organizations organized the Conference for the Victory of Israel. The aim was to plan for resettling Gaza and increase Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Speakers advocated for transferring Palestinians from the Strip to the Sinai through “voluntary emigration.” With Jewish settlers planning for the return to Gaza, and speakers citing both the Bible and Israeli security for justifications, an oversized map showed the location of proposed Jewish settlements.
A man takes a photo with a map showing the Gaza Strip with Jewish settlements during a convention calling to resettle the Gaza Strip on Jan. 28, 2024, in Jerusalem, Israel. Amir Levy/Getty Images
Such maps reveal the desire by some in Israel for a “Greater Israel” – an area described in 1904 by Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern-day Zionism, as spanning from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.
Unsurprisingly, Palestinians make different maps for envisioning the future. Palestine Emerging – a Palestinian and international initiative that brings together various experts, organizations, and funders – uses maps that connect Gaza to the West Bank and the wider region.
A map shows the proposed Gaza-West Bank corridor transport link. Palestine Emerging
Their aim is to transform Gaza into a commercial hub for trade, tourism and innovation and to integrate it into the global economy. Accordingly, maps of urban projects, airports and seaports overlay the cartographic contours of Gaza; and a Gaza-West Bank corridor, which would be sealed for Israeli security, could connect the two geographically separate Palestinian territories.
Such maps reflect the efforts by Palestinian stakeholders to continue surveying the territories that, since the Oslo Accords, were to make up the future state of Palestine.
In a novel twist, U.S. President Donald Trump on Feb. 4, 2025, floated a plan for the U.S. to “take over” Gaza, moving its current inhabitants out and turning the enclave into “”the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Such a move would amount to another attempt to remake borders across the Middle East. It would not, however, end the “map wars” in Israel/Palestine.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Science and Technology Studies (STS) Program, award #1152322. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or any other entity.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University – Newark
On Feb. 4, 2025, Trump described his plans for Linda McMahon, his nominee for education secretary. “I want Linda to put herself out of a job,” Trump said, according to The Associated Press.
Education policies in the U.S. are largely carried out at the state and local levels. The Education Department is a relatively small government agency, with just over 4,000 employees and a US$268 billion annual budget. A large part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans as well as grants for K-12 schools.
And it ensures that public schools comply with federal laws that protect vulnerable students, like those with disabilities.
Why, then, does Trump want to eliminate the department?
A will to fight against so-called “wokeness” and a desire to shrink the government are among the four reasons I have found.
President Donald Trump waves to supporters at a Jan. 25, 2025, rally in Las Vegas. Ian Maule/Getty Images
First and foremost, Trump and his supporters believe that liberals are ruining public education by instituting what they call a
“radical woke agenda” that they say prioritizes identity politics and politically correct groupthink at the expense of the free speech of those, like many conservatives, who have different views.
Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives promoting social justice – and critical race theory, or the idea that racism is entrenched in social and legal institutions – are a particular focus of MAGA ire.
So, too, is what Trump supporters call “radical gender ideology,” which they contend promotes policies like letting transgender students play on school sports teams or use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, not biological sex.
Trump supporters say that such policies – which the Education Department indirectly supported by expanding Title IX gender protections in 2024 to include discrimination based on gender identity – are at odds with parental school choice rights or, for some religious conservatives, the Bible.
For MAGA supporters, ”radical left“ wokeness is part of liberals’ long-standing attempt to ”brainwash“ others with their allegedly Marxist views that embrace communism.
Trump supporters also argue that “woke” federal public education policy infringes on people’s basic freedoms and rights.
This idea extends to what Trump supporters call “restoring parental rights,” including the right to decide whether a child undergoes a gender transition or learns about nonbinary gender identity at public schools.
Diversity, according to this argument, should include faith-based institutions and homeschooling. Project 2025 proposes that the government could support parents who choose to homeschool or put their kids in a religious primary school by providing Educational Savings Accounts and school vouchers. Vouchers give public funding for students to attend private schools and have been expanding in use in recent years.
For the MAGA faithful, the Education Department exemplifies government inefficiency and red tape.
Project 2025, for example, contends that from the time it was established by the Carter administration in 1979, the Education Department has ballooned in size, come under the sway of special interest groups and now serves as an inefficient “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”
To deal with the Education Department’s “bloat” and “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” Project 2025 recommends shifting all of the department’s federal programs and money to other agencies and the states.
And Trump has taken actions, such as seeking to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development without the required congressional approval, which suggest he may try to act on his Education Department promises.
Abolishing the department, however, would legally require congressional approval and 60 votes to move forward in the Senate, which is unlikely since Republicans only have 53 seats.
Trump also made similar promises in 2016 that were unfulfilled. And Trump’s executive actions are likely to face legal challenges – like a DEI-focused higher education lawsuit filed on Feb. 3.
Regardless of such legal challenges, Trump’s executive orders related to education demonstrate that he is already attempting to “drain the swamp” – starting with the Education Department.
Alex Hinton receives funding from the Rutgers-Newark Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America, Rutgers Research Council, and Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Catriona Waitt, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Global Health, University of Liverpool
Breastfeeding is so important for child health that the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef recommend that babies should be breastfed within an hour of birth, be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life, and then continue breastfeeding in combination with other foods for two years or more.
Infectious disease emergencies can threaten breastfeeding and the lives of mothers and babies. Depending on the disease, there is a risk of passing infection to the baby by close contact or (rarely) through breastmilk. There is also the risk of harm to breastfed infants from medication or vaccination of their mothers.
But separating mothers and babies or stopping breastfeeding also poses risks.
Mothers need proper guidance on the best course of action during an Ebola outbreak.
Threat to mothers and babies
The symptoms of Ebola include fever, tiredness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash and, later, bleeding from any part of the body.
Ebola viruses are extremely contagious and people who become infected are at very high risk of death. Pregnant women and infants are more vulnerable and at greater risk than others.
Ebola outbreaks most often occur in countries where breastfeeding is vital for child survival. They have occurred in several African countries and on 30 January 2025 Uganda declared an outbreak, the latest in several the country has endured.
Breastmilk contains many ingredients that help to prevent and fight infection and that strengthen the baby’s own immune system. Replacing breastmilk with other foods or liquids (including infant formula) removes this protection from babies and makes them more likely to become seriously ill.
It’s important to know which actions protect or harm babies and their mothers during outbreaks. Recommendations on infectious diseases must weigh up the risks related to the disease, medical treatments and the risks of not-breastfeeding.
The World Health Organization has published guidelines on how to care for breastfeeding mothers and their infants when one or both have Ebola, but these recommendations are based on “very low quality” evidence, they are mostly expert opinion rather than research-based knowledge.
Women and children have been largely neglected in Ebola research. More is known about Ebola and semen than Ebola and breastmilk.
In a paper just published in the Lancet Global Health, we have outlined a roadmap for research on Ebola and breastfeeding so that mothers and babies can be protected.
We don’t know if breastmilk can be infectious and, if it is, for how long.
We don’t know whether expressed breastmilk can be treated so that it is safe.
We don’t know whether, if both mother and baby are infected, it is better for the baby if the mother keeps breastfeeding, if she is able to.
We don’t know if vaccinating mothers against Ebola helps to protect their breastfed infants from the virus.
We don’t know if there are any risks for breastfed infants if their mothers are infected.
The result of this lack of knowledge is that decisions may be taken that increase risk and suffering for mothers and their babies.
For example, mothers may refuse vaccination because they are fearful that it is risky for their baby. But by refusing vaccination they’d be making themselves vulnerable to Ebola.
Alternatively, they may get vaccinated and stop breastfeeding, making their baby vulnerable to other serious infections.
If mothers and babies who both have Ebola are separated and breastfeeding is stopped, it could reduce the chances of survival.
Mothers and babies deserve better than this.
No more excuses
For many years people have called for more research on Ebola, breastmilk and breastfeeding, but this research has not been undertaken. It is not acceptable that women and children are deprived of breastfeeding because the needed research has not been done.
In our paper, we describe the different groups of breastfeeding women affected by Ebola who must be included in research:
vaccine recipients
mothers who are ill with Ebola
mothers recovering from Ebola
mothers who are infected with Ebola, but have no symptoms
the wider population of breastfeeding mothers in communities experiencing Ebola outbreaks.
The roadmap also includes the research questions that need answering and the study designs that would enable these questions to be answered.
It is up to governments, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, funders and health organisations to act.
Following the Ebola and breastfeeding research roadmap will not necessarily be easy. It is difficult to do research in the middle of an emergency.
But research on vaccination safety can be done outside outbreaks. Putting research plans in place and gaining approvals before outbreaks will also make things easier.
There just needs to be a commitment to make this research happen.
Catriona Waitt receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation.
Karleen Gribble is a long-term member and current steering committee member of the Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies Core Group.
Peter Waitt receives funding from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the UK Medical Research Council, thr UK National Institute of Health Research and the Wellcome Trust.
Mija Ververs and Prince Imani-Musimwa do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rebecca Ackermann, Professor, Department of Archaeology and Human Evolution Research Institute, University of Cape Town
Here’s how the story of the Taung Child is usually told:
In 1924 an Australian anthropologist and anatomist, Raymond Dart, acquired a block of calcified sediment from a limestone quarry in South Africa. He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material.
A year later, on 7 February 1925, he published his description of what he argued was a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, in the journal Nature. It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age.
The international scientific community rebuffed this hypothesis. They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate. Dart was vindicated decades later after subsequent similar fossil discoveries elsewhere in Africa.
Dart is portrayed as prescient in most retellings. He’s hailed for elevating the importance of Africa in the narrative of human origins.
But is this a biased and simplified narrative? The discovery played out during a period marked by colonialism, racism and racial segregation and apartheid in South Africa. The history of human origins research is, therefore, intertwined with inequality, exclusion and scientifically unsound ideas.
Viewed against this backdrop, and with a contemporary lens, the figure of Dart, and palaeoanthropology on the African continent more broadly, is complex and worthy of reflection.
The South African Journal of Science has published a special issue to mark the centenary of Dart’s original paper.
A group of African researchers and international collaborators, ourselves among them, contributed papers offering perspectives on the science, history and legacy of palaeoanthropology in South Africa and beyond.
We were particularly interested in exploring how the history of the discovery of early hominins in South Africa influenced the scientific field of palaeoanthropology. Did it promote or limit scientific enquiry? In what ways? What were its cultural effects? And how do they play out now, a century later?
The papers in the special issue unpack a number of issues and highlight ongoing debates in the field of human evolution research in Africa and beyond.
Our goal is to celebrate the remarkable science that the discovery of A. africanus enabled. At the same time we are probing disciplinary legacies through a critical lens that challenges researchers to do science better.
The marginalisation and erasure of voices
Several key themes run through the contributions in the special issue.
One is the unheard voices. The colonial framework in which most palaeoanthropological research in South Africa took place excluded all but a few groups. This is particularly true for Indigenous voices. As a legacy, few African researchers in palaeoanthropology are first authors on prominent research or leading international research teams.
Too often, African palaeoanthropological heritage is the domain of international teams that conduct research on the continent with little meaningful collaboration from local African researchers. This is “helicopter science”. More diverse teams will produce better future work and those of us in the discipline must actively drive this process.
The dominance of western male viewpoints is part of the colonial framework. This theme, too, threads through most of the work in the special issue.
In a bid to redress some of the imbalances, a majority of the authors in the special issue were women, especially African women, and Black Africans more broadly. Many of the papers call for a more considered and equitable approach to the inclusion of African researchers, technicians and excavators in the future: in workshops and seminars, on professional bodies, as collaborators and knowledge creators, and in authorship practices.
Community and practice
Colonial legacies also manifest in a lack of social responsiveness – the use of professional expertise for a public purpose or benefit. This is another theme in the special edition. For example, Gaokgatlhe Mirriam Tawane, Dipuo Kgotleng and Bando Baven consider the broader effects of the Taung Child discovery on the Taung community.
Tawane is a palaeoanthropologist and grew up in the Taung municipality. She and her co-authors argue that, a century after the discovery of the fossil, there is little (if any) reason for the local community to celebrate it. They argue that more must be done not only to give back to the community, which is beset by socio-economic struggles, but also to build trust in science and between communities and scientists.
Researchers need to understand that there is value in engaging with people beyond academia. This is not merely to disseminate scientific knowledge. It can also enrich communities and co-create a scholarship that is more nuanced, ethical and relevant. Researchers must become more socially responsive and institutions must hold researchers to higher standards of practice.
Resourcing
Another theme which emerges from this special issue is the value of and the need for excellent local laboratory facilities in which to undertake research based on the fossils and depositsassociated with them.
Increased investment in local laboratory facilities and capacity development can create a shift towards local work on the content being led by Africans. It can also increase pan-African collaboration, dismantling the currently common practice of African researchers being drawn into separate international networks.
It is important for international funding bodies to increase investment within African palaeoanthropology. This will facilitate internal growth and local collaborative networks. International and South African investment is also needed to grow local research capacity. Fossil heritage is a national asset.
This is an edited version of an article in the South African Journal of Science. Yonatan Sahle (Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Department of History and Heritage Management, Arba Minch University, Ethiopia) co-authored the academic article.
Rebecca Ackermann receives funding from the National Science Foundation African Origins Platform (AOP240509218040) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Lauren Schroeder receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2020-04159)
Robyn Pickering receives funding from the NRF African Origins Platform (AOP240509218076) and the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (COE2024-RP)
Over the past few weeks the new US president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly claimed that the United States should “take back” the Panama Canal and that it should assume control of Greenland – one way or another. He has talked of Canada becoming America’s 51st state and now he even wants to “take over” the Gaza Strip to convert it into a “Riviera” on the eastern Mediterranean.
It’s as if the US president believes that his country should be an empire. In this Trump seems to be emulating China’s Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of Russia, leaders he has said he admires and who have themselves shown some clear imperial tendencies in recent years.
Under Putin, Russia has supported secessionist regions, such as Transnistria and Abkhazia, fought wars in Georgia and Ukraine and actively interfered in the affairs of Syria and assorted African countries. In 2022 Russia even launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, claiming that Ukraine was historically inseparable from Russia, but that hostile western influences were trying to destroy that unity.
China, meanwhile, has militarised a number of small uninhabited islands in the South China Sea. It has built 27 installations on disputed islands in the Spratly and Paracel island group that are also claimed by other countries including Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia. This has prompted a flurry of development, as other countries in the region have raced to establish their own footholds in the disputed, but very resource-rich, region.
Beijing also maintains its claim over Taiwan, which it says is an inalienable part of China which it wants to “come home”.
Empires and nation states
Most people assumed that the age of empires had been relegated to the dustbin of history. But this is by no means a straightforward proposition. Until relatively recently, the rise and fall of empires had dominated much of recorded history. Nation-states only appeared at the end of the 18th century. And as those states rose to prominence many too displayed imperial inclinations.
So the US, fresh from throwing off the yoke of the British empire, wasted little time in expanding its borders westward, acquiring – whether by conquest or purchase – large swaths of new territory in what effectively turned a small group of east coast states into a continental empire.
Meanwhile other newly minted nation-states such as Italy and Germany also aspired to acquire overseas empires and involved themselves, with varying success, building what turned out to be relatively shortlived colonial empires in Africa and elsewhere.
Most traditional dynastic empires, meanwhile, began to adopt various aspects of the nation-state model, such as conscription, legal equality and political participation. The decades following the second world war are often seen by historians as a period of decolonisation by traditional imperial powers such as Britain and France. But the transition from empire to nation-states was far from smooth. Most imperial governments hoped to transform their empires into more egalitarian commonwealths, while retaining a degree of influence.
This they did with varying degrees of success and often under extreme duress, as with France in Algeria and Vietnam, or under great economic pressure, such as with Britain and India. The real age of the nation-state didn’t begin until the 1960s.
The return of empire?
Today, the world consists of about 200 independent countries, the overwhelming majority nation-states. Nonetheless, one could argue that empires – or at least imperial tendencies – have never totally disappeared. France, for instance, frequently interfered in many of its former colonies in Africa. However, these military interventions were not meant to permanently occupy new territories.
Today, imperial tendencies seem to resurface around the world. The past, however, tends not to repeat itself. Massive wars of conquest or attempts to create new overseas empires are unlikely in the immediate future. Most imperial expansions are currently sought close to home.
What is striking is that Putin, Xi and Trump all use fierce nationalist rhetoric to justify their imperialist designs. Putin, as we have seen, claims the indivisibility of Ukraine and Russia and blames “Nazis” for trying to turn Russia’s sister state towards the west. He used it as a justification for invading Ukraine in February 2022.
Xi, in turn, often maintains that Communist China has finally overcome the century of humiliation, in which the country was the plaything of foreign powers. They both seem to yearn for past imperial greatness. The Russian Federation aims to undo the dissolution of the Soviet Union, communist China looks back to the Qing empire. Interestingly, under its increasingly authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey – another regional power with imperial inclinations – similarly finds inspiration in the Ottoman Empire.
The US case seems to be more complex, but in fact is very similar. Thus, Trump argues that the Panama Canal, which has long been administered by the US, was foolishly returned to Panama by Jimmy Carter and claims that it is now controlled by China. He will, he says, return it to the US.
Trump also refers to America’s “Manifest Destiny”, the 19th-century belief that American settlers were destined to expand to the Pacific coast. These days his aspirations are northwards rather than to the west. The president also wants to plant the US flag on Mars, taking his imperial dreams into outer space.
If the US joins China and Russia in violating recognised borders, the international, rights-based order could be in danger. The signs are not very positive. Taking steps to illegally annex territories could blow up the entire international edifice.
Eric Storm 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.
AI offers the promise of improving public services by enabling faster, more efficient processes, personalising provision of those services for the public and optimising decision-making. However, the adoption of this technology in public systems brings inherent risks, particularly in an environment characterised by rapid technological developments.
A primary concern and challenge lies in ensuring that AI adoption builds trust in public services. Mismanagement of AI can worsen inequality, lead to job losses, and erode public confidence in government and the further rollout of AI-based technologies.
Balancing these opportunities and risks requires understanding the trade offs involved, notably the tension between job creation and displacement, unconstrained benefits from the misuse of AI, and the need for fairness, transparency, equity and a capacity to be able to explain the design of algorithms.
The challenge lies in maintaining efficiency and accountability while addressing inevitable job gigification. This transition will not be uniform. Workers in roles vulnerable to automation will experience immediate consequences.
The government has rightly identified the need to invest in reskilling initiatives that prepare workers for an AI-driven future. Reskilling is necessary but insufficient to fuel economic growth.
As tasks are gigified by AI technologies, traditional full-time jobs become increasingly scarce, leading to more “white collar” workers experiencing income volatility, periods of un- or underemployment and precarious living. Yet, extant financial systems are based upon patterns of monthly income and expenditure on mortgages and rent or utilities.
Financial systems need to become significantly more flexible to enable workers to align uncertain income streams with unavoidable regular expenditure on necessities such as food and internet connectivity.
Oversight is key
The risks of AI algorithm failures are particularly apparent when systems deployed in the public sector cause harm. A glaring example is the UK Post Office scandal, where inaccurate data from the Horizon IT system led to wrongful prosecutions.
This case highlights the importance of oversight in AI deployment. Without a mix of regulations, guidelines and guardrails, errors in AI systems can lead to serious consequences, particularly in sectors related to justice, welfare and resource allocation.
Government must ensure that AI-driven systems are not only efficient and accurate but also auditable. Independent bodies should oversee the design, implementation, and evaluation of AI systems to reduce risks of failure.
AI can enhance public services, but it is important to acknowledge that algorithms reflect biases inherent in their design and training data. In the public sector, these biases can have unintended and unforeseen consequences that are invidious, as they are hidden in the depths of complex computer code.
For instance, AI systems used in housing allocation can exacerbate existing inequalities if trained on biased historical data. Fairness and trust should therefore be core principles in AI development. Developers must use diverse, representative datasets and conduct bias audits throughout the process.
Citizen engagement is essential, as affected communities can provide valuable input to identify flaws and contribute to solutions that promote equity.
A key challenge for policymakers is whether AI can deliver on its promise without deepening social divisions or reinforcing discriminatory practices. Transparency in AI decision making is essential for maintaining public trust.
Citizens are more likely to trust systems when they understand how decisions are made. Governments should commit to clear, accessible communication about AI systems, allowing individuals to challenge and appeal automated decisions. While AI adoption will likely cause disruption in the early stages, these challenges can diminish over time, leading to faster, more personalised services and more meaningful work opportunities for government employees.
AI systems are dynamic, continuously evolving with the data they process and the contexts in which they operate. Governments must prioritise ongoing review and auditing of AI systems to ensure they meet public needs and ethical standards. Engaging relevant stakeholders – citizens, public sector employees and private sector partners – is essential to this process.
Transparent communication about the goals, benefits, and limitations of AI helps build public trust and ensures that AI systems remain responsive to societal needs. Independent audits conducted by multidisciplinary teams can identify flaws early and prevent harm. To fully realise AI’s potential and ensure its benefits are distributed equitably, policymakers must carefully balance efficiency, fairness, innovation, and accountability.
A strategic focus on education, ethical algorithm design and transparent governance is necessary. By investing in education, AI ethics and strong regulatory frameworks, governments can ensure that AI becomes a tool for societal progress while minimising unintended adverse consequences.
S. Asieh Hosseini Tabaghdehi works for Brunel University of London. She received funding from UKRI (ESRC) to investigate the ethical implication of digital footprint data in SMEs value creation.
Professor Ashley Braganza 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 Nick Ilott, Senior Researcher and Lead Bioinformatician, The Oxford Centre for Microbiome Studies, University of Oxford
Many of us pay attention to the foods we’re putting in our bodies – asking ourselves whether they’re nutritious and healthy for us. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself how fast this food is moving through your gut? The answer to this question is actually really important, as the speed that food moves through your digestive tract affects your health and wellbeing in many ways.
Once you’ve chewed up and swallowed your meal, this food begins its journey along the gastrointestinal tract – a long and winding pathway that begins at the mouth and ends at the anus. Along the way, it reaches specialist organs that churn and digest (stomach), absorb nutrients (small intestine) and absorb water and salts (large intestine).
The movement of food through the digestive tract is known as gut motility. This process is partly controlled by the trillions of bacteria present in our gut. The gut microbiome is extremely important as these bacteria help develop our immune system and break down food.
So, when we eat, we’re not just feeding ourselves – we’re feeding the micro-helpers present in the intestine. To thank us, the bacteria produce small molecules called metabolites that boost our immune system and keep our gut moving by stimulating the intestinal nerves so they contract and move the food onwards.
Without these bacteria and their metabolites, our guts would be less able to move food through the gastrointestinal tract. This could cause a build up of ingested material, leading to constipation and discomfort.
Gut transit time
The time it takes for food to pass from one end of the gastrointestinal tract to the other is called gut transit time.
Gut transit time varies from one person to the next. Recent estimates suggest it can take somewhere between 12 and 73 hours for food to pass through the body – with the average being around 23-24 hours. This variation in gut transit explains some of the gut microbiome differences seen between people – and consequently their gut health.
If gut transit time is long (meaning you have slow gut motility), bacteria in the large intestine produce different metabolites. This is because, just like us, the bacteria in our guts need to be fed. These bacteria enjoy fibre. But, if gut transit time is long and fibre is taking too long to reach the large intestine, these microbial inhabitants have to switch to an alternative food source. So, they turn to protein.
The switch to protein can result in the production of toxic gases leading to health problems such as bloating and inflammation.
Slow gut transit can also cause partially digested food to get stuck in the small intestine. This has additional health consequences – such as an overgrowth of small intestinal bacteria, which can lead to symptoms such as abdominal pain, nausea and bloating.
Fast gut transit can negatively impact health, too.
There are many reasons that someone may experience fast transit time. For example, anxiety, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) can all cause decreased transit time and even diarrhoea.
In cases of fast transit, the resulting stool is loose with high water content. This indicates that the faecal matter has not spent enough time in the intestine, preventing sufficient absorption of water and nutrients. In cases of IBD for example, this can lead to dehydration.
Testing your gut speed
Fortunately, there’s a very simple at-home test you can do to check your gut motility. It’s called “the sweetcorn test”. And yes, it is what you’re thinking.
Don’t eat any sweetcorn for 7-10 days (the “wash-out” phase). Then you are ready to begin the test. Note down the date and time, and eat some sweetcorn – a corn on the cob or a handful of corn is sufficient. Because the outer shell of the corn is indigestible, it will pass through your gastrointestinal tract with the rest of the food you’ve eaten and will eventually be visible in your stool.
What you’ll do is keep an eye on the next few stools you pass and note down the date and time that you observe the golden treasure. It should be noted that this at-home test is not definitive – but it does represent a measure of transit time that, on average, gives similar results to more sophisticated measures.
If you pass the corn in 12 hours or less, your gut is fast. If you don’t pass it for around 48 hours of more, then your gut is slow. If you find your gut motility is on either end of the spectrum, there are fortunately things you can do to improve it.
If it’s consistently fast, it’s best to visit your doctor to see if there is an underlying cause. If it’s a little slow – but you don’t seem to be having any additional gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloating, abdominal pain, lack of appetite or nausea – eat more fruit and veg to increase the fibre you’re feeding those friendly gut bacteria, drink more water and exercise.
Following a balanced diet will help to keep your bowels moving and healthy.
Nick Ilott receives funding from the Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research (KTRR), GutsUK, PSC Support and supervises a PhD project jointly funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Roche.
Meet north Wales’s newest resident: the Aesculapian snake (_Zamenis longissimus_).Nathan Rusli
All animals live in or seek a set of climate conditions they find tolerable. This “climate envelope” partially determines where animals are found, but the continued existence of many species now rests on the outcome of human-driven climate change.
Rising temperatures are moving the available climate niches of many species into areas which were previously too cool. While their ranges shift poleward or to higher elevations, their habitat downslope or closer to the equator shrinks, as it becomes too hot to live in.
Flying and marine animals are relatively free to follow these shifting niches. Birds and butterflies are two examples. New species arrive regularly in the UK with the warming climate and are generally met with excitement by enthusiasts and scientists alike, given that they are a natural effort by a species to make the best of a difficult situation.
However, many grounded species, including reptiles and mammals, cannot disperse through habitats split apart by roads and other human-made obstacles, or cross natural barriers like the Channel. This limits their ability to find suitable conditions and makes them vulnerable to extinction.
Nowhere to go?
Here is the dilemma for conservationists like us.
We normally focus on preserving species within their modern ranges, and have traditionally viewed species that end up outside theirs as a problem. But retaining the status quo is increasingly untenable in the face of unchecked climate change.
Should we consider conserving species that have moved, or been moved, outside of the native ranges that existed before industrial society and its greenhouse effect? Should we even consider deliberately moving species to conserve them? Introduced species that have established just outside of their native ranges, in slightly cooler climates, offer a glimpse of the likely consequences.
Our new study in north Wales focused on one such migrant. Aesculapian snakes (Zamenis longissimus) are nonvenomous reptiles that mostly eat rodents and are native to central and southern Europe, reaching almost to the Channel coast in northern France.
Two accidental introductions, one in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, and another along the Regent’s Canal in London, have allowed this species to thrive in Britain. It is not actually novel to our shores, but it disappeared during a previous ice age and has probably been absent for about 300,000 years.
While the introduced UK populations appear to be thriving, recent surveys of this snake in the southern parts of its range have discovered a rapid decline, potentially due in part to climate change.
A good neighbour
Given their status as a non-native species, we were keen to find out how Aesculapian snakes are surviving in chilly north Wales, further north than anywhere they currently occur naturally. To do this, we implanted 21 snakes with radio transmitters and spent two summers tracking them around the countryside.
Aesculapian snakes are elusive and wary of humans. Tom Major
Our results surprised us. The snakes had a trump card which seemed to help them weather the cool climate. They were frequently entering buildings – relatively warm refuges – while they were digesting food or preparing to shed their skin. They also used garden compost bins for shelter and to incubate their eggs.
Even more surprisingly, most residents did not mind the snakes. In fact, many had no idea they had snakes as neighbours because they kept such a low profile, typically hiding in attic corners. The snakes appear to coexist with normal suburban wildlife, and there are no indications that their presence is affecting native species.
Should successfully established, innocuous immigrants be proscribed and potentially eradicated, as is currently the case? Or should they be valued and conserved in the face of current and impending climate change?
Protecting and conserving the maximum possible diversity of species and ecosystems is the heart of the conservation agenda. However, the rapid pace of change forced upon our planet requires us to rethink what is practical and desirable to achieve.
Conservation within the silos of national boundaries is an increasingly outdated way of trying to maintain the diversity underlying global ecosystems. Instead, conservationists may need to accept that the rapidly changing environment necessitate shifts in the ranges of species. And perhaps, even assist those species incapable of moving on their own.
Introductions have allowed this snake to flourish on an island it would never naturally reach. Antonio Gandini
Unlicensed “guerrilla” releases are obviously unacceptable due to biosecurity risks (for example, the potential to introduce devastating diseases such as the amphibian-killing Bsal fungus) and other unforeseen consequences. Even legitimate reintroductions often fail, due to there being too few individual specimens, pollution or predation from invasive species.
Aesculapian snakes will be considered by the government for addition to the list of alien species of special concern, which would be grounds for eradication. It would be tragic if species such as this became extinct in parts of their natural range, while thriving introduced populations just to the north of their pre-industrial distribution are treated as undesirable aliens that must be removed.
Instead, we argue that this innocuous species should be the figurehead for new thinking in conservation biology, that incorporates the reality of impending further climate change and dispenses with the narrow constraints of national boundaries and adherence to pre-industrial distributions.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Wolfgang Wüster receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Tom Major 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 – USA – By Joseph N. Cooper, Endowed Chair of Sport Leadership and Administration, UMass Boston
On the day after the New England Patriots ended their NFL season with a miserable 4-13 record, team owner Robert Kraft fired Jerod Mayo, the team’s first Black head coach. In a press conference following his decision, Kraft explained that he put Mayo in “an untenable situation” by hiring him to lead an underperforming team.
Kraft’s assessment reflects an all-too-familiar reality for Black coaches in the NFL. Though Black players account for 53% of all NFL players, only 19% of head coaches are Black men.
At the beginning of the 2024 season, the NFL set its own league record with nine of its 32 head coaching jobs held by minorities. In addition to Mayo, Las Vegas’ Antonio Pierce, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, Tampa Bay’s Todd Bowles, Atlanta’s Raheem Morris and Houston’s DeMeco Ryans are Black. They were joined by Carolina’s Dave Canales, who is Mexican American, Miami’s biracial Mike McDaniel and the New York Jets’ Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent.
By season’s end, three of those coaches were gone, including the Raiders’ Pierce. Pierce, like Mayo, was given one season to turn around a team with a losing record. Saleh was fired during the season.
In my view as a scholar of race and professional sports, the firings revealed the NFL’s double standard for Black head coaches and suggest that Black men are still valued more for their athletic prowess than their leadership skills.
During a Fox NFL Sunday show shortly after Mayo’s firing, former Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski called Mayo’s firing shocking, disappointing and “unfair.”
ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith was quick to blame the race of Mayo as a factor. “They call it Black Monday for a reason,” Smith said. “Jerod Mayo was clearly not given a lengthy enough opportunity.”
A checkered history
In 1921, a year after the NFL’s inaugural season, Fritz Pollard became the first Black head coach when he was hired to lead the Akron Pros. It would take nearly 70 years before the NFL had its second Black head coach – Art Shell of the Oakland Raiders in 1989.
Since then, Black coaches have had few chances in the NFL. Even fewer have succeeded. Only two Black head coaches have won Super Bowl titles: Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts in 2007 and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008.
To address the lack of Black head coaches, the NFL enacted in 2003 what is known as the Rooney Rule, a hiring practice named after Dan Rooney, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers who sat on the NFL’s diversity committee. The rule requires teams to include two minority candidate during the interview process for head coaching jobs and was later applied to general managers, senior executives and assistant coaches.
But even with the rule, the percentage of Black coaches has consistently been lower than the percentage of Black players. Research has shown that Black coaches are both less likely to be promoted to head coaching jobs than their white counterparts and less likely to receive a second chance after a losing season.
In fact, since the Rooney Rule was instituted in 2003, nonwhite coaches have been more than three times as likely to be fired after one season than white coaches, according to data collected by the USA Today NFL Coaches Project.
Their data did not include the scores of Black assistant coaches who are routinely overlooked for their first head coaching jobs.
Eric Bieniemy, for example, shared two Super Bowl championships as offensive coordinator with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2019 and 2022. Given his experience, he was widely expected by NFL analysts to earn a head coaching job.
In order to pursue that goal, Bieniemy left the Chiefs in 2023 to join the Washington Commanders and was a favorite to become the team’s next head coach. But the Commanders were sold at the end of the 2023 season, and the new owners promptly fired him.
Bieniemy is back in the NFL after being hired in February 2025 by the Chicago Bears as their running backs coach, a lower rank than his prior position as offensive coordinator.
The benefit of the doubt
In 2020, the NFL expressed its support for the Black Lives Matter movement by promoting social justice messages on end zones and players’ helmets. The NFL also hired Roc Nation, Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z’s company, to manage its music and entertainment.
A year later, the NFL formally ended their decades-long practice of race norming in which the league routinely gave Black players lower baseline cognitive ratings than white players in legal actions related to concussions and subsequent dementia.
But those measures, much like the Rooney Rule, have not closed the racial disparities among NFL head coaches and have not stopped white coaches from appearing to be more likely to receive the benefit of the doubt.
Still unresolved is a 2022 lawsuit filed by Black head coach Brian Flores. Despite posting two winning seasons during his three-year tenure, he was fired by the Miami Dolphins. Flores filed a suit against the NFL, the Miami Dolphins and two other NFL teams alleging widespread racial discrimination and hiring practices.
During an interview with reporters before the 2025 Super Bowl, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the league’s diversity initiatives, saying, “We’ve proven to ourselves that it does make the NFL better.”
Goodell was quick to point out that the NFL’s diversity efforts do not mean a “quota system” in which a certain number of candidates of each race are hired.
“There’s no requirement to hire a particular individual on the basis of race or gender,” Goodell said. “This is about opening that funnel and bringing the best talent into the NFL.”
Joseph N. Cooper 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.
Harvey Mudd College’s mission is to educate STEM students – short for science, technology, engineering and math – so they have a “clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.” But the “impact” part of our mission has been the most challenging to realize.
When our college revised its “Core Curriculum” in 2020, our faculty decided we should create a new required impact course for all students.
What does the course explore?
The course is taught by a team of eight instructors who share their own disciplinary perspectives and help students critically analyze proposed interventions for increasing wildfire risks.
The course focuses on California wildfires so students can think critically about the ways STEM and social values shape each other.
For example, in 1911, U.S. Forest Service deputy F. E. Olmsted applied the Social Darwinist idea of “survival of the fittest” to forest management. Reflecting the prevailing views of his era, he believed that competition was the driving force behind biology, economics and human progress – where the strong thrive and the weak fail.
Olmsted said it was good forestry and good economics to let the forests grow unchecked. This policy would yield straight and tall “merchantable timber” suitable for sale and the needs of industry.
He also rejected “light burning,” which Native Americans had used for centuries to manage forest ecosystems and reduce the flammable undergrowth.
Climate change is arguably the most pressing concern of our time. And wildfires are particularly relevant to those of us in fire-prone areas like Southern California.
Public distrust of science is increasing. Consequently, society needs skilled STEM practitioners who can understand and communicate how scientific interventions will have different consequences and appeal to different stakeholders.
The course’s focus on writing, critical thinking and climate change science prepares students to participate in public discussions about such interventions.
By making students consider the impact of their future work, we also hope they will be proactive about the careers they want to pursue, whether it involves climate change or not.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?
Not everyone benefits in the same way from a single innovation.
For example, low-income and rural Americans are less likely to benefit from the lower operating costs and lower pollution of electric vehicles. That’s because inadequate investment in public charging infrastructure makes owning them less practical.
The course’s interdisciplinary approach helps to expose these kinds of structural inequities. We want students to get in the habit of asking questions about any technological solution.
They include questions like: Who is likely to benefit, and how? Who has historically wielded power in this situation? Whose voices are being included? What assumptions have been made? Which values are being prioritized?
The 2018 Camp Fire caused an estimated $US12.5 billion in damages. AP Photo/Noah Berger
They analyze wildfire data using the Pandas library, an open-source data manipulation library for the Python computer programming language.
They also read a Union of Concerned Scientists report examining fossil fuel companies’ culpability for increased risk of wildfires. And they analyze the environmental historian William Cronon’s classic indictment of the environmentalist movement for romanticizing an idea of a pristine “wilderness” while absolving themselves of the responsibility to protect the rest of nature – humans, cities, farms, industries.
The final assignment for the course asks students to critically analyze a proposed intervention dealing with growing California wildfire risk using the disciplinary tools they have learned.
Darryl Yong is a professor at Harvey Mudd College and co-directs Math for America Los Angeles. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Erika Dyson 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.
A student works on a design in a fashion merchandising lab.Fashion Merchandising Labs at Oklahoma State University, CC BY-ND
Generative artificial intelligence tools can help design students by making hard tasks easier, cutting down on stress, and allowing the students more time to explore innovative ideas, according to new research I published with my colleagues in the International Journal of Architectural Computing.
Our study found that AI design tools didn’t just make the designs better – they also made the process easier and less stressful for students.
Imagine trying to come up with a cool idea in response to a design assignment, but it’s hard to picture it in your head. These tools step in and quickly show what your idea could look like, so you can focus on being creative instead of worrying about little details. This made it easier for students to brainstorm and come up with new ideas. The AI tools also made more design variations by introducing new and unexpected details, such as natural shapes and textures.
A design fueled by artificial intelligence: The left image is the result of the text-to-image technology, and the image on the right is the design completed by the student. Oklahoma State University, CC BY-ND A design by a student without using artificial intelligence. Oklahoma State University, CC BY-ND
How we did our work
My colleagues and I worked with 40 design students and split them into two groups.
One group used AI to help design urban furniture, such as benches and seating for public spaces, while the other group didn’t use AI. The AI tool created pictures of the first group’s design ideas from simple text descriptions. Both groups refined their ideas by either sketching them by hand or with design software.
Next, the two groups were given a second design task. This time, neither group was allowed to use AI. We wanted to see whether the first task helped them learn how to develop a design concept.
My colleagues and I evaluated the students’ creativity on three criteria: the novelty of their ideas, the effectiveness of their designs in solving the problem, and the level of detail and completeness in their work. We also wanted to see how hard the tasks felt for them, so we measured something called cognitive load using a well-known tool called the NASA task load index. This tool checks how much mental effort and frustration the students experienced.
The group of students who used AI in the first task had an easier time in the second task, feeling less overwhelmed compared with those who didn’t use AI.
The final designs of the AI group also showed a more creative design process in the second task, likely because they learned from using AI in the first task, which helped them think and develop better ideas.
What’s next
Future research will look at how AI tools can be used in more parts of design education and how they might affect the way professionals work.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Hyunseon Lee, Professorial Research Associate at Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies, SOAS, University of London
Jeju inhabitants awaiting execution in late 1948wikimedia, CC BY
We Do Not Part is the latest book by Korean writer Han Kang, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024. The book begins in fragments that ebb between dark dream, waking nightmare and memories of how the book’s protagonist Kyungha got to this terrible way of living.
Even for those who do not know much about Korean history, it is fairly clear that something awful has changed Kyungha. When she closes her eyes images of women clutching children, black tree trunks jutting like limbs from the earth and so much snow flood into her mind.
This experience has sapped all life from Kyungha and she is, when we meet her, simply waiting for death. That is, until her friend Inseon injures herself and asks Kyungha to travel to her home on the island of Jeju, south of mainland Korea, to look after her beloved pet bird, Ama.
When she gets there, a violent snowstorm leaves her trapped in Inseon’s compound. Here, she stumbles upon the investigation into her friend’s family and its connection to the Jeju 4.3 massacre in the 1940s.
In the early morning of April 3 1948, 359 members of the South Korean Workers’ Party and partisans carried out attacks on 12 police facilities and the homes of conservative leaders. They killed 12 people, including family members, before fleeing to the Halla Mountains. The term “Jeju 4.3” came from the date the incident is considered by many to have begun, even though it officially lasted from March 1 1947 to September 21 1954.
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What followed was a massive counterinsurgency operation by the South Korean government (with US backing) to exterminate communists and their sympathisers on the island. While officially numbers are still not known, it is believed that more than 30,000 Jeju people (10% of Jeju’s population at the time), including women and children, were killed.
In We Do Not Part, we find out that Inseon’s mother, who died several years earlier, was a survivor of Jeju 4.3. Han Kang’s impressive approach to presenting the memories of Jeju 4.3 is multi-layered, subtle, fragmentary and contains a high degree of sensitivity as she recounts the massacre from the perspective of Inseon and her mother.
Inseon is part of a what the Holocaust and cultural memory scholar Marianne Hirsch termed the “postmemory generation”. She is the child of a survivor who has inherited a “catastrophic [history] not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories”.
Inseon has absorbed the stories of her mother as her own. For instance, in one of the first extracts of Inseon’s memories she speaks of her mother and her sister finding their family dead in the snow.
I remember her. The girl roaming the schoolyard, searching well into the evening. A child of 13 clinging to her 17-year-old sister as if her sister wasn’t a child herself, hanging on by a sleeve, too scared to see but unable to look away.
However, Inseon doesn’t remember. She wasn’t there. But, as Hirsch writes of the postmemory generation, such distinct “memories” are mediated by “imaginative investments, projections and creations”.
Han Kang’s skilful use of Inseon’s postmemory carefully gives voice to the feelings of Inseon’s mother. Han Kang does this through presenting these in fragments that recount first Inseon’s investigative work, and then Inseon’s mother’s research into the family’s losses. These are inserted in passages of recounted conversations, writing and descriptions of photographs and films.
These pieces are scattered amid Kyungha’s time in the dreamlike and snow buried compound. The intermingling of past and present, dream and reality, art and life creates an almost hallucinatory quality where the edges blur as Kyungha inherits Inseon’s memories – which she inherited from her mother. In each transference, these stories become new.
This retelling and remembering is important. The 1947 to 1949 uprising is considered by some historians, particularly the American historian Bruce Cummings, as the precursor to the Korean civil war, which left the country divided into North and South. However, for almost 50 years, the very existence of the massacre was officially censored and repressed.
Hang Kang’s novel makes it clear that Jeju 4.3 is not simply an issue of the past, but one of the present that persists and lives on in the lives of all who it has touched. Inseon was born the only daughter of a mother who witnessed the massacre and a father who survived, not only on Jeju, but also afterwards on the Korean mainland. This parentage means she cannot forget nor repress it, it constantly intrudes into her life.
Han Kang urges the public to bear witness, the reader does so through Kyungha. As she delves into the history through memory and official documents, we too do the same. In this act of reading we remember and name the tragedy.
Ultimately, this becomes an act of commemoration of the victims whose spirits still seem unable to leave this life as they remain on the island in the form of wind, birds, trees, snow and sea. We see, as Kyungha sees, Jeju 4.3 has left too much pain and too many scars on the souls for them to forget and leave.
We Do Not Part is captivating, moving and from sentence to sentence Han Kang’s sensitive approach to Jeju 4.3 makes us reflect on why we still need to remember and commemorate this tragedy and the many others that still go ignored.
Hyunseon Lee 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 crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) escalated at the end of January 2025 when Goma, the capital of the province of North Kivu, fell to Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
The civilian population is paying a heavy price as a result of ongoing violence, despite a series of initiatives aimed at creating conditions for peace. Since the re-emergence of the M23 in November 2021, violent clashes with the Congolese army have led to thousands of deaths and displaced more than one million people in North Kivu province alone.
Patrick Hajayandi, whose research focuses on peacebuilding and regional reconciliation, examines previous attempts at finding peace in eastern DRC – and what needs to happen next.
What efforts have been made by the DRC and Rwanda to ease tensions?
Kigali accuses the DRC of hosting the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the largest illegal armed group operating in the conflict area. Better known by its French acronym, FDLR, the group has stated its intention to overthrow the Rwandan government.
On the other hand, Kinshasa accuses Rwanda of supporting and arming the M23, which seeks to control the two Kivu provinces, North and South. The involvement of the Rwandan Defence Forces in direct combat alongside the M23, corroborated by UN experts, has escalated the spread of violence.
Despite current tensions between Kinshasa and Kigali, a few years ago the two governments engaged in collaborative efforts to solve the problem posed by the numerous armed groups operating in eastern DRC.
Such efforts included two joint operations with Congolese and Rwandan forces aimed at neutralising the FDLR. These joint operations in 2008 and 2009 were known as Operation Kimia and Umoja Wetu. In 2019 and 2020, soon after he took power, President Felix Tshisekedi allowed the Rwandan army to conduct operations against the FDLR in Congolese territory.
However, in recent years, relations have soured badly between Kinshasa and Kigali. This has led to regional efforts to broker peace.
Why has it been so difficult for regional actors to broker peace in the DRC?
The involvement of a multitude of countries points to the complexity underlying the conflict and the diverse geopolitical interests. The DRC shares a border with nine countries: Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
In 2022, the African Union asked Angolan president João Lourenço to mediate between the DRC and Rwanda. The process he oversees is known as the Luanda Process and seeks to defuse the escalation of violence across the region. In particular, it has sought to reduce tensions between Kigali and Kinshasa.
The East African Community is directly involved in peace initiatives to restore peace in DRC. It has appointed former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta to lead what is called the Nairobi Process.
The DRC has rebuffed the East African Community’s reconciliation efforts. And Rwanda recently criticised both processes, suggesting the country had lost confidence in the ability of Lourenço and Kenyatta to find a solution.
In May 2023, the Southern African Development Community, of which the DRC is a member state, deployed a peace mission. This followed the exit of troops from the East African Community.
Other countries play different roles directly or indirectly in various missions in the DRC. Burundi is supporting military operations there under the framework of bilateral agreements in the defence sector. Uganda also deployed troops, ostensibly in pursuit of jihadist-backed armed rebels three years ago. However, this deployment has been a destabilising factor, with Kampala facing accusations of supporting the M23.
What have been the main hurdles in the way of these initiatives?
The East African Community Regional Force was deployed to pursue peace in eastern DRC as part of the Nairobi Process. However, this mission was cut short due to four main challenges:
differences over mission objectives: the DRC government believed that the East African Community Regional Force would militarily confront M23 rebels. But the force had different objectives. As indicated by its commander, the deployment was to focus on overseeing the implementation of a political agreement, not run a military confrontation.
contrasting views among the leaders of the East African Community member states on how to address the DRC’s crisis: the DRC and Rwanda are both members of the community. Rwanda is vocal about stopping the persecution of Congolese Tutsi in the DRC. However, there is a growing perception that Rwanda is supporting the M23 as a proxy force to allow it to control mineral resources. This has stalled reconciliation efforts.
a lack of financial support for the talks: the African Union and regional bodies don’t have enough funding to support the interventions required to make meaningful progress.
The Luanda Process has not been able to bring tangible results either. The reasons for this failure include bad faith from the parties involved. This was reflected in the continued capture of territories by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, despite a July 2024 ceasefire.
After the January 2025 seizure of Goma and wave of deaths and displacement that followed, the M23 declared another ceasefire. Whether it will hold remains to be seen.
Rwanda’s behaviour in the ongoing conflict is complicating peace efforts. Kigali continues to deny supporting the M23 armed group. But it is participating in negotiations that involve the M23 and the DRC government. These contradictions make it difficult to know exactly who must be held responsible when, for example, a ceasefire is violated.
What’s required to give peace in the DRC a chance?
The current peace initiatives have been ineffective; they are routinely violated. What is needed is real pressure on the actors involved in spreading violence, forcing them to halt their destructive activities.
Congolese Nobel Prize winner Denis Mukwege, for example, has called for diplomatic and economic measures to end the aggression in the DRC. This would mean implementing sanctions and aid conditionalities in both Kigali and Kinshasa against the military and political leaders orchestrating violence against civilian populations.
Interventions should also include addressing structural causes of the conflict in the DRC, including resource exploitation.
There is also a need to address impunity as an essential step towards lasting peace. Rwanda must not continue to support an armed group that is attacking a neighbour. Kigali needs to be held accountable. International pressure is essential in halting attacks. The DRC government must also play its role as a guarantor of security for all its citizens.
Patrick Hajayandi 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.
Greece’s government has just declared a state of emergency on the island of Santorini, as earthquakes shake the island multiple times a day and sometimes only minutes apart.
The “earthquake swarm” is also affecting other nearby islands in the Aegean Sea. It began gradually with numerous very minor (less than magnitude 3) and mostly imperceptible earthquakes in late January. However, at the start of February, the seismic activity intensified as the quakes became larger and more frequent.
So far, several thousand quakes have been recorded in the last two weeks. As many as 30 a day have been above magnitude 4.0 – most of them at less than 10km depth, which is large and shallow enough to be felt by people living on local islands.
These larger earthquakes have resulted in rock falls along the islands’ coastal cliffs, as well as minor damage to vulnerable buildings. The largest earthquake so far was magnitude 5.1 on February 6, which was also felt in the capital city, Athens, as well as in Crete and in parts of Turkey more than 240km away.
Usually a popular tourist destination, Santorini is now virtually empty. Over the past week, some 11,000 holidaymakers and locals have left the island, with many fearing the seismic activity may presage a volcanic eruption.
So how exactly does an “earthquake swarm” happen? And what might happen in the coming days and weeks?
The current seismic activity is located near Anydros, an uninhabited islet about 30km northeast of Santorini. This region lies within the volcanic arc of the “Hellenic subduction zone”, where the African tectonic plate is slowly sliding beneath the Eurasian plate (and specifically the Aegean microplate). The region hosts volcanoes as well as numerous weak zones in the crust – what earth scientists often call “faults”.
Santorini itself is a mostly submerged caldera – a crater formed as a result of volcanic activity over the past 180,000 years, with its last eruption in the 1950s. Earthquakes can be connected to volcanic activity – specifically, the movement of magma beneath the surface.
However, this earthquake sequence is not located beneath Santorini. And local scientists monitoring Santorini have reported no change to indicate the current seismic activity is a forerunner of another Santorini eruption. Instead, the earthquakes appear to align with faults lying between Santorini and the neighbouring island Amorgos.
Nearby faults are known to have produced earthquakes before. For example, in 1956, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake here also produced a damaging tsunami and was soon followed by a magnitude 7.2 aftershock. More than 53 people died as a result of this earthquake and the aftershock and tsunami. Many more were injured.
Earthquakes, shown as coloured circles, of the January-February 2025 Anydros swarm, near Santorini, Greece (Source: seismo.auth.gr) and known active faults, depicted as black lines (Source: https://zenodo.org/records/13168947). Dee Ninis & Konstantinos Michailos
No single stand-out event
Tectonic earthquakes occur when accumulating stress in Earth’s crust is suddenly released, causing a rupture along a fault and releasing energy in the form of seismic waves.
Typically, moderate to major earthquakes (known as mainshocks) are followed by smaller quakes (known as aftershocks) that gradually diminish in magnitude and frequency over time. This is what seismologists call the mainshock–aftershock sequence.
Some sequences behave differently and do not exhibit a single stand-out event. Instead, they involve multiple earthquakes of a similar size that take place over days, weeks, or even months. These types of sequences are what seismologists call “earthquake swarms”.
The 1956 earthquake was a mainshock–aftershock sequence, with aftershocks lasting at least eight months after the mainshock. However, the current ongoing seismic activity near Santorini, at least as of February 7, features thousands of earthquakes, many with magnitudes ranging between 4.0 and 5.0.
This suggests it is most likely an earthquake swarm.
Earthquake swarms are often associated with fluid movement in the earth’s crust and the resulting seismic activity is usually less dramatic than the sudden movement of a strong mainshock.
Seismologists are interested in distinguishing between mainshock–aftershock sequences and earthquake swarms as it can help them better understand the processes that drive these phenomena.
A larger quake is still possible
We cannot predict exactly what will come from the earthquake activity near Santorini. Global observations of earthquakes tell us that only a small fraction (about 5%) of earthquakes are foreshocks to larger earthquakes.
That said, there could still be a possibility that a larger and potentially damaging earthquake could occur there soon.
Although swarms typically involve earthquakes of lower magnitudes, they can last for days to weeks, or persist for months. They can even slow down, and then intensify again, unsettling locals with intermittent ground shaking.
Dee Ninis works at the Seismology Research Centre, is Vice President of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society, and a Committee Member for the Geological Society of Australia – Victoria Division.
Konstantinos Michailos 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 – USA – By Richard Forno, Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Assistant Director, UMBC Cybersecurity Institute, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), President Donald Trump’s special commission tasked with slashing federal spending, continues to disrupt Washington and the federal bureaucracy. According to published reports, its teams are dropping into federal agencies with a practically unlimited mandate to reform the federal government in accordance with recent executive orders.
As a 30-year cybersecurity veteran, I find the activities of DOGE thus far concerning. Its broad mandate across government, seemingly nonexistent oversight, and the apparent lack of operational competence of its employees have demonstrated that DOGE could create conditions that are ideal for cybersecurity or data privacy incidents that affect the entire nation.
Traditionally, the purpose of cybersecurity is to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information and information systems while helping keep those systems available to those who need them. But in DOGE’s first few weeks of existence, reports indicate that its staff appears to be ignoring those principles and potentially making the federal government more vulnerable to cyber incidents.
Technical competence
Cybersecurity and information technology, like any other business function, depend on employees trained specifically for their jobs. Just as you wouldn’t let someone only qualified in first aid to perform open heart surgery, technology professionals require a baseline set of credentialed education, training and experience to ensure that the most qualified people are on the job.
Currently, the general public, federal agencies and Congress have little idea who is tinkering with the government’s critical systems. DOGE’s hiring process, including how it screens applicants for technical, operational or cybersecurity competency, as well as experience in government, is opaque. And journalists investigating the backgrounds of DOGE employees have been intimidated by the acting U.S. attorney in Washington.
DOGE has hired young people fresh out of – or still in – college or with little or no experience in government, but who reportedly have strong technical prowess. But some have questionable backgrounds for such sensitive work. And one leading DOGE staffer working at the Treasury Department has since resigned over a series of racist social media posts.
Wired’s Katie Drummond explains what the magazine’s reporters have uncovered about DOGE staffers and their activities.
According to reports, these DOGE staffers have been granted administrator-level technical access to a variety of federal systems. These include systems that process all federal payments, including Social Security, Medicare and the congressionally appropriated funds that run the government and its contracting operations.
DOGE operatives are quickly developing and deploying major software changes to very complex old systems and databases, according to reports. But given the speed of change, it’s likely that there is little formal planning or quality control involved to ensure such changes don’t break the system. Such actions run contrary to cybersecurity principles and best practices for technology management.
As a result, there’s probably no way of knowing if these changes make it easier for malware to be introduced into government systems, if sensitive data can be accessed without authorization, or if DOGE’s work is making government systems otherwise more unstable and more vulnerable.
If you don’t know what you’re doing in IT, really bad things can happen. A notable example is the failed launch of the healthcare.gov website in 2013. In the case of the Treasury Department’s systems, that’s fairly important to remember as the nation careens toward another debt-ceiling crisis and citizens look for their Social Security payments.
On Feb. 6, 2025, a federal judge ordered that DOGE staff be restricted to read-only access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, but the legal proceedings challenging the legality of their access to government IT systems are ongoing.
DOGE email servers
DOGE’s apparent lack of cybersecurity competence is reflected in some of its first actions. DOGE installed its own email servers across the federal government to facilitate direct communication with rank-and-file employees outside official channels, disregarding time-tested best practices for cybersecurity and IT administration. A lawsuit by federal employees alleges that these systems did not undergo a security review as required by current federal cybersecurity standards.
There is an established process in the federal government to configure and deploy new systems to ensure they are stable, secure and unlikely to create cybersecurity problems. But DOGE ignored those practices, with predictable results.
For example, a journalist was able to send invitations to his newsletter to over 13,000 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees through one of these servers. In another case, the way in which employee responses to DOGE’s Fork in the Road buyout offer to federal employees are collected could easily be manipulated by someone with malicious intent – a simple social engineering attack could wrongly end a worker’s employment. And DOGE staff members reportedly are connecting their own untrusted devices to government networks, which potentially introduces new ways for cyberattackers to penetrate sensitive systems.
However, DOGE appears to be embracing creative cybersecurity practices in shielding itself. It’s reorganizing its internal communications in order to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests into its work, and it’s using cybersecurity techniques for tracking insider threats to prevent and investigate leaks of its activities.
Lacking management controls
But it’s not just technical security that DOGE is ignoring. On Feb. 2, two security officials for the U.S. Agency for International Development resisted granting a DOGE team access to sensitive financial and personnel systems until their identities and clearances were verified, in accordance with federal requirements. Instead, the officials were threatened with arrest and placed on administrative leave, and DOGE’s team gained access.
The Trump administration also has reclassified federal chief information officers, normally senior career employees with years of specialized knowledge, to be general employees subject to dismissal for political reasons. So there may well be a brain drain of IT talent in the federal government, or a constant turnover of both senior IT leadership and other technical experts. This change will almost certainly have ramifications for cybersecurity.
DOGE operatives now have direct access to the Office of Personnel Management’s database of millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances holding sensitive positions. Without oversight, this access opens up the possibilities of privacy violations, tampering with employment records, intimidation or political retribution.
Support from all levels of management is crucial to provide accountability for cybersecurity and technology management. This is especially important in the public sector, where oversight and accountability is a critical function of good democratic governance and national security. After all, if people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.
At the moment, DOGE appears to be operating with very little oversight by anyone in position willing or able to hold it responsible for its actions.
Mitigating the damage
Career federal employees trying to follow legal or cybersecurity practices for federal systems and data are now placed in a difficult position. They either capitulate to DOGE staffers’ instructions, thereby abandoning best practices and ignoring federal standards, or resist them and run the risk of being fired or disciplined.
The federal government’s vast collections of data touch every citizen and company. While government systems may not be as trustworthy as they once were, people can still take steps to protect themselves from adverse consequences of DOGE’s activities. Two good starting points are to lock your credit bureau records in case your government data is disclosed and using different logins and passwords on federal websites to conduct business.
It’s crucial for the administration, Congress and the public to recognize the cybersecurity dangers that DOGE’s activities pose and take meaningful steps to bring the organization under reasonable control and oversight.
Richard Forno has received research funding related to cybersecurity from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the US Army during his academic career since 2010.
“Will you be pulling up? I hope so,” he says, plugging his forthcoming appearance on one of the world’s biggest stages, where the cultural stakes can be as high as the athletic ones. “Wear your best dress too, even if you’re watching from home.”
The casual yet evocative scene was classic Kendrick.
As a world-renowned Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning artist, Lamar stands in a league of his own. His unflinching critiques of racial injustice, systemic inequality and the exploitation of Black culture have made him a boundary-pushing artist and cultural visionary.
My work examines how race and racism are constructed, represented and challenged in mass media, particularly in news, music and sports. I think the NFL’s complicated history with social justice makes his participation even more significant.
With a discography expansive enough to eclipse the time constraints of Sunday’s game, I’m eager to see whether Lamar will weave his lyrical masterpieces into a performance that entertains, educates and challenges viewers.
The tradition of playing the national anthem before sporting events is but one example: The song is rooted in wartime sorrow and serves as a call to patriotism.
Yet, acts of protest often incite backlash, and the NFL has haphazardly tried to police political speech.
Kaepernick’s protests sparked a national debate about ideas of patriotism and the appropriateness of protest on the playing field. At the same time, NFL owners appeared to effectively blacklist him from the league.
Kansas City Chiefs Chairman and CEO Clark Hunt has donated to Republican politicians and causes, even as the league tries to muzzle players’ political speech. Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
During Beyoncé’s 2016 appearance alongside headliner Bruno Mars, she paid homage to the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement. U2’s act during the 2002 Super Bowl provided a moment of collective mourning and hope for a country still reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More recently, Dr. Dre’s 2022 performance celebrated hip-hop’s rise from a marginalized genre to a dominant cultural force. Eminem, who also participated in that performance, took a knee on stage to critique the NFL’s treatment of Black athletes and activists.
Rapper Eminem takes a knee as he performs during the halftime show of Super Bowl 56 on Feb. 13, 2022. Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
To me, Lamar’s Super Bowl appearance symbolizes a broader reckoning with how the NFL handles the tension between politics and corporate entertainment.
That’s because Kendrick Lamar’s artistry is more than just music. It’s activism.
From his Grammy award-winning album “To Pimp a Butterfly” to the raw, introspective, Pulitzer Prize-winning album “DAMN.,” Lamar has consistently confronted themes of systemic oppression, racial injustice and Black life in America.
Tracks like “DNA.” are unapologetic celebrations of Blackness and generational resilience:
I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA
Quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA
I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA
I got hustle, though, ambition flow inside my DNA
“The Blacker the Berry” delves into the complexities of Black identity and confronting systemic racism:
I said they treat me like a slave, cah me Black
Woi, we feel whole heap of pain cah we Black
And man a say they put me inna chains cah we Black
And “XXX.” confronts the greed, violence and hypocrisy at the core of American life.
Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph
The great American flag
Is wrapped and dragged with explosives
Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters
Barricaded blocks and borders, look what you taught us
It's murder on my street
Your street, back streets, Wall Street
Unlike many mainstream artists, Lamar seems to have mastered the delicate balance between commercial success and politically charged content. His genius lies in his ability to write songs that transcend race, gender and class.
Lamar has never hesitated to confront uncomfortable truths through his music. He has a unique opportunity to merge art, activism and a critique of the nation. I expect this moment will be no exception.
Will you be pulling up? I will.
Christina L. Myers is affiliated with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
Around US$40 billion is allocated annually from the U.S. federal budget for humanitarian and development aid. If USAID is dismantled, it raises questions about how these funds will be redirected and the long-term impacts it will have on global development efforts.
While the future of U.S. foreign assistance remains uncertain, other world powers have a role to play. European donors, despite some limitations in resources, remain committed to the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda.
Beyond humanitarianism
If the agency is shut down, it may be widely condemned on moral and humanitarian grounds. However, its closure would respond to a logic of strategic and ideological interests that has long shaped the international development system. This a key finding from my longstanding field research with organizations that receive funding, not only from USAID, but also from Canadian and European donors.
International development largely unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War when global powers competed to establish a new world order. This led to the creation of international agreements and multilateral institutions, with major industrialized nations emerging as the primary donors of foreign aid.
In my research, I have interviewed many people involved in the foreign aid chain, including directors and offices of international non-governmental organizations and governmental co-operation agencies. Many said development relationships are shaped by both the interests of donors and those of recipient populations and organizations.
While these relationships may be based on humanitarian objectives, such as disaster relief or human rights advocacy, they can also be influenced by ideological, geopolitical, economic and social agendas.
In this context, the American move to eliminate USAID could be seen as one that prioritizes national security and economic goals over traditional global humanitarian concerns. Governments steer the wheel of international development according to their political ideologies and interests, regardless of the shock this may generate among citizens.
Canada’s role in this unfolding situation remains uncertain. With the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party and the upcoming federal election, it’s unclear what will happen to Canada’s international development strategy going forward.
The answer to these questions will depend on the direction that our political leaders decide to take, and the sentiments of citizens. Still, Canada’s approach to development aid will probably remain in a trade-off between moral imperatives of humanitarianism and strategic national interests.
Nelson Duenas receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Nelson Duenas is a researcher associated to l’Observatoire canadien sur les crises et l’action humanitaires
Around US$40 billion is allocated annually from the U.S. federal budget for humanitarian and development aid. If USAID is dismantled, it raises questions about how these funds will be redirected and the long-term impacts it will have on global development efforts.
While the future of U.S. foreign assistance remains uncertain, other world powers have a role to play. European donors, despite some limitations in resources, remain committed to the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda.
Beyond humanitarianism
If the agency is shut down, it may be widely condemned on moral and humanitarian grounds. However, its closure would respond to a logic of strategic and ideological interests that has long shaped the international development system. This a key finding from my longstanding field research with organizations that receive funding, not only from USAID, but also from Canadian and European donors.
International development largely unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War when global powers competed to establish a new world order. This led to the creation of international agreements and multilateral institutions, with major industrialized nations emerging as the primary donors of foreign aid.
In my research, I have interviewed many people involved in the foreign aid chain, including directors and offices of international non-governmental organizations and governmental co-operation agencies. Many said development relationships are shaped by both the interests of donors and those of recipient populations and organizations.
While these relationships may be based on humanitarian objectives, such as disaster relief or human rights advocacy, they can also be influenced by ideological, geopolitical, economic and social agendas.
In this context, the American move to eliminate USAID could be seen as one that prioritizes national security and economic goals over traditional global humanitarian concerns. Governments steer the wheel of international development according to their political ideologies and interests, regardless of the shock this may generate among citizens.
Canada’s role in this unfolding situation remains uncertain. With the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party and the upcoming federal election, it’s unclear what will happen to Canada’s international development strategy going forward.
The answer to these questions will depend on the direction that our political leaders decide to take, and the sentiments of citizens. Still, Canada’s approach to development aid will probably remain in a trade-off between moral imperatives of humanitarianism and strategic national interests.
Nelson Duenas receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Nelson Duenas is a researcher associated to l’Observatoire canadien sur les crises et l’action humanitaires
The ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas makes provisions for the passage of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza. This support is much needed given that Gaza’s agricultural system has been severely damaged over the course of the war.
Over the past 17 months we have analysed satellite images across the Gaza Strip to quantify the scale of agricultural destruction across the region. Our newly published research reveals not only the widespread extent of this destruction but also the potentially unprecedented pace at which it occurred. Our work covers the period until September 2024 but further data through to January 2025 is also available.
Before the war, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries were grown in open fields and greenhouses, and olive and citrus trees lined rows across the Gazan landscape. The trees in particular are an important cultural heritage in the region, and agriculture was a vital part of Gaza’s economy. About half of the food eaten there was produced in the territory itself, and food made up a similar portion of its exports.
By December 2023, only two months into the war, there were official warnings that the entire population of Gaza, more than 2 million people, was facing high levels of acute food insecurity. While that assessment was based on interviews and survey data, the level of agricultural damage across the whole landscape remained out of view.
Most olive and citrus trees are gone
To address this problem, we mapped the damage to tree crops – mostly olive and citrus trees – in Gaza each month over the course of the war up until September 2024. Together with our colleagues Dimah Habash and Mazin Qumsiyeh, we did this using very high-resolution satellite imagery, detailed enough to focus on individual trees.
We first visually identified tree crops with and without damage to “train” our computer program, or model, so it knew what to look for. We then ran the model on all the satellite data. We also looked over a sample of results ourselves to confirm it was accurate.
Our results showed that between 64% and 70% of all tree crop fields in Gaza had been damaged. That can either mean a few trees being destroyed, the whole field of trees completely removed, or anything in between. Most damage took place during the first few months of the war in autumn 2023. Exactly who destroyed these trees and why is beyond the scope of our research or expertise.
In some areas, every greenhouse is gone
As greenhouses look very different in satellite images, we used a separate method to map damage to them. We found over 4,000 had been damaged by September 2024, which is more than half of the total we had identified before the start of the war.
Greenhouses and the date of initial damage between October 2023 and September 2024. Yin et al (2025)
In the south of the territory, where most greenhouses were found, the destruction was fairly steady from December 2023 onwards.
But in north Gaza and Gaza City, the two most northerly of the territory’s five governorates, most of the damage had already taken place by November and December 2023. By the end of our study period, all 578 greenhouses there had been destroyed.
North Gaza and Gaza City have also seen the most damage to tree crop fields. By September 2024, over 90% of all tree crops in Gaza City had been destroyed, and 73% had been lost in north Gaza. In the three southern governorates, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah, around 50% of all tree crops had been destroyed.
The exact impact can differ from conflict to conflict. War may directly damage lands, as we have seen in Gaza, or it may lead to more fallow areas as infrastructure is damaged and farmers are forced to flee. A conflict also increases the need for local agricultural production, especially when food imports are restricted.
Our assessment shows a very high rate of direct and extensive damage to Gaza’s agricultural system, both compared to previous conflict escalations there in 2014 and 2021, and in other conflict settings. For example, during the July-August war in 2014, around 1,200 greenhouses were damaged in Gaza. This time round at least three times as many have been damaged.
Agricultural attacks are unlawful
Attacks on agricultural lands are prohibited under international law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court from 1998 defines the intentional use of starvation of civilians through “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival” as a war crime. The Geneva conventions further define such indispensable objects as “foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production offoodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works”.
Our study provides transparent statistics on the extent and timing of damage to Gaza’s agricultural system. As well as documenting the impacts of the war, we hope it can help the massive rebuilding efforts that will be required.
Restoring Gaza’s agricultural system goes beyond clearing debris and rubble, and rebuilding greenhouses. The soils need to be cleaned from possible contamination. Sewage and irrigation infrastructure need to be rebuilt.
Such efforts may take a generation or more to complete. After all, olive and citrus trees can take five or more years to become productive, and 15 years to reach full maturity. After previous attacks on Gaza the trees were mostly replanted, and perhaps the same will happen again this time. But it’s for good reason they say that only people with hope for the future plant trees.
Lina Eklund receives funding from the Swedish National Space Agency and the Strategic Research Area: The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden.
Recently released government statistics show a record number of fines were given to parents for their children’s absence from school in 2023-24 in England. Of the 487,344 fines issued, 91% were for unauthorised family holidays.
If these fines, known as fixed penalty notices, go unpaid or in some cases have been previously issued, parents are taken to court. In 2023-24, 28,296 parents were prosecuted over their children’s school attendance.
Whether the fines have any effect on ensuring attendance is debatable. The figures show that thousands of parents are willing to book a term-time holiday anyway. But fines are certainly affecting the crucial relationship between schools and families.
When I carried out my doctoral research between 2014 and 2016 on the relationships between schools and parents, these bonds were already quite fragile. People in my study argued that endless “dictats” from school built a “brick wall” rather than a partnership.
Now, it’s likely that an increasingly strict application of attendance rules is further breaking down trust.
Fines were first introduced by a Labour government in 2004 as a last resort to tackle truancy. In 2014, then education secretary Michael Gove widened the application of the fines. Local authorities were encouraged to use penalty notices for parents who took their children on holiday during school term time.
Since Gove, education secretaries – including current education minister Bridget Phillipson – have insisted that every day matters in school, and that there are very few reasons to miss school. Holidays are seen as unacceptable.
Trust between parents and school staff is very important. fizkes/Shutterstock
Government statistics show a correlation between attendance and exam results. However, whether lower attendance causes lower results is difficult to prove, especially when factors such as poverty are taken into account.
What’s more, when holiday absence has been analysed separately, this has not been found to have the same negative affect on achievement at school as other reasons for absence.
The record number of fines issued last year came before new guidance was set in August 2024. Now, fixed penalty notices have risen from £60 to £80 for a first offence (if paid within 21 days) and to £160 for a second offence (if paid within 28 days). If parents receive two fixed penalty notices within three years, the next offence will result in prosecution. However, councils may choose prosecution earlier if they wish.
Whereas previously there was more discretion and variance between authorities and schools, all headteachers must now consider the above approach if a child misses more than five days of school. It can only be assumed that the number of fines and prosecutions will increase.
As a side-effect, we are seeing schools encouraged to clamp down on child illness for fear that parents are lying and are in fact on holiday. While government guidance says that in most cases a parent’s word should be enough evidence that their child is sick, it also states that evidence of illness should be requested in cases where there is “genuine and reasonable doubt about the authenticity of the illness”.
This suggests that schools should be questioning their trust in their pupils’ parents. This is a fundamental break down of the school-parent relationship, not to mention a strain on NHS time.
Why parents book term-time holidays
Term-time holidays are often seen as a way for parents to book a cheaper break, as holidays are generally more expensive during school holidays. But, even leaving aside that many families may only be able to afford a holiday at all if it is taken in term time due to the cost of living crisis, the situation is more complicated.
There are many reasons for taking holidays within school term time. Families might be visiting relatives overseas for a wedding, funeral or because of a family member’s terminal illness. Often, a school might grant one day of absence, but no more.
Parents may be unable to take leave from work during school holidays as a result of the industry they work in. They may have family members who work away for long periods, and want to spend time together with the children when they return. They may have a child with particular needs who is unable to cope with busy holiday times, or children in different schools with different holiday periods.
Relationship breakdown
When a headteacher refuses to authorise such a holiday this leads to resentment from parents. Resentment like this may cause some to withdraw children from school and choose to home educate.
There is some effort now for schools to offer support first before legal intervention for families who might have attendance issues for other reasons, such as emotionally based school avoidance. But there is little to no desire to work with families around their complex needs for holidays.
Partnership with parents is often touted by schools as central to pupils’ wellbeing, progress and attainment. But the power in this partnership is often skewed towards the professionals.
Parents and schools should work together for the good of children. This does not simply mean parents obeying schools; that is not a recipe for partnership. Instead, it means understanding the different contexts that families and teachers live and work in. If parent engagement is essential to wellbeing and school progress, it is not worth continuing down the road of alienation and punishment.
Dr Charlotte Haines Lyon is affiliated with Labour Party and UNISON.
Steve Bannon may no longer be in Donald Trump’s inner circle, but the newly reinstated US president appears to be adhering to a dictum the conservative disrupter-in-chief outlined back in 2018 as he reflected on his role in getting Trump elected the first time. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
It’s fair to say that for the first two weeks of Trump’s second presidency the Democrats haven’t really mattered. But Trump and his advisers have got news organisations struggling to work out which way to look.
In any normal news cycle, the appointment of vaccine-sceptic RFK Jnr. as health secretary would dominate the headlines, as would the successful installation of any of the more bizarre Trump cabinet picks. But at the same time the media has had to deal with a steady stream of other attention-grabbing announcements: the idea that the US could one way or the other acquire Greenland from Denmark, for instance, or the threats to use force to take control of the Panama Canal. We’ve had conflicting statements about how to end the war in Ukraine (more of which later) and the now you see them, now you don’t tariff threats against Mexico and Canada, not to mention the idea that the latter could be incorporated as the 51st state of the USA.
The zone has been well and truly flooded. Meanwhile, the administration’s plan to take complete control of the civil service (which appears to be straight out of the Project 2025 playbook) has proceeded apace with career public servants being dismissed in their droves to make way for true Maga (Make America Great Again) believers in key roles. This, needless to say, has struggled for attention in light of all the eye-catching news stories.
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This week’s big idea has to do with his vision for a post-conflict Gaza. Trump foreshadowed this plan last week when he announced he was talking with the leaders of Egypt and Jordan about resettling Gazans there – whether permanently or just for a period of reconstruction of Gaza was not clear, his statement was short on detail. But this week, hosting the Israeli prime minister in Washington (significantly the first foreign leader to visit since his inauguration), Trump expanded on his vision while Benjamin Netanyahu looked on approvingly.
Initially, it appeared that Trump’s plan was for the permanent relocation of all 2.2 million Gazans to other countries while the Trump administration and its allies considered the considerable real estate investment opportunities presented by turning the 360km² Gaza Strip, with its 40km Mediterranean coastline into the “Middle East Riviera”. But as Simon Mabon notes here, administration officials were later quick to insist that the relocation would only last for as long as it takes to rebuild the stricken enclave.
Mabon, professor of international relations at the University of Lancaster who specialises in Middle East politics, also notes that the proposal did what few other issues seem able to do: united the Arab nations in opposition. He also believes that while both Egypt and Jordan have signed peace deals with Israel, the relationship is often fractious and this latest announcement won’t have helped.
Most importantly, perhaps, will be the reaction of Saudi Arabia. Israel (with Washington’s encouragement) has been pursuing normalisation of relations with Riyadh for some years. But the Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has explicitly rejected “any attempts to displace the Palestinians from their land as well as affirming that relations with Israel would depend on the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It’s not the first time, by any means, that the idea of clearing Gaza of Palestinians has been mooted. It’s not even the first time that the real estate investment potential of such a plan has been discussed by a senior Trump official. Back in March last year, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser who was the architect of Trump’s 2020 peace plan, talked up the idea of resettling Gazans in the Negev desert while noting that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable”.
Israel’s far-right settler movement, meanwhile, has long yearned to empty out the strip. In December 2023 the leader of the Nachala Israeli settlement movement, Daniella Weiss, declared that Gaza City had always been “one of the cities of Israel. We’re just going back. There was a historical mistake and now we are fixing it.”
The relocation of Palestinians outside Palestine was actually part of the founding mission of UN agency Unrwa – which, incidentally was banned by Israel last week and has been defunded by the US since allegations surfaced last year that a number of Unrwa employees had taken part in the Hamas attacks on October 2023.
Anne Irfan of University College London, a specialist in refugees and displacement, and Jo Kelcey of the Lebanese American University, whose core research area covers the politics of education in marginalised communities such as Gaza, recount here that Unrwa was set up in 1949 following the Nakba (catastrophe) when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in fighting before and after the foundation of the State of Israel.
Unrwa was set up with the aim of resettling the displaced people and sponsoring projects that would create jobs and promote economic development in their new host countries: the “works” in the agency’s title.
As Irfan and Kelcey note, the staunchest opponents of this plan were Palestinians themselves. They could read between the lines of this mission, that their exile was intended to be permanent. It was a non-starter and within five years of Unrwa’s establishment the resettlement policy was shelved in favour of a focus on education, which remains to this day.
Not that Trump would be keen to associate any plan of his with Unrwa. In 2018 he fully defunded the agency, the first time a US president has done this. He has also more recently extended Joe Biden’s suspension of Unrwa funding after the allegations of Hamas infiltration and has made it clear he supports Netanyahu’s ban on the agency operating in Israel.
Meanwhile, how would the Gaza plan sit in terms of Trump’s “America First” strategy? Mark Shanahan, of the University of Surrey, believes this is all part of what he refers to here as “Trumperialism”. It’s not so much America as the light on the hill, trying to find a way to fix global problems and seek peaceful solutions to dangerous and distressing conflicts. Rather, in this case at least, it sees Gaza as “an opportunity for American business to build wealth – the classic US economic hegemony of the populist America First political theory”.
Rather than emulating the Marshall plan of what feels now like a more enlightened era, Trump’s plan for Gaza, at least as he laid it out after his meeting with Netanyahu, is more akin to the plan for the rebuilding of Iraq after the 2003 invasion, writes Shanahan. That is: US private funding for beachside condos and luxury developments while the countries to whom the displaced Palestinians are relocated would be expected to pay for the privilege.
But Trump also hinted this might mean US boots on the ground in the Middle East, cautions Shanahan, adding that “delivering Mar-a-Lago on the Med may mean thousands of American combat troops deployed to Gaza for years at daily risk of death. How do main-street Americans benefit from that?”
And if you wondered whether – like so many of Trump’s big plans and executive orders issued since his second inauguration – the Gaza Riviera scheme might fall foul of the law, it would. As Tamer Morris –
an expert in international law at the University of Sydney – explains, the US would require the consent of the Palestinian people to take control of Gaza. And this is not going to happen.
Forced relocation is forbidden under the Geneva Conventions as is helping another state forcibly relocate people. It could also be interpreted as ethnic cleansing, as defined by the Commission of Experts report on the former state of Yugoslavia to the UN Security Council in 1994.
Meanwhile, the US president has also been making noises about his ideas for bringing peace to Ukraine. The latest, aired this week, involved linking continuing US support with favourable concessions on Ukraine’s supply of rare earths and other strategic resources. Stefan Wolff, of the University of Birmingham, has been watching the diplomatic manoeuvrings around Trump, Putin, Xi and Ukraine since the war began nearly three years ago. In the past fortnight, he’s been looking at the prospect of a peace deal brokered by the US.
Wolff thinks it unlikely that anything will be resolved in the foreseeable future beyond a ceasefire and freezing of the battle lines. And that’s not even much more than a distant possibility given that neither Kyiv nor the Kremlin seem to want this for reasons of their own.
The possibility of Europe bearing the burden of maintaining support to Ukraine without the US bearing the lion’s share of the burden also looks remote. Domestic politics in many EU member states is threatening the bloc’s unity – and, in any case, the ability of Europe to make up the shortfall caused by a possible US withdrawal of aid to Ukraine is distinctly doubtful. And unlikely improve any time soon.
It appears, meanwhile, that Putin’s ally Kim Jong-un is poised to send another wave of North Koreans to help. Jennifer Mathers, of Aberystwyth University, takes a detailed look at what we know about how these troops have fared thus far. She concludes that, given the terribly heavy losses the North Korean units are reported to be suffering, it’s possible that their leader may be trading the high casualty rate for much-needed combat experience in case his army might want to fight in a conflict nearer to home.
About 5% of people who catch COVID have long-lasting symptoms. In these people, loss of smell, dizziness, fatigue and other hallmark COVID symptoms can persist for months after the initial illness. Yet even five years after the COVID pandemic began, we still don’t know why some people develop long COVID and others don’t.
But a recent study brings us a step closer to understanding who is at greatest risk of developing long COVID. The study found that women have a much higher risk of developing long COVID compared to men.
Published in Jama Network Open, the paper investigated symptoms of long COVID in 12,276 adults. Each participant had had COVID at least six months earlier. Using a questionnaire, participants gave information on their current symptoms, allowing researchers to identify those with long COVID.
While previous research has also uncovered a similarly increase long COVID risk in women, these studies had small sample sizes and didn’t consider certain factors that may have distorted the findings.
The new study took these various factors into account in their analysis, including a participant’s age, race, vaccination status and whether they had any other health conditions. This allowed them to better calculate the risks of developing long COVID for men and women.
Their results indicated that women had 31% higher chance of developing long COVID than men.
When broken down by age, this difference disappeared in people aged 18-39. However, the risk was even greater in women aged 40-54, who had a 48% higher risk of developing the condition compared with men. Women over 55 had a 34% higher risk of developing long COVID.
Interestingly, this finding is contrary to data on COVID infection severity, which shows men are more prone to developing severe symptoms. They also make up around two out of three COVID deaths.
While researchers don’t currently know why women are at greater risk of long COVID, differences in the way men’s and women’s immune systems respond to COVID could be a factor.
Immune differences
The immune system is a fascinating, complicated system with many different types of cell, each of which has a specific role in fighting infection.
For instance, B cells make antibodies that target infections, while non-classical monocytes regulate immune function and clear up dead and damaged cells. Our cytotoxic T cells kill virus-infected cells, while helper T cells help activate other immune cells and signal that there’s an issue.
But the proportion and type of immune cells that circulate in the body can differ by sex and age.
People with long COVID also have a higher number of non-classic monocytes and more activated B cells compared to those who didn’t have long COVID. Given that older women already have a higher proportion of these cell types even before an infection, it’s possible that this may explain why they were at the greatest risk of developing long COVID.
The study found peri-menopausal women and women who had reached the menopause had the greatest risk of developing long COVID. Gladskikh Tatiana/ Shutterstock
But these aren’t the only immune function differences in women that may account for their greater risk of long COVID.
In particular, the hormone oestrogen plays a vital role in controlling the immune system. Oestrogen helps contribute to the enhanced immune response that occurs when a person develops an infection. The severe drop in oestrogen that occurs during the menopause may also explain why women are more susceptible to an infection and longer lasting diseases.
In this recent Jama study, peri-menopausal women and women who had reached the menopause were at greatest risk of developing long COVID. This suggests oestrogen may be a contributing factor.
After fighting an infection, immune cells should die off – stopping prolonged, uncontrolled damage to the body. While the more intense immune response women have to an infection may be beneficial in reducing the initial severity of the COVID infection, this persistent, heightened immune response and any damage it causes to the body may increase the possibility of long COVID occurring.
Such prolonged, higher intensity immune responses are known to promote the development of autoimmune diseases – where the body’s immune system attacks itself. Women have a higher prevalence of many autoimmune conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren’s and multiple sclerosis.
Although COVID isn’t an autoimmune disease, autoantibodies (proteins released by B cells that attack the body’s own cells and tissues) have been found in people with long COVID. These antibodies promote long COVID symptoms. Possibly women are at greater risk of long COVID for the same reasons they’re at greater risk of developing an autoimmune condition.
The findings from this recent study add to our understanding of long COVID – pointing to which groups are at greatest risk of developing the condition. More work needs to be done to explore differences in how long COVID differs based on sex and age – and the mechanisms that trigger long COVID to begin with.
Through understanding the who and why of long COVID, it might allow for new treatments to be developed.
Helen McGettrick receives funding from Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Leap, Helmsley Foundation and ROCHE. She is also an elected member of British Society of Immunology Congress Committee.
Jonathan Lewis receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the British Society of Immunology (CARINA).
