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Category: housing

  • MIL-OSI USA: 2025 Vermont Barn Preservation Grants Fund 23 Projects

    Source: US State of Vermont

    Montpelier, Vt. – Governor Phil Scott, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation (DHP) and the Vermont Advisory Council on Historic Preservation today announced the 2025 Barn Preservation Grant awardees. The program is awarding $373,026 in matching grants to 23 preservation projects across eleven Vermont counties. This year’s awardees will be celebrated next week at the Statehouse.

    “These grants will help to preserve barns across Vermont, which are an important part of our agricultural heritage,” said Governor Phil Scott. “This funding will put Vermonters to work so future generations can continue to enjoy these iconic landmarks.”

    “We applaud this year’s grant recipients for their commitment. The barns and farms of Vermont are important agricultural landmarks,” stated State Historic Preservation Officer Laura V. Trieschmann. “The Barn Preservation Grant Program is a great tool to support their restoration and rehabilitation, ensuring long-term stewardship of our cultural resources and landscapes.”

    Grants awarded this year include projects from Arlington to Troy. Grants will support roofing repairs at the historic Phelps Farm (now Health Hero Farm) in South Hero, and a full roof replacement at Sunday Bell Farm, a dairy and diversified livestock farm in Danville. Framing repairs and drainage work will be completed with grant funds at Bagley Farm/Clearfield Farm in Granville, an organic vegetable farm. Other projects funded[MM1]  include cupola and slate roof repairs of the Remington-Williamson Farm in Huntington, repair of a Hay Barn, Horse Barn and Cown Barn[MM2]  at the Valley Ridge Farm in Orwell, and replacement of a section of failing concrete foundation with traditional stonework at Bread and Puppet’s main barn on their farm in Glover.

    Established in 1992, the state-funded Barn Preservation Grant Program awards matching grants for improvement projects that promote Vermont’s architectural and agricultural heritage. To qualify, buildings and structures must be at least 50 years old, and listed or eligible to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

    Recipients of 2025 Barn Preservation Grants and 2025 Historic Preservation Grants (announced in February) are invited to a celebration in the Cedar Creek Room at the Statehouse on March 18 at 11:30am. Refreshments will be served.

    Visit DHP’s website to learn more about grant and tax credit opportunities including Barn Preservation Grants and Historic Preservation Grants.

    ###


     [MM1]It might read better if ‘funded’ goes before ‘projects’.

     [MM2]Should these be lowercase?

    MIL OSI USA News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Africa: African Development Bank, African Water Facility, Association of European Development Finance Institutions to hold Investment Event for Water and Sanitation in Africa

    Source: Africa Press Organisation – English (2) – Report:

    ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, March 17, 2025/APO Group/ —

    The African Development Bank Group (www.AfDB.org), African Water Facility (www.AfricanWaterFacility.org), and the Association of European Development Finance Institutions (https://EDFI.eu/) will host a high-level event to generate investment for water and sanitation services in Africa. Taking place on 18 March 2025 in Brussels, the event will bring together development finance institutions, private sector investors, and philanthropic organizations.

    During the event, the African Development Bank and African Water Facility will showcase investment-ready projects and those in their pipeline, offering opportunities for investors and development financiers to support high-impact water and sanitation projects, including homegrown solutions that will drive economic growth, social stability, and public health improvements across Africa.

    Why This Matters

    Africa faces significant water and sanitation challenges, amplified by increasing pressure on strained water resources by the continent’s growing population, which is expected to double by 2050. Currently, 411 million people lack access to safe drinking water, 779 million are without essential sanitation services, and 839 million do not have access to basic hygiene services, according to a 2020 report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

    This lack of access contributes to severe public health challenges, including the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera and diarrhea, which have caused over 400,000 deaths annually on the continent, according to the WHO.

    The economic cost of inadequate access to water and sanitation is also high. Inadequate sanitation alone results in losses of up to $5.5 billion per year in sub-Saharan Africa due to healthcare costs and lost productivity. However, investing in climate-resilient water and sanitation services could yield at least $7 in economic returns for every $1 spent.

    “Water and sanitation infrastructure is fundamental to economic growth. Investing in it is not only a necessity, but good business sense. By securing funding for high-impact projects, we can create jobs, improve public health, and grow local economies,” said Mtchera Chirwa, Director for Water Development and Sanitation at the African Development Bank and Coordinator of African Water Facility.

    Beyond funding, the event will facilitate discussions on public-private partnerships, blended finance models, and innovative financing mechanisms to accelerate progress in achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 – universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030.

    Association of European Development Finance Institutions (https://EDFI.eu/) CEO David Kuijper said. “As stakeholders in development, together, we have the resources to make transformative change happen. The Association of European Development Finance Institutions (https://EDFI.eu/) values the partnership with the African Development Bank and African Water Facility to convene this event to find financial and technical resources for solutions through projects already on the market in Africa.”

    MIL OSI Africa –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: Tonasket Man Charged with Receiving and Possessing Sexually Explicit Material from Minors

    Source: Office of United States Attorneys

    Spokane, Washington – Acting United States Attorney Richard R. Barker announced today that Daniel John Kraft, age 41, was charged by criminal complaint on one count of Receipt of Child Pornography and one count of Possession of Child Pornography. Kraft was arraigned in federal court on March 10, 2025.

    According to court documents, in September 2024, the Sanders County Montana Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) developed information that Snapchat user “smokeweed5468” was soliciting sexual images from a minor. “Smokeweed5468” also told the minor he knew where they lived and threatened to kidnap the minor and take them to Mexico.

    Investigators obtained a warrant for the Snapchat account for “smokeweed5468.” The records from Snapchat contained more than a dozen sexually explicit videos of minors. “Smokeweed5468” also used Snapchat to offer the minors drugs and money and asked if the minors would be willing to sneak out and meet with him.

    Investigators learned the Snapchat account was allegedly being used at home in Tonasket, Washington, owned by Kraft. The Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) confirmed Kraft lived at the home. OCSO also confirmed Kraft was a registered sex offender for violations committed in 2013.

    On March 5, 2025, the Washington State Patrol took Kraft into custody at his home in Tonasket. Investigators seized several electronic devices. A search of Kraft’s cellphone allegedly revealed Snapchat running in the background of the device. In addition, investigators allegedly located several sexually explicit images involving minors on Kraft’s phone that were also on the “smokeweed5468” Snapchat account. 

    This case is being investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, Seattle Police Department, Washington State Patrol, the Eastern Region Washington Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, Sanders County Sheriff’s Office, and the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office.

    This case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Stephanie Van Marter.

    2:25-mj-00091-JAG

    A complaint is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Economics: Samsung Reveals World’s First 25-hour Skatepark, Powered by the Galaxy S25 series

    Source: Samsung

     
    London, UK – 17th March 2025 – Building off the success of the ‘Drop in with Samsung’ Flip Park, Samsung, in collaboration with Skateboard GB and supported by EE, launches the groundbreaking ‘Drop in with Samsung 25-hour Skate Park’ Supported by EE. This unique immersive event, taking place at London’s iconic BAYSIXTY6 Skatepark in West London, celebrates skate culture while showcasing the revolutionary capabilities of the new Galaxy S25 series.
     
    This pop-up celebrates Samsung and EE’s commitment to facilitating enhanced accessibility and connectivity within UK skateparks, empowering more individuals to embrace the sport.
     
    Event Details:
    Dates: Wednesday 19th – Thursday 20th March, 2025
    Location: BAYSIXTY6 Skate Park, 66 Acklam Road, London, W10 5YU
    Opening Hours: 6PM on 19th March – 7PM on 20th March
     
    The world’s first 25-hour skatepark is a vibrant homage to all elements of skateboarding culture, featuring 25 hours of music performances, entertainment and content creation experiences, all powered by the Galaxy S25 series. Samsung invites everyone to ‘Drop in with Samsung’ Supported by EE and participate in a dynamic range of activities on offer, all whilst experiencing the exceptional camera capabilities of the latest Galaxy S25 series.
     
    BAYSIXTY6 will undergo a dramatic transformation, with enhanced lighting and design, creating the ultimate backdrop for capturing stunning content with the Galaxy S25’s advanced features, including Nightography Video and Ultra-Wide camera. Whether day or night, attendees can witness firsthand how the device delivers stunning shots in any lighting condition.
     
    Experience the 25-hour immersion:
     
    The 25-Hour Street: A free skate zone for all skill levels, with Samsung product experts on hand to assist with capturing incredible content on the Galaxy S25 series.
    The Ultra-Wide Bowl: A dedicated drop-in area for skaters to showcase their skills, utilising the Ultra-Wide camera to capture expansive angles during the day and stunning night shots with Night mode, or video content with Nightography Video.
    The 25-Hour Zone: Home of the ‘Now Bar’ – a space to learn about Samsung’s latest Galaxy AI innovations and why the Galaxy S25 series is the ultimate true AI companion. The Now Bar is a space to break for some food, grab a drink, and learn how the latest tech can offer ‘New ways to get things done’, with updates on the 25-hour Skatepark schedule and some exclusive product giveaways for most impressive Galaxy S25 skate footage.
    The 25-Hour Shop: Celebrity meet-and-greets with Team Galaxy Skate ambassadors, an immersive mobile gaming station, offering visitors the chance to beat the top score on mobile skateboarding game True Skate, and opportunities to try out the wider Samsung Galaxy product ecosystem.
     
    Event highlights:
    A launch moment to remember with Sky Brown and Team Galaxy Skate talent dropping in, and James Threlfall DJing to set the vibe.
    An exclusive sunrise skate session and shoot curated in partnership with Dazed Media
    Invigorating skate yoga session led by Shankos Skate School
    Design your own board with Big Aye Skateboards – a closed session for under 18s
    Exclusive meet-and-greets with professional skaters, including Olympic medalist Sky Brown
    Social media workshop with skate influencer Stef Nurding and Samsung UK, giving insights on maximising skate content for visibility
    Dedicated skate photography sessions with renowned photographer Garry Jones
    Perfect your trick with pro-skaters in Team Galaxy Skate offering one-on-one lessons
    A panel discussion with leaders from Skateboard GB, who will be talking about what a career in skate looks like and how to get more skateparks in your local community.
     
    Driven by the shared belief to ‘Never Stop Growing,’ Samsung, Skateboard GB and EE are also investing in extended opening hours at ten skateparks across the UK. This initiative, which includes funding for events, product experiences, and skate jams, will empower the personal growth of the next generation of skaters with greater park access, enhanced connectivity, and the tools to capture and share their progress.
     
    Join the ‘Drop in with Samsung 25-hour Skate Park’ Supported by EE. experience from 19th to 20th March, located at BAYSIXTY6. Drop in be part of this interactive experience – check out the full schedule here:
     
    Full 25-hour Skatepark event schedule:
     
    Time:
    Activity:
    Attendance:
    18:00 – 20:00
    Opening skate jam:
    Featuring demos from Team Galaxy Skate, hosted by Marc Churchill and accompanied by tunes from DJ James Threlfall, plus exclusive meet and greet with two-times Olympic Medallist Sky Brown
    Sign-up needed
    (Via Dazed website here)
    20:00 – 22:00
    Skate with Team Galaxy Skate:
    Skate drop-ins accompanied by DJ James Threlfall on the decks
    Drop in on the day
    22:00 – 00:00
    Skate film session:
    Hosted in partnership with City Mill Skate
    Sign-up needed
    (Via Skateboard GB website here)
    00:00 – 04:00
    Artist creation session:
    Hosted by artist Billy Colours – mural creation at BAYSIXTY6, with time-lapse capture
    Invite only
    04:00 – 06:30
    Sunrise skate session and shoot:
    Hosted in partnership with Dazed Club
    Sign-up needed (via Dazed here)
    06:30 – 07:30
    Skate yoga session:
    Hosted in partnership with Shankos Skate School
    Sign-up needed
    (Via Skateboard GB website here)
    07:30 – 10:00
    Pre-school skate breakfast club
    Invite only
    10:00 – 11:00
    Skate Photography Session:
    Hosted by photographer Garry Jones
    Sign-up needed
    (Via Skateboard GB website here)
    11:00 – 12:00
    Social media workshop:
    Hosted by Team Galaxy Skate’s Stef Nurding, Samsung UK and creative agency Iris
    Drop in on the day
    12:00 – 14:00
    Skate activators:
    Hosted in partnership with Skateboard GB and Team Galaxy Skate
    Drop in on the day
    14:00 – 16:00
    How to get skateparks built in your local community:
    Led by Skateboard GB
    Drop in on the day
    16:00 – 17:30
    Lessons with a pro:
    Hosted by Team Galaxy Skate’s Jordan Thackeray and Alex DeCunha
    Sign up needed
    (Via Skateboard GB website here)
    17:30 – 19:00
    Game of S.K.A.T.E
    Hosted by Team Galaxy Skate’s Ashley Mercer
    Drop in on the day
     
    About Skateboard GB
    Skateboard GB is the National Governing Body for skateboarding in England and the home of Olympic skateboarding in Great Britain. The organisation exists to give skateboarders the opportunity to “Skate More, Skate Better” ensuring they are skater-focused in everything that they do; aiming to lead, support, empower and facilitate.
     
    Skateboard GB celebrate and champion everything that is positive about skateboarding’s heritage and culture and work with the skateboarding community to develop more opportunities and better environments to skate, inspiring future generations of skateboarders as a result of success on the world stage.
     

    MIL OSI Economics –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Canada: Saskatchewan Recognizes Pharmacy Appreciation Month

    Source: Government of Canada regional news

    Released on March 17, 2025

    The Government of Saskatchewan has proclaimed March as Pharmacy Appreciation Month to celebrate the many contributions of pharmacists across the province. 

    “This is an opportunity for us to recognize the important work pharmacists do every day – and the role pharmacy technicians and assistants play – in helping care for the people of Saskatchewan,” Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said. “We recognize that pharmacists are highly trained and trusted professionals and in many communities, the pharmacy is the first point of contact to access health care.”

    The province has collaborated with pharmacists on initiatives in recent years to improve patient care in the province, including the expansion of pharmacists’ ability to prescribe for certain conditions.

    Pharmacists were first granted the authority to prescribe for three minor ailments in 2012. Currently, Saskatchewan pharmacists can prescribe for 34 conditions such as, cold sores, sinus infections, nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, bladder infections and shingles. The full list of conditions is available at the Government of Saskatchewan website.

    Regulated pharmacy technicians and pharmacy assistants support pharmacists by performing a variety of technical and dispensary functions, which allow pharmacists to focus on working to their highest scope of practice. Expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice optimizes their skills, builds capacity within the health care system and brings care closer to home, allowing patients to have greater access to health services. 

    There are more than 2,200 practising pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in more than 430 licensed community pharmacies, hospitals and clinics across Saskatchewan.

    -30-

    For more information, contact:

    MIL OSI Canada News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Kabaddi World Cup: City hosts opening of international spectacle

    Source: City of Wolverhampton

    WV Active Aldersley staged the opening ceremony and first games of the tournament today (Monday 17 March, 2025).

    The opening ceremony featured live music by students from Wolverhampton Music Service, local dance acts and a parade of athlete from across the world who are taking part.

    The host nation England men’s team then got the live action underway with the first group stage game against Hungary. A number of other men’s and women’s games then took place featuring teams including India, Poland, China and the USA.

    It’s the first time that the Kabaddi World Cup has been hosted outside of Asia and Councillor Bhupinder Gakhal, the City of Wolverhampton Council’s Cabinet Member for Resident Services, said it was a very proud moment for the city of Wolverhampton to host the festivities.

    He said: “The ceremony and opening games were spectacular to witness. It’s a real honour to have the Kabaddi World Cup taking place on our doorstep and we can’t wait to host the semi-finals and finals this weekend.

    “It’s exciting to welcome fans not just from Wolverhampton but from far and wide to our city, as well as the millions tuning in online to watch the action. This is a global celebration of sport and cultures and we’re proud to be the home for it.”

    Wolverhampton is also hosting day two of the tournament tomorrow (Tuesday) before the action takes to the road with games being hosted in Coventry, Birmingham and Walsall. The tournament then returns to Wolverhampton on Saturday for the semi-finals and Sunday for the finals, third place play-off and closing ceremony.

    Councillor Gakhal added: “Events of this scale help support the local economy and help put the city on the map, so I encourage everyone to snap up the final remaining tickets while they can.”

    Tickets are still available for this week and information on how to purchase can be found at Kabaddi World Cup England 2025. 

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: Director Emma Burnham of the Antitrust Division’s Criminal Enforcement Section Delivers Remarks to Global Competition Review

    Source: United States Attorneys General 7

    Thank you to Global Competition Review for putting together today’s program. I am grateful for the opportunity to close out what I imagine has been a full day of interesting discussions.

    Let me cut to the chase. As I’m sure you are all aware, like the rest of the federal government, we at the Antitrust Division are in the midst of a transition. I know from my experience at the Division through previous transitions that these periods always raise questions about our enforcement levels and priorities going forward, about how we’ll deploy our finite resources. And I know you all are eager for answers on whether and how our enforcement priorities might shift. Of course, I won’t attempt to speak for our new and incoming leadership team at the Department, but what I can say is that I fully expect robust antitrust enforcement to continue, with cartel enforcement being no exception.

    With that said, I will offer some thoughts on our recent and ongoing criminal enforcement work and our core mission.

    I’ll start with a few simple truths.

    First, our country relies on free markets.

    Second, vigorous antitrust enforcement is essential to protect free markets and ensure that we all receive the benefits of competition.

    Third, that enforcement mission has a critical criminal prosecution component. If we did not prosecute those who commit antitrust crimes like price fixing and monopolization schemes, unchecked collusion, consolidation, and anticompetitive crimes would distort our markets and raise prices — including on everyday products we all rely on, as well as for vital goods and services the government needs to ensure our national security and provide critical infrastructure. This is why areas like healthcare, defense spending, agriculture and food supply, infrastructure and housing, and technology for just a few examples, continue to be staples of our work.

    So, it is not surprising that we are continuing to investigate and charge criminal cases — across a wide array of sectors and across all levels of the economy. These investigations and cases have significant impacts on key areas of public procurement and private spending.

    We are not even through the first quarter of 2025, and already our statistics are tangible evidence that our enforcement is not letting up. Thus far this year, our teams have charged 15 defendants — one company and 14 individuals — and have obtained 24 guilty pleas — two from companies and 22 from individuals. I would be the first to acknowledge that numbers aren’t the whole story. Much of our work goes on behind the scenes, in a covert posture, and the public filings are merely the tip of a vast iceberg.

    But the numbers can certainly tell you something about our priorities. I think you can take away two things from these statistics: first, we are not shying away from enforcement; and second, we remain deeply committed to individual accountability — never forgetting the essential, unique deterrent role that prison sentences serve.

    The recent charges include a slate of guilty pleas in US v. Martinez, a case where 12 individuals were charged with using anticompetitive and violent means to monopolize the market for transmigrante forwarding services in the Los Indios, Texas, area, and to enforce a price fixing and market allocation conspiracy. The majority of defendants have now pleaded guilty, including to landmark criminal monopolization conspiracy charges.

    I’ll note that it was just about three years ago when Antitrust Division officials began observing in public fora like this one that Section 2 of the Sherman Act, like Section 1, is a felony offense and that the Antitrust Division had a long and storied record — albeit interrupted by a half century of underenforcement — of prosecuting monopolization crimes. Several years ago, some may have thought it remarkable to hear from an enforcer that if the facts and the law lead us to the conclusion that a criminal charge based on Section 2 of the Sherman Act is warranted, we’ll charge it. But from where we stand today, the landscape has changed. Several years on, the Division has done exactly what was previewed: we have charged several criminal monopolization cases, using the statute as Congress wrote and intended it to punish those who seek to monopolize markets through anticompetitive means.

    The charges in Martinez are also illustrative for another reason — they show that antitrust crimes occur at all levels of the economy and that antitrust crime can also occur alongside and be carried out with other crimes — including extortion and acts of violence.

    Beyond Martinez, the Division’s recent guilty pleas include defendants charged with conspiracies and schemes targeting government procurement, which our teams investigated with our law enforcement partners through the Procurement Collusion Strike Force. For example, four defendants pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges arising from schemes targeting IT sales to the Department of Defense and intelligence community. Those pleas included a former government official who admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for ensuring that another defendant received government contracts at inflated prices.

    And within the last month, three individuals and one company admitted to rigging bids in the Division’s ongoing investigation into widespread bid rigging and fraud targeting sports equipment for schools that has, in total, resulted in six defendants charged to date, all of whom have pleaded guilty. At least 100 schools throughout Mississippi and elsewhere have been victimized by these conspiracies. And in a different investigation, another defendant recently pleaded guilty to obstruction for destroying evidence, demonstrating yet again that we will pursue cases where defendants seek to obstruct or impede criminal or civil antitrust investigations by destroying evidence or lying to agents and enforcers.

    Additional recent successes relate to our continued pursuit of bid rigging and collusion in construction and infrastructure industries. In an ongoing investigation, four individuals and a company recently admitted rigging bids for commercial roofing services in Florida — a vital industry given that safe, affordable roofing is critical to Florida communities prone to hurricanes. And two more individuals pleaded guilty in a long running investigation of bid rigging of asphalt paving services in the Detroit area. In total seven individuals and three companies have been charged and admitted guilt in that investigation.

    I think it’s also worth noting that these charges continue to expose individuals to real prison sentences — leading to significant general deterrence. Take as one example the most recent criminal antitrust case that went to trial — against two executives, Greg and David Melton, who were convicted of fixing prices, rigging bids, and allocating jobs in the sale of ready-mix concrete in the Savannah, Georgia area. They were sentenced to 41 and 26 months in prison.

    At that sentencing hearing — I will quote from the transcript because it is an important reminder of how courts view these violations — the judge observed that the crime of conviction was, in effect, “years of decisions that stole from the American people, from our economy.”

    The judge went on to say: “That’s what antitrust is. It’s like thievery, because at the bedrock of the greatest economy in the history of the world is competition. That’s what we’ve always been founded on. I have naturalization ceremonies in our courtrooms, and I tell new citizens, welcome to the country where you have the greatest potential and opportunity that you’ll ever have, because we’re a meritocracy. You come here; you do a good job, and you can obtain anything. That’s the American dream.

    When we rig a system, when we rig government or we rig the economy, we steal from that dream.

    It’s very, very serious conduct; and that’s why we have serious consequences for it.”

    And this is precisely why our work continues. Teams are preparing for three trials in the coming months. The first of these, scheduled to begin March 24 in Las Vegas, charges an individual with wage fixing and fraud in the healthcare industry. Next up, is another individual trial, set for April in the District of Idaho, on charges of market allocation in wildfire fighting services sold to the U.S. Forest Service, part of our ongoing work prosecuting procurement collusion through the PCSF. And in May, a team is heading to Oklahoma to try a case against two executives and a company charged with rigging bids and fixing prices in erosion control products and services for highway construction.

    These cases, like so many others we have brought, have a direct impact on the livelihood of regular Americans and are a vital part of our government’s work to safeguard the public’s tax dollars. Their variety — in terms of industry and geography — reflect the breadth of our work and its importance to our country.

    Beyond those cases, our covert and nonpublic work is ongoing. We have more grand jury investigations open now than at any time in my career, more than twice as many investigations as we had a decade ago. I expect to be able to share developments in some of these investigations in the near future.

    In sum, our criminal enforcement work is continuing.

    I want to conclude by recognizing the work that the Antitrust Division does cannot happen without its people — the beating heart of the organization. Fundamentally, the Antitrust Division is its people, who make significant sacrifices to perform their public service roles. They continue to operate at the highest level as they investigate and prosecute cases to protect American consumers and our open markets. I’m so proud of the work they do, and I remain incredibly grateful that I have the opportunity to work alongside them every day. Thank you.

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Council’s digital helper Darcie gets an upgrade

    Source: City of Derby

    Residents are now able to interact with an improved and more inclusive online resource as Derby City Council launches an upgraded version of its digital helper, Darcie this week [17 March].

    Introduced to answer citizens’ queries more efficiently, Darcie has undergone significant behind-the-scenes improvements.

    The latest generative AI capabilities mean the digital helper now understands more complex questions and can respond with more detailed answers on a range of Council services, including Council Tax, bins, fostering and registration services.

    Darcie can also now answer queries about adult social care in more detail for the first time.

    In 2023, Derby City Council introduced two digital helpers, Darcie for the council’s customer service centre, and Ali for Derby Homes’ housing enquiries on their respective websites.

    Since their launch, Darcie and Ali have handled more than 1.8m million routine enquiries, resolving 44% of enquiries without input from staff – freeing them to focus on more complex cases.

    Darcie is like a super-smart robot that is trained in the Council’s services, information and advice, and continues to learn from experience. The more Darcie learns, the better they get at understanding and generating answers to queries that feel natural and helpful.

    Darcie now supports the 9 most common languages after English that are spoken by residents, based on Council data. These are:

    • Arabic
    • Czech
    • Pashto
    • Polish
    • Punjabi
    • Romanian
    • Slovak
    • Somali
    • Urdu

    A more advanced version of phone Darcie is set to follow in the coming weeks, and residents are encouraged to visit the Council’s website, try out Darcie, and provide feedback on their experiences, to help guide future improvements.

    Giving feedback is simple. Darcie has Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down buttons for residents to rate a translation or how well the digital helper answered a question. Pressing the Thumbs Down button will open up a text box for more detailed comments.

    The Council is also planning focused sessions with representatives from community, language, and disability groups to ensure Darcie meets diverse needs.

    Councillor Hardyal Dhindsa, Cabinet Member for Digital and Organisational Transformation at Derby City Council said:

    We want to use technology to make a positive difference, and our goal is to make things as easy and user-friendly as possible for residents. The feedback from the testing phase has been good, and now we want to hear more from residents about their experiences before we move forward with the next phase.

    Derby is at the forefront of this technology and, given the lack of precedents, we don’t expect perfection right away. It’s important that we take the time to learn and refine our approach.

    Darcie is an important part in helping us make sure all residents can easily get the information and support they need.   Remember, Darcie is available 24/7 on web and phone and can answer queries at evenings, weekends and holidays. There is always the option to talk to a human advisor if needed during normal office hours.

    I urge all citizens to try Darcie and let us know how we can improve this tool further.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: Corner Brook — RCMP Major Crimes Unit West arrests man in Port au Port West, attempt murder charge laid

    Source: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

    RCMP NL’s Major Crime Unit (MCU) West arrested 66-year-old Wayne Harold Hynes of Port au Port West on March 16, 2025, as part of an ongoing investigation that left a snowmobiler with life-threatening injuries.

    At approximately 4:30 p.m. on February 21, 2025, Bay St. George RCMP responded to the report of an injured snowmobiler on Gravel’s Pond in Port au Port. The operator of the snowmobile fell from the machine after it came to a stop and sustained serious injuries that did not appear to be consistent with the fall from the snowmobile. The RCMP MCU was engaged to continue the investigation.

    As part of the investigation, police determined the level of injury to the snowmobiler was not as a result of the fall from the snowmobile.

    On February 25, 2025, with a search warrant authorized under the Criminal Code, RCMP MCU searched Hynes’s residence and seized a number of items as part of this investigation.

    In continuing the investigation, Hynes was arrested yesterday at his home without incident and was held in police custody overnight. He appeared in provincial court today, via teleconference, was charged with attempted murder and was remanded into custody. His next court appearance takes place on March 18, 2025.

    The investigation is continuing.

    Background:

    https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2025/rcmp-nls-mcu-searches-home-port-au-port-part-injured-snowmobiler-investigation

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: UK pledges up to £160 million to support Syria’s recovery and stability in post-Assad era

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments 3

    Press release

    UK pledges up to £160 million to support Syria’s recovery and stability in post-Assad era

    The UK government has pledged up to £160 million in aid to help stabilise Syria following the fall of the Assad regime.

    • The UK will pledge up to £160 million in critical aid at humanitarian Syria conference in Brussels.
    • UK aid, delivered through trusted UN and NGO partners, will provide life-saving support to millions of Syrians, including refugees across the region, to help them to rebuild their lives and livelihoods.
    • Ensuring long-term stability in Syria is essential for regional and UK security – the foundation of the Government’s Plan for Change.

    The UK government has committed today to play a leading role in Syria’s post-Assad recovery. Millions of Syrians are set to benefit from lifesaving aid from the UK and international partners, supporting them to rebuild their lives and stabilise the country following the fall of the brutal Assad regime late last year. 

    Minister for the Middle East, Hamish Falconer, will today pledge up to £160 million of UK funding – delivered by trusted UN and NGO partners on the ground – to help provide Syrians with critical water, food, healthcare and education in 2025 at the Annual Syria Pledging Conference, hosted by the EU in Brussels.

    Ensuring stability in Syria and the wider region is critical for UK national security, which is the foundation of the government’s Plan for Change.

    In his speech at the conference, which will be attended by members of the international community and the Syrian interim authorities, the Minister will urge the Syrian authorities to ensure the recent violence witnessed in Syria never happens again, reiterating the importance of a properly representative and inclusive political transition. 

    Minister for the Middle East, Hamish Falconer said:

    A stable Syria is vital for ensuring our security at home and abroad, which is critical for delivering our Plan for Change. Today’s pledge of up to £160m underlines our commitment to helping Syrians stabilise and rebuild their country, as well as provide lifesaving aid for Syrians hosted generously in partner countries.  

    This is a critical moment for Syria. The violence in coastal areas earlier this month was horrific. The interim authorities must demonstrate their intent to promote stability, protect minorities and govern in the interests of all Syrians. We welcome the ceasefire agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the interim authorities as an important step in this direction.

    At the conference, the Minister will welcome last week’s ceasefire agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the interim authorities, as well as the authorities’ commitment to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.

    Notes to Editors: 

    • The UK’s pledge covers support to Syria and the wider region for 2025. 

    • Today’s visit follows the recent decision to lift asset freezes on 24 Syrian entities. These entities were previously used by the Assad regime to fund the oppression of the Syrian people, including the Central Bank of Syria, Syrian Arab Airlines, and energy companies. This reaffirms UK support to the Syrian people in re-building their country and promote security and stability.

    Media enquiries

    Email newsdesk@fcdo.gov.uk

    Telephone 020 7008 3100

    Contact the FCDO Communication Team via email (monitored 24 hours a day) in the first instance, and we will respond as soon as possible.

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    Published 17 March 2025

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: New task force launched in Virginia to eliminate transnational criminal organizations

    Source: United States Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

    ALEXANDRIA, Va. – U.S. Attorney Erik S. Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia along with federal and state partners announced today the recently established Virginia Homeland Security Task Force (VHSTF), an interagency group founded to combat transnational organized crime and coordinate ongoing immigration enforcement efforts across Virginia. In the two weeks since the VHSTF’s creation on March 3, task force members have arrested 247 individuals.

    Hundreds of personnel are supporting the task force, including representatives from U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern and Western Districts of Virginia; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; FBI’s Washington, Norfolk, and Richmond Field Offices; Homeland Security Investigations; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; U.S. Customs and Border Protection; U.S. Marshals Service; Virginia Department of Corrections; Virginia Office of the Attorney General; Virginia Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security; Virginia State Police; and the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force.

    The VHSTF is part of Operation Take Back America, which streamlines efforts and resources from the Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETFs) and Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN). HSTFs, which were established by President Trump in Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, are joint operations led by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Operation Take Back America is a nationwide federal initiative that marshals the full resources of the Department of Justice to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime.

    The VHSTF is the first of these task forces. Task force members are building on existing partnerships and initiatives to enforce immigration laws and policies to dismantle TCOs threatening the safety of millions of Virginians.

    These organizations operate across international borders, wholly or in part, by illegal means. Regardless of structure, TCOs destabilize local communities and fuel violence by engaging in drug trafficking, firearms trafficking, human trafficking, assault, kidnapping, murder, and extortion.

    One of the VHSTF’s goals is the elimination of TCOs across Virginia. Task force members seek to target these organizations’ infrastructures — including leaders, intermediaries, and street-level offenders — utilizing the State Department’s new foreign terrorist designations of various gangs, such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13); Cártel de Sinaloa; and Tren de Aragua (TdA). Under the guidance provided by Attorney General Pamela Bondi, leaders and managers of cartels and TCOs may be prosecuted for such crimes as terrorism, racketeering, continuing criminal enterprise offenses, violations of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, and violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    To date, the VHSTF has arrested numerous gang affiliates, including 18 MS-13 affiliates, six TdA affiliates, and 12 individuals affiliated with other TCOs.

    A copy of this press release is located on the website of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Stoke-on-Trent commits to building a greener and fairer future for all

    Source: City of Stoke-on-Trent

    Published: Monday, 17th March 2025

    Stoke-on-Trent City Council has signed a charter committing to building a sustainable and fair future for the city and county as it looks to take further steps to combat climate change.

    The charter – signed at Lichfield Cathedral on Friday 14 March – was produced by the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Celebration of the Possible (COP) – an alliance that brings together communities, councils, academics and other partners around a shared vision of a happier, healthier future based on better stewardship of the environment.

    Earlier this year, COP announced its commitment to a decade-long action plan, which will drive collaboration and chart a clear path forward. By signing the charter, the city will commit to proactive measures to combat climate change and consider nature and sustainability in its decision-making. The charter is based on so-called “doughnut economics”, which suggest that humanity should exist in a space where needs are met but where economic activity does not go beyond the planet’s natural limits.

    Stoke-on-Trent has committed to playing its part in the government’s target of being ‘net zero’ -. taking out more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it puts in – by 2050.

    The city’s dedication to a greener future is already underway with its new Economic Strategy, which focuses on community wealth-building and supporting sustainable, green industries. These initiatives align closely with the city’s environmental goals, aiming to make Stoke-on-Trent a greener, cleaner, and more prosperous place for all residents.

    Councillor Sarah Hill, cabinet member for children’s services at Stoke-on-Trent City Council, said: “Signing the COP Charter is a natural next step for us. It fits perfectly with our goal to create a sustainable, thriving city.

    “We’re already taking action, including early development of a District Heat Network, promoting sustainable travel through our Transforming Cities programme and Bus Service Improvement Protocol, and we will be supporting tree planting in celebration of our Centenary.

    “We’re also focused on ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. By making Stoke-on-Trent a cleaner, safer, and more inclusive city, we can help everyone enjoy the benefits of a greener future.”

    The signing of the COP Charter is an important milestone in Stoke-on-Trent’s journey to becoming a cleaner, fairer, and more resilient city. To learn more about the city’s strategy for 2024-2028 – Our City, Our Wellbeing – residents can visit:  https://www.stoke.gov.uk/ourcityourwellbeing.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI: Iterate.ai’s Kevin Homer Named CRN Channel Chief Amid AI PC Partnership Success

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    SAN JOSE, Calif. and DENVER, March 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Iterate.ai, whose AI platform enables enterprises to build production-ready applications and ready-to-use products for private AI requirements and the AI PC era, today announced that CRN has named Kevin Homer as a 2025 Channel Chief. The recognition comes as Iterate.ai expands its channel-first strategy, bringing secure and local AI processing capabilities to business through recent strategic partnerships with companies including Intel and TD SYNNEX. Iterate.ai’s channel program now has more than 50 partners, with plans to continue expanding rapidly this year.

    Homer has led Iterate.ai’s channel-centric model by establishing partnerships that make Generate—Iterate’s privacy-first AI Assistant—available to over 25,000 resellers. Generate’s ability to process documents more than 1,000 pages locally on AI PCs, among its many other capabilities, positions partners to address growing business demands for secure AI deployment. Unlike cloud-dependent AI assistants, Generate’s proprietary Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework ensures sensitive data remains within organizational boundaries while eliminating cloud processing costs.

    “The channel is ideal for what Iterate.ai brings to the market,” said Homer. “Through our recent deals with TD SYNNEX, Intel, and others, we’re empowering partners to drive revenue while delivering AI solutions that protect users’ sensitive data by running entirely on local AI PCs. This has created tremendous services opportunities for our partners as their customers seek more secure ways to leverage AI, while our partner portal and upcoming MDF program provide the resources needed to accelerate their growth.”

    “Kevin’s vision for Iterate.ai in the channel aligns well with our product development and the emergence of AI PCs that demand secure AI deployments,” said Brian Sathianathan, CTO and co-founder of Iterate.ai. “His recognition by CRN validates our strategy of scaling through partners who can deliver complete, secure AI solutions for years to come.”

    Homer brings 25 years of technology sales experience to Iterate.ai, having previously built successful channel programs at LogRhythm and Vericept. His CRN Channel Chief achievement adds to Iterate.ai’s industry recognition; the company has recently been recognized in Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, named to the KM World AI 100, and had its Interplay-AppCoder LLM awarded the best AI and Machine Learning Model by InfoWorld.

    About Iterate.ai

    Iterate.ai is at the forefront of empowering businesses with state-of-the-art AI solutions, like Generate and its AI low code platform, Interplay. Interplay is cloud-agnostic and can run AI on the edge and in secure private environments. With six patents granted (including “drag-and-drop AI”) and nearly a dozen more pending, Iterate.ai’s platform offers corporate innovators a low-risk, speedy, and systematic way to scale in-house, near-term digital innovation initiatives. With its largest offices in San Jose, CA and Denver, CO, Iterate.ai has a global presence with other offices in North America (Texas, Washington, Arizona), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Singapore).

    Contact

    Kyle Peterson
    kyle@clementpeterson.com

    A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e20a4206-0b49-4122-92ed-85343513d9eb

    The MIL Network –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Nations: 17 March 2025 News release Nearly 50 million people sign up call for clean air action for better health

    Source: World Health Organisation

    In an unprecedented show of unity, more than 47 million health professionals, patients, advocates, representatives from civil society organizations, and individuals worldwide have signed a resounding call for urgent action to reduce air pollution and to protect people’s health from its devastating impacts.

    Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health and a major contributor to climate change. Around 7 million people die from air pollution each year, mainly from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

    This global call to action, spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and international health organizations will be presented at the Second Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, set to take place in Cartagena, Colombia, on 25–27 March 2025.

    “Forty-seven million people from the health community have issued a clarion call for urgent, bold, science-driven action on air pollution, and their voices must be heard,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Around the world, WHO is supporting countries to implement evidence-based tools to address air pollution and prevent the disease it causes. At the second WHO Conference on Air Pollution and Health in Cartagena, we hope to see concrete commitments from countries to implement those tools and save lives.”

    Hosted by WHO and the Government of Colombia, the conference will bring together political leaders, representatives from civil society organizations, UN agencies and academia to drive a global clean air agenda which promises benefits for public health, climate change response and sustainable development, both globally and locally.

    Recognizing the heavy toll of air pollution, the health community is calling on governments to take immediate and ambitious steps to reduce emissions, enforce stricter air quality standards, and transition to cleaner energy sources, unlocking multiple benefits for the health of people and planet. The topic will also be a focus ahead of the 2025 UN High-Level Meeting on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), where world leaders will be called upon to take stronger action.

    Key facts:

    • Air pollution in both cities and rural areas generates fine particulate matter which results in NCDs such as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, chronic respiratory diseases as well as acute conditions such as pneumonia.  
    • Around 2.1 billion people are exposed to dangerous levels of household air pollution, while using polluting open fires or stoves for cooking.
    • Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), are among the leading causes of death, many are linked to air pollution exposure. The global NCD epidemic claims 41 million lives annually. Addressing air pollution is a key strategy in reducing the burden of NCDs and improving global health.
    • Sources of air pollution are varied and context-specific. The major pollution sources include polluting energy sources used in homes, energy production, industrial emissions, transport, agriculture, waste as well as natural sources such as desert and dust storms or wildfires.

    Improving air quality by implementing well-known and available solutions will prevent premature deaths, improve health, drive sustainable economic development, and mitigate climate change.

    At the conference, countries are expected to commit to concrete measures, including setting and enforcing stronger air quality standards aligned with the WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines. WHO, in collaboration with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), has unveiled the updated 2025 Air Quality Standards database last month, which now includes data from approximately 140 countries, showcasing their air pollution regulatory efforts aimed at protecting public health.

    “While the challenge is immense, progress is possible. Many cities and countries have significantly improved air quality by enforcing stricter pollution limits,” said Dr Maria Neira, WHO Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health. “Clean air is not a privilege; it is a human right as recognized by the UN General Assembly. We need to work together urgently to scale up transitioning from coal-fired power to renewable energy, expanding public and sustainable transport, establishing low-emission zones in cities and promoting clean energy for cooking and solar power in healthcare facilities.”

    The commitments made at the upcoming Second Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health and the UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs will play a crucial role in paving the way for a healthier, more sustainable future for all. Now is the time to take the call and step up efforts for cleaner air, everywhere.

    For interviews, please contact WHO Media Team.

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Syria: Relative of Assad regime’s disappeared speaks of anguish in search for truth and justice

    Source: United Nations 2

    17 March 2025 Peace and Security

    A relative of two Syrians tortured and murdered by the Assad regime has spoken of the anguish caused by their enforced disappearance during the country’s civil war.

    Obeida Dabbagh’s brother Mazen, and nephew Patrick – both Syrian-French nationals – were arrested by Air Force Intelligence officials in November 2013.

    Held for years and tortured, there were falsely declared dead in 2018 “years after they disappeared,” Mr. Dabbagh told the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which meets at the UN Office at Geneva (UNOG).

    Arbitrary victims

    He stressed that his uncle and nephew had not been involved in initially peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad that authorities attempted to crush by carrying out mass arrests, torture and widespread human rights abuses that have been widely condemned by UN senior officials.

    “The Syrian regime, in addition to torture and executions, extorted money from our family, promising us information or release in exchange for exorbitant sums, before expelling [Mazen’s] wife and [his] daughter from our family home in Damascus,” Mr. Dabbagh told the panel, which is one of ten UN human rights Treaty Bodies independent of the Human Rights Council.

    Fight against impunity

    “This fight goes beyond my family,” Mr. Dabbagh continued.

    “It is part of a universal quest for justice and against impunity for war crimes. Through this legal action, I wanted not only to obtain justice for Mazen and Patrick, but also to participate in the global fight against the atrocities committed by the Syrian regime.”

    Before they were arrested, Mazen provided teaching support at a French college in the Syrian capital and his son Patrick was a psychology student at Damascus university.

    Desperate to secure their release, their family approached the Syrian, French and international authorities, including the Red Cross and European Union.

    In 2016, alongside the NGO International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the family filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor’s office for crimes against humanity.

    Key French intervention

    This legal action allowed the French justice system to open an investigation and collect key testimonies, particularly from Syrian deserters. This led to an indictment order in March 2023 for three senior Syrian regime officials to stand trial for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes.

    Following their trial in France last May, Ali Mamlouk, Jamil Hassan and Abdel Salam Mahmoud were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity in imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance and murder constituting crimes against humanity, as well as for confiscation of property, classified as a war crime.

    International rights framework

    The Committee on Enforced Disappearances monitors how countries implement the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2006 and came into force in December 2010.

    Ratifying countries are legally bound to its provisions, including the prohibition of secret detention, the obligation to search for disappeared persons, the criminalization of enforced disappearance and the commitment to prosecute those responsible.

    For the Committee, independent rights expert Fidelis Kanyongolo highlighted the critical importance of extra-territorial jurisdiction in the Committee’s work, given that many States have yet to ratify the Convention – along with the fact that Syria has not ratified the Rome Statute, which would have allowed the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute serious human rights crimes there.

    In addition, there has been no resolution from the UN Security Council referring grave rights abuses in Syria to the ICC and the domestic justice system remains neither independent nor accountable, Mr, Kanyongolo maintained.

    Trailblazing global accord

    The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance is the first universally legally binding human rights instrument concerning the practice.

    It was preceded by the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1992.

    With 77 State parties today, the Convention remains a key reference, with several of its provisions now reflecting customary international law.

    Call for Justice

    In a statement marking 14 years since the start of the Syrian civil war, the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry on Syria called for urgent efforts to hold all perpetrators accountable, both from the Assad era and all warring parties since 2011.

    “Evidence, including documents in prisons, courts and mass grave sites, must be preserved to support future truth and accountability initiatives led by the new Syrian authorities, with the support of key actors such as Syrian civil society,” the Commission stated.

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI: Intesa Sanpaolo has partnered with the EIB to provide nearly €660m to promote economic growth in the CEE region since 2020

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    Paola Papanicolaou, Head of Intesa Sanpaolo’s International Banks Division

    MILAN, March 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Speaking at the EIB Forum in Luxembourg this month, Paola Papanicolaou, the head of Intesa Sanpaolo’s International Banks Division (IBD), outlined the significant contribution to economic growth in Central and Eastern Europe that the bank has made over the last five years.

    Intesa Sanpaolo has signed deals worth nearly €660m in the CEE region over the past five years, in partnership with the EIB. This includes some €370m dedicated to EU candidate countries, such as Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine.

    In Serbia, Intesa Sanpaolo’s subsidiary, Banca Intesa Beograd, recently partnered with EIB Global to provide €160m from the EU to support investment in the energy transition at Serbian SMEs, fostering sustainable economic growth.

    The transaction will benefit around 240 companies and protect approximately 25,000 jobs. Banca Intesa Beograd is Serbia’s leading banking group.

    “We believe that our role goes beyond that of a financial institution that just operates transactions, to that of a partner,” Papanicolaou said at the recent EIB Forum. “Intesa Sanpaolo advises and supports the growth of individual companies as well as the wider national economies in which we operate.”

    Intesa Sanpaolo’s IBD is deeply embedded in the CEE region through a network of twelve fully-owned banks.

    “It’s very important to be on the ground, as we are, to fully understand each country’s needs,” Papanicolaou said. “For example, we are working closely with some countries to support public finance and significant infrastructure projects”.

    Another agreement signed in November 2024 saw Intesa Sanpaolo’s Croatian bank, Privredna Banka Zagreb (PBZ), receive €169m from the EIB to finance the green transition at Croatian companies. Of this total amount, €100m was earmarked by the EIB as a guarantee line for large enterprises and mid-cap companies, and an extension of an EIF guarantee of up to €69m was made for small businesses in the country. Intesa Sanpaolo’s PBZ is the second-largest bank in Croatia by assets.

    Italy is a key trading partner for many EU candidate countries. As the leading Italian financial institution, Intesa Sanpaolo acts as a natural financial bridge between Italy — the second-largest manufacturing economy in Europe — and CEE markets.

    Intesa Sanpaolo facilitates international trade, supports SMEs in expanding beyond domestic markets, and fosters cross-border collaborations that drive economic progress. In particular, the bank believes that helping SMEs to expand internationally is a vital contribution to the development of an economy.

    The 12 home markets of Intesa Sanpaolo’s IBD are Croatia, Slovakia and Czech Republic, Serbia, Hungary, Egypt, Slovenia, Ukraine, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania and Moldova.

    These banks together serve 7.4m customers, with a combined loan book of €45bn and €61bn in deposits.

    Intesa Sanpaolo plays a crucial role in these economies, serving individuals, SMEs, corporates, and public sector entities while driving investment and growth.

    Contact: international.media@intesasanpaolo.com

    A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b9897a34-ccf2-4423-8cc4-3d0427433a18

    The MIL Network –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Economics: Automotive dealers need to adapt to technological advancements to remain competitive, says GlobalData

    Source: GlobalData

    Automotive dealers need to adapt to technological advancements to remain competitive, says GlobalData

    Posted in Automotive

    The automotive industry is on the brink of a significant transformation as digital technologies reshape the way vehicles are bought and sold. The rise of online car buying platforms is not merely a trend; it represents a fundamental shift in consumer behavior and expectations. This shift was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted lockdowns and disrupted global supply chains, leading to a sharp decline in physical car sales. As consumer expectations evolve and technology continues to advance, both dealers and manufacturers must adapt to remain competitive, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

    Madhuchhanda Palit, Automotive Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The transition to online car buying has fundamentally altered consumer expectations. Today’s buyers demand a seamless, digital-first experience akin to what they encounter in other retail sectors. This shift compels traditional dealerships to enhance their online presence and digital sales capabilities.

    “As consumers grow accustomed to the convenience of browsing and purchasing vehicles from home, dealerships must innovate to meet these new standards for transparency and accessibility. The challenge lies in balancing the trust and personal touch of in-person interactions with the efficiency of online transactions. Those who can successfully integrate these elements will likely thrive in this evolving market.”

    Technological advancements are at the forefront of the digital transformation in the automotive industry. The emergence of virtual showrooms, augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the car-buying experience.

    Virtual showrooms allow consumers to explore vehicles in immersive 360-degree views, while AR applications enable potential buyers to visualize cars in their own environments. AI-driven tools enhance personalization, guiding consumers through the buying process with tailored recommendations. These technologies not only improve the user experience but also streamline operations for dealerships, making the sales process more efficient. As these innovations continue to evolve, they will play a crucial role in shaping the future of automotive commerce.

    Palit continues: “Looking ahead, the automotive market is poised for considerable growth driven by the ongoing digital transformation. The integration of advanced technologies is expected to redefine purchasing methods, with predictions of even more sophisticated AI applications and enhanced online experiences. Traditional dealerships have the opportunity to adopt hybrid models that blend online convenience with the benefits of in-person service. Collaborations, such as Hyundai’s recent partnership with Amazon to facilitate online vehicle sales, exemplify how traditional players can adapt to this new landscape. As the industry embraces these changes, it is essential for stakeholders to remain agile and responsive to evolving consumer preferences.”

    Palit concludes: “The digital transformation of the automotive industry is not just a passing phase; it is a significant shift that will shape the future of the market. As the industry adapts to this digital revolution, both consumers and dealerships must navigate a new landscape that promises unprecedented convenience and efficiency.

    “The path forward will require a commitment to innovation, a focus on enhancing the customer experience, and an openness to new business models. While the future remains uncertain, the potential for growth and transformation in the automotive sector is considerable, paving the way for a more connected and efficient marketplace.”

    MIL OSI Economics –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Economics: UK Mother’s Day spending to reach £2.4 billion, as consumer participation rises, reveals GlobalData

    Source: GlobalData

    UK Mother’s Day spending to reach £2.4 billion, as consumer participation rises, reveals GlobalData

    Posted in Retail

    The UK consumer spending for Mother’s Day 2025 is set to reach £2.4 billion, reflecting a 5% increase from the previous year. With more consumers planning to participate, retailers have an opportunity to cater to the rising demand for premium gifts and experiences. Strategic marketing, along with tailored product offerings, will be key to capitalising on this trend ahead of the event on the 30 March 2025, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

    GlobalData Retail Mother’s Day Intentions Report 2025 reveals that the proportion of UK consumers planning to purchase at least one item for Mother’s Day 2025 has risen to 56.4%, a 2.9ppt increase on 2024.

    Furthermore, consumers plan to spend £17.43 more on their mums than last year, resulting in an average spend of £125.30. Gifting will be the most popular expense this year, with categories such as clothing, fine jewellery & watches and health & beauty among the most sought-after.

    Eleanor Simpson-Gould, Senior Retail Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Retailers should offer personalised gifting options, including customised clothing, bespoke jewellery pieces, and curated beauty gift sets. Providing unique and thoughtful gifts will appeal to the customers looking to make a special gesture on Mother’s Day. Additionally, retailers must enhance the shopping experience by offering gift-wrapping services and convenient delivery options to make the process seamless for shoppers.”

    Grocers will benefit from decreased interest in takeaways and dining out this year. 17.5% of Mother’s Day shoppers plan to have a special meal at home with mum, a 3.1ppt increase on 2024. Dine-in options are crucial, given that Mother’s Day shoppers intend to spend £52.32 on average on food & drink for the event. There will be plenty of room in consumers’ budgets to trade up to premium ranges.

    Simpson-Gould adds: “The UK consumers are prioritising quality time at home with their mums this Mother’s Day, focusing on special meals, presenting a lucrative opportunity for grocers. Upselling opportunities include luxury wines, champagnes, confectionery, and premium meats, and grocers must focus on catering to these preferences to maximise sales potential.”

    According to the report, 62.5% of Gen Z consumers agree that “retailers do not do enough to provide gift inspiration.” This sentiment is far higher than that of their cohorts. Almost half of this age group plan to spend more on Mother’s Day this year.

    Simpson-Gould concludes: “Retailers must engage with Gen Z shoppers on key social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to promote affordable Mother’s Day gift ideas, offering exclusive discounts and engaging content to attract budget-conscious shoppers. Next-day delivery options will be a significant draw for this age group. Given that 63.8% of Gen Z shoppers agree they ‘tend to leave Mother’s Day shopping until the very last minute’ online retailers offering expedited delivery stand to benefit the most from the expenditure ahead of the event.”

    MIL OSI Economics –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Video: UK House of Lords Committee explores the UK’s involvement in space

    Source: United Kingdom UK House of Lords (video statements)

    Space is essential to the functioning of the UK economy. People relying on GPS for navigation, scientists who monitor climate change, and farmers who use autonomous machinery are just some of the daily users of satellite technology in the UK.

    The House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee has been set up to consider UK space policies, the opportunities and challenges the sector faces, and how space can contribute to economic growth.

    The committee wants to hear from you. Whether you’re an industry professional, an academic or a policy expert, you can get involved.

    Share your views by 17 April https://committees.parliament.uk/work/8966/uk-engagement-with-space/news/205799/call-for-evidence-launched-on-the-uks-engagement-with-space/

    Catch-up on House of Lords business:

    Watch live events: https://parliamentlive.tv/Lords
    Read the latest news: https://www.parliament.uk/lords/

    Stay up to date with the House of Lords on social media:

    • X: https://twitter.com/UKHouseofLords
    • Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/houseoflords.parliament.uk
    • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/UKHouseofLords/
    • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UKHouseofLords
    • Flickr: https://flickr.com/photos/ukhouseoflords/albums
    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-house-of-lords
    • Threads: https://www.threads.net/@UKHouseOfLords

    #HouseOfLords #UKParliament

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jQw37KRguk

    MIL OSI Video –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI USA: NEWS: Sanders, 37 Colleagues to Education Secretary: “We Will Not Stand By as You Attempt to Turn Back the Clock on Education in this Country”

    US Senate News:

    Source: United States Senator for Vermont – Bernie Sanders

    WASHINGTON, March 17 – As the Trump administration and Elon Musk attack public education in America by closing offices and laying off 1,300 workers at the Department of Education, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), alongside 37 Senate colleagues, today sent a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon expressing outrage at the administration’s reckless and illegal firing of half of the workforce at the U.S. Department of Education, which will devastate America’s public education system and impact students across the country.

    Joining Sanders on the letter are Sens. Maize Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Chuck Schumer  (D-N.Y.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Mark Warner  (D-Va.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.).

    “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 60 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, millions of Americans cannot afford higher education, and 40 percent of our nation’s 4th graders and 33 percent of 8th graders read below basic proficiency, it is a national disgrace that the Trump Administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students,” wrote Sanders and the lawmakers.

    The lawmakers noted that these layoffs and closures will have devastating effects on the nation’s students, including by limiting the department’s ability to guarantee federal funding reaches communities that rely on it, ensure students can access federal financial aid, and uphold students’ civil rights. Not even 24 hours after the staff reductions were announced, the Free Application for Federal Financial Aid (FAFSA) experienced a glitch that prevented students and families from accessing the application. Education Department workers responsible for fixing it had reportedly been fired.

    The lawmakers continue: “[The layoffs] would also mean decreased enforcement of rights for children with disabilities and fewer resources for students from low-income backgrounds and children with disabilities, like the 26 million students from low-income backgrounds and over 100,000 public schools in every community across this country that rely on Title I funding; the 7.5 million students with disabilities who benefit under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the 7 million students who receive Pell grants to help access higher education.”

    “We will not stand by as you attempt to turn back the clock on education in this country through gutting the Department of Education. Our nation’s public schools, colleges, and universities are preparing the next generation of America’s leaders—we must take steps to strengthen education in this country, not take a wrecking ball to the agency that exists to do so,” concluded Sanders and the lawmakers.

    Read the text of the letter here.

    MIL OSI USA News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: Par Funding Enforcer Sentenced to 11½ Years in Prison for RICO Conspiracy, Obstruction of Justice, and Retaliation

    Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) State Crime News

    James LaForte Brutally Assaulted Receivership Attorney, Threatened Government Witnesses, Extorted Merchants

    PHILADELPHIA – United States Attorney David Metcalf announced that James LaForte, 48, of New York, New York, was sentenced today by United States District Court Judge Mark A. Kearney to 137 months’ imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release to include 12 months’ home confinement, for crimes committed as part of a criminal enterprise that ran a fraudulent investment vehicle[1] known as Complete Business Solutions Group, Inc., d/b/a Par Funding (“Par Funding”) for a number of years, before it was taken over by a court-appointed receivership pursuant to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. LaForte was also ordered to pay $2,488,645 in restitution, representing the portion of investor proceeds that he illegally diverted from Par Funding’s numerous investors for his own use through sham merchant contracts and other self-dealing conduct.

    In February 2024, the defendant, his brother Joseph LaForte, Par Funding’s president and CEO, and Joseph Cole Barleta, Par Funding’s chief financial officer, were charged in an amended second superseding indictment with racketeering conspiracy and related crimes.

    James LaForte pleaded guilty in September 2024 to racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud, and extortionate collection of debt, as well as obstruction of justice, for his violent assault on one of the Par Funding receivership’s Philadelphia attorneys, and retaliation, for threatening several government witnesses.

    “James LaForte served as one of his brother’s enforcers,” said U.S. Attorney Metcalf. “He not only used threats of violence to collect on Par Funding’s debt, but stalked and assaulted an attorney, in retaliation for that man’s efforts to hold the LaForte family responsible for one of the largest financial frauds in Philadelphia’s history. As today’s sentence shows, this brand of brazen and violent lawbreaking simply won’t be tolerated in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.”

    “Since its earliest days, the FBI has been dedicated to investigating complex financial crimes,” said Wayne A. Jacobs, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Philadelphia. “James LaForte participated in a criminal enterprise driven by greed and sustained through threats and violence. The FBI is proud to stand with our partners in the pursuit of justice — disrupting these schemes and ensuring restitution for victims.”

    “The defendant in this case was brought to justice for his participation in a criminal enterprise that caused significant financial harm to numerous investors,” said Special Agent in Charge Patricia Tarasca of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General (FDIC OIG), New York Region. “The FDIC OIG will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to pursue those who commit such egregious crimes that threaten investors and the safety and soundness of our Nation’s financial institutions.”

    Joseph LaForte also pleaded guilty in September 2024 to racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud, and related crimes and is scheduled to be sentenced on March 26, 2025. Barleta pleaded guilty in October 2024 to one count of racketeering conspiracy and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 2, 2025.

    This case was investigated by the FBI, Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General, and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Matthew Newcomer, Samuel Dalke, and Eric Gill.

    The SEC in Florida investigated and litigated the civil securities fraud charges, which formed the basis of a portion of the Par Funding criminal prosecution.


    [1] On January 21, 2025, the Court found the Par Funding fraud scheme caused an actual fraud loss of approximately $404,000,000, which it reduced to $288,395,088 after factoring in credit for collateral seized from Par Funding by federal authorities when the investigation became public in July 2020.

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Security: Man sentenced to life in jail for murder of Sean O’Neill

    Source: United Kingdom London Metropolitan Police

    A 23-year-old man responsible for the brutal murder of Sean O’Neill has been jailed for life.

    Dellan Charles (08.01.2001), of no fixed address, appeared at Kingston Crown Court on Monday, 17 March where he was told he will serve a minimum of 23 years behind bars. He was convicted of murder on Tuesday, 17 December.

    On the evening of Thursday, 18 May 2023, following an altercation between two rival groups in Reynolds Road, Hayes, Charles chased and killed Sean in a quiet residential street in broad daylight.

    After cornering him, Charles used two knives to stab Sean multiple times. During the trial, the court heard how Charles shouted “die, die, die” during the attack.

    In CCTV footage, Charles was pictured calmly leaving the scene after delivering the fatal blows, before making his escape by trespassing through nearby leafy suburban gardens. The jury heard how Charles disposed of a knife at a nearby address, before concocting a calculated plan to flee the area. He then went to ground for just shy of a year.

    Over the course of the next ten months, detectives pieced together the course of events alongside an extensive manhunt.

    The specialist team of officers then used this evidence and intelligence to capture Charles in Coventry on Wednesday, 27 March 2024, helping secure justice for Sean and his family.

    The jury heard how Sean was a funny, kind and sociable person and many people have been deeply affected by his tragic death.

    Detective Inspector Kevin Martin, who led the investigation for Specialist Crime South, said:
    “Myself and the team once again pay tribute to Sean’s family who, throughout this distressing time, have shown real strength and togetherness.

    “Heartbreakingly, nothing will ever bring Sean back, but today, the man responsible for taking him away from his much-loved family has been forced to face the reality of his malicious actions.”

    In a statement previously provided by Sean’s family, they added:

    “We really appreciate the efforts of the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service in bringing about justice, as well as the support we have received throughout this difficult process.

    “Sean will be remembered for his big heart, charming smile and fun-loving personality. He is incredibly loved by us all and we miss him every day.”

    ENDS

    MIL Security OSI –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Russia: SPbGASU named the winning team of the qualifying round of the International Engineering Championship “CASE-IN”

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Team “C-Key” (Ekaterina Buryak, Alexandra Leonova, Elizaveta Petrova, Alexey Khimichev, Sofia Tarkhanova, Denis Lebedev, Alexander Katsyuba) and Kirill Pivovarov

    The results of the selection round of the student league of the International Engineering Championship “CASE-IN” in the direction of “Architecture, design, construction and housing and public utilities” were summed up at SPbGASU. The defense of case solutions and the award ceremony for the winners took place on March 12.

    CASE-IN was created 13 years ago to promote engineering and technical education and to train future highly qualified specialists. The organizers of the championship are the Nadezhnaya Smena Foundation, the Youth Forum of Mining Leaders Non-Commercial Partnership, AstraLogika LLC, and the presidential platform Russia – the Land of Opportunities. The championship is included in the Science of Winning initiative of the Decade of Science and Technology in Russia.

    According to Marina Malyutina, Vice-Rector for Youth Policy, SPbGASU has been participating in CASE-IN since 2019. According to Marina Viktorovna, this is a fundamental and important decision for an engineering university. Students show good results, the number of those wishing to participate is growing year after year. In the future, they are offered practice, internship, and employment. Previously, the university participated in the “Engineering Design” competency, and the tasks were not entirely specialized. Now, thanks to the Metropolis company, SPbGASU students have the opportunity to apply the specialized knowledge they receive at the university.

    Artem Korolev, director of the Nadezhnaya Smena charity foundation and founder of the CASE-IN International Engineering Championship, shared his plans for the 13th season in a video message: this year, there will be school, student, and special leagues. 280 schools are expected to participate in the school league. More than 220 universities are expected in the student league, 80 of which will host the in-person selection round. A total of 18,500 participants are expected – schoolchildren, students, young professionals, experts, mentors, and curators. The theme of the 13th season is Technological Innovations.

    The first deputy general director of the autonomous non-profit organization “Russia – Land of Opportunities” Gennady Guryanov spoke about the successes of the project in a video message: during its existence, the project has united more than 120 thousand schoolchildren, students and young professionals from Russia and neighboring countries. Since 2019, together with the presidential platform “Russia – Land of Opportunities”, the project provides young people with opportunities for personal, professional and career growth.

    Eight teams spent 21 days solving a case from Metropolis, the initiator of the direction and strategic partner of the championship. Each team brought together students from different directions. Under the guidance of mentors, future architects, builders, and designers developed a hotel and tourist complex in a natural area. The results of their work were assessed by an expert commission, which included representatives of Metropolis and SPbGASU.

    The architectural and design solutions, power supply systems, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, general requirements (technology, fire safety, energy efficiency, automation systems) were assessed. The speakers’ fluency in professional terminology, their ability to express and justify their opinions, the clarity and understandability of the slide structure, the logicality of their answers to questions, etc. were also taken into account. After the defenses, the experts provided targeted feedback to the teams assigned to them: they highlighted strengths and growth areas, provided comments and advice on improving the solution.

    Andrey Surovenkov and Olga Bochkareva

    Olga Bochkareva, a member of the expert committee, deputy dean of the Faculty of Economics and Management for academic work, associate professor of the Department of Construction Management, believes that the championship gave students the opportunity to “pump up” their knowledge in practice, to feel that the entire project depends on the joint work. In addition, the competition showed that students of technical specialties need to learn to speak: “Whatever profession students are studying – builder, designer, architect – it is important to be able to “sell” their project. In the modern world, there is no way around it!”

    Andrey Surovenkov, a member of the expert committee and head of the architectural design department, believes that the benefit of the championship is that students from different specialties, who most likely did not know each other before, unite into a team. For the curators, this is also a useful experience – they had to set the vector for creating a good project.

    Participants of the selection round. Ahead is the expert committee: chief architect of the project OOO Metropolis Alexey Bondarenko, Kirill Pivovarov, chief specialist of the design solutions department Alina Sitova, senior lecturer of the department of heat and gas supply and ventilation of SPbGASU Sergey Kashnikov, deputy director of the educational center of digital competencies of SPbGASU Denis Nizhegorodtsev, associate professor of the department of water use and ecology of SPbGASU Alexander Podporin

    Kirill Pivovarov, Chairman of the Expert Commission and Head of the Metropolis Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Department Group, is confident that for the company, the championship is, first and foremost, about attracting new employees. Moreover, employers have the opportunity to evaluate their abilities without an interview or probationary period. For students, this is an opportunity to create. When compiling the assignment, the company was guided by the students’ current capabilities and, at the same time, sought to bring the tasks closer to reality.

    “This is a great experience for the guys in terms of applying their skills in practice. The theory they study at the university is superimposed on a real project here, and this will help them in their future work. Many students are great: they have quite serious projects at the level of practicing designers. I would rate the overall level of work as very high,” said member of the expert commission, senior lecturer of the Department of Heat and Gas Supply and Ventilation Sergey Kashnikov.

    “I regularly participate in assessing student work at a variety of competitions – both within our university and at other venues. I would like to note that it is precisely such competitions that develop students’ extremely important skills of independent work, including as part of project teams. And it is especially pleasant to see that the level of students’ work is growing from year to year,” said Denis Nizhegorodtsev, a member of the expert commission and deputy director of the Educational Center for Digital Competencies.

    Third place went to the YeezyBIM team (mentor – associate professor of the Department of Heat and Gas Supply and Ventilation Viktor Yakovlev). It included Alina Kizchenko (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, leader/BIM coordinator), Arina Tereshchenko (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Architecture, architect), Olga Gavrichenkova (third-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, water use and sanitation engineer), Anna Yarullina (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, design engineer of internal electrical equipment and lighting), Yaroslav Perevalov (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, designer), Polina Orlova (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, heating and ventilation engineer).

    The second place was won by the team “Bim Bam Boom” (mentor – assistant of the Department of Design of Architectural Environment Dmitry Fleisher). The team consists of Emilia Sukhareva (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Architecture, leader/architect), Kirill Besedin (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, designer), Daniil Goncharenko (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, heating and ventilation engineer), Mikhail Danilchenko (third-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, designer), Kirill Ivanov (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, BIM coordinator), Sergey Sergeev (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, power supply engineer), Dmitry Sidorchuk (fourth-year bachelor’s degree student of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Urban Management, water supply and sanitation engineer).

    “The team decided to implement the current principle of nature-likeness as the most suitable for the given topic. It implies minimizing the impact on the environment and using natural factors for the functioning of the facility. The team worked under the leadership of captain Emilia Sukhareva, a talented student studying at the Department of DAS. Kirill Besedin is the most experienced and proactive member of the team. Daniil Goncharenko, having project experience, successfully implemented the general concept of ventilation and heating. Dmitry Sidorchuk, having extensive experience in participating in competitions of this kind, managed to provide the facility with water supply and sewerage networks. Sergey Sergeev, also an experienced team member, was engaged in the design of power supply networks and showed an excellent result. Mikhail Danilchenko gained his first experience of participating in a team on this project, but he coped with the tasks set by the KR very well. Kirill Ivanov provided BIM technologies throughout the project and in all its areas. Well done!” – summed up Dmitry Fleisher.

    The first place was awarded to the “C-Key” team (mentor – Deputy Dean for Career Guidance, Associate Professor of the Department of Technosphere Safety Alexander Glukhanov). It included Ekaterina Buryak (third-year specialist student of the Faculty of Construction, chief project engineer), Alexandra Leonova (third-year specialist student of the Faculty of Construction, BIM coordinator), Elizaveta Petrova (third-year undergraduate student of the Faculty of Architecture, architect), Sofia Tarkhanova (third-year specialist student of the Faculty of Construction, designer), Denis Lebedev (third-year specialist student of the Faculty of Construction, designer), Alexey Khimichev (third-year undergraduate student of the Faculty of Architecture, architect), Alexander Katsyuba (third-year undergraduate student of the Faculty of Engineering Ecology and Urban Economy, specialist in engineering networks).

    “It was difficult. But we approached the solution comprehensively, followed all the requirements of the technical specifications and achieved the result!” – Ekaterina Buryak is sure.

    “This is the first experience of such live interaction with the subject area. I worked with guys from other specialties, it was very interesting. I learned some programs all over again, I learned a lot of new things in these three weeks. The experience is colossal!” – shared Alexander Katsyuba.

    “We developed the architectural solutions section together with Elizaveta Petrova. And we want to say that this project was very interesting for us from the point of view of interaction between specialists in related fields. It was interesting to track how architectural issues are connected with issues of utility networks, design solutions, how all issues are resolved in the design system,” said Alexey Khimchev.

    The mentor of the winners, Alexander Glukhanov, gave his comment: “The team developed a concept for the development of a tourist cluster on the Black Sea coast. The students created a detailed description of the construction project, took into account the features of the area, the needs of tourists, and the possibilities of using the infrastructure. They created a harmonious arrangement of the park area located in the heart of the territory, the active recreation area and the entrance area, integrated recreation areas and other functional components of the complex. Special attention was paid to the optimal combination of space-planning solutions: they took into account functional, sanitary and hygienic and fire safety requirements.”

    The champions and prize winners of the Architecture, Design, Construction and Housing and Utilities category will be invited to an internship at Metropolis with the prospect of further employment. The winning team will take part in the final competition, which will be held in Moscow at the end of May. We wish them good luck!

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Global: You’ve heard of the Big Bang. Now astronomers have discovered the Big Wheel – here’s why it’s significant

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Themiya Nanayakkara, Lead Astronomer at the James Webb Australian Data Centre, Swinburne University of Technology

    The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbours. Weichen Wang et al. (2025)

    Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It’s a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We’ve dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published today in Nature Astronomy.

    This giant disk galaxy existed within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, meaning it formed when the universe was just 15% of its current age. It challenges what we know about how galaxies form.

    What is a disk galaxy?

    Picture a galaxy like our own Milky Way: a flat, rotating structure made up of stars, gas and dust, often surrounded by an extensive halo of unseen dark matter.

    Disk galaxies typically have clear spiral arms extending outward from a dense central region. Our Milky Way itself is a disk galaxy, characterised by beautiful spiral arms that wrap around its centre.

    An artist impression of the Milky Way showcasing the dusty spiral structures similar to The Big Wheel.

    Studying disk galaxies, like the Milky Way and the newly discovered Big Wheel, helps us uncover how galaxies form, grow and evolve across billions of years.

    These studies are especially significant, as understanding galaxies similar to our own can provide deeper insights into the cosmic history of our galactic home.

    A giant surprise

    We previously thought galaxy disks form gradually over a long period: either through gas smoothly flowing into galaxies from surrounding space, or by merging with smaller galaxies.

    Usually, rapid mergers between galaxies would disrupt the delicate spiral structures, turning them into more chaotic shapes. However, the Big Wheel managed to quickly grow to a surprisingly large size without losing its distinctive spiral form. This challenges long-held ideas about the growth of giant galaxies.

    Our detailed JWST observations show that the Big Wheel is comparable in size and rotational speed to the largest “super-spiral” galaxies in today’s universe. It is three times as big in size as comparable galaxies at that epoch and is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early cosmos.

    In fact, its rotation speed places it among galaxies at the high end of what’s called the Tully-Fisher relation, a well-known link between a galaxy’s stellar mass and how fast it spins.

    Remarkably, even though it’s unusually large, the Big Wheel is actively growing at a rate similar to other galaxies at the same cosmic age.

    The Big Wheel galaxy is seen at the centre. In striking contrast, the bright blue galaxy (upper right) is only about 1.5 billion light years away, making the Big Wheel roughly 50 times farther away. Although both appear a similar size, the enormous distance of the Big Wheel reveals its truly colossal physical scale.
    JWST

    Unusually crowded part of space

    What makes this even more fascinating is the environment in which the Big Wheel formed.

    It’s located in an unusually crowded region of space, where galaxies are packed closely together, ten times denser than typical areas of the universe. This dense environment likely provided ideal conditions for the galaxy to grow quickly. It probably experienced mergers that were gentle enough to let the galaxy maintain its spiral disk shape.

    Additionally, the gas flowing into the galaxy must have aligned well with its rotation, allowing the disk to grow quickly without being disrupted. So, a perfect combination.

    An illustration of how a massive spiral galaxy forms and evolves over billions of years. This evolutionary path is similar to real-world galaxies like Andromeda, our closest spiral galaxy neighbour, which also developed distinct spiral arms similar to the Big Wheel.

    A fortunate finding

    Discovering a galaxy like the Big Wheel was incredibly unlikely. We had less than a 2% chance to find this in our survey, according to current galaxy formation models.

    So, our finding was fortunate, probably because we observed it within an exceptionally dense region, quite different from typical cosmic environments.

    Besides its mysterious formation, the ultimate fate of the Big Wheel is another intriguing question. Given the dense environment, future mergers might significantly alter its structure, potentially transforming it into a galaxy comparable in mass to the largest ones observed in nearby clusters, such as Virgo.

    The Big Wheel’s discovery has revealed yet another mystery of the early universe, showing that our current models of galaxy evolution still need refinement.

    With more observations and discoveries of massive, early galaxies like the Big Wheel, astronomers will be able to unlock more secrets about how the universe built the structures we see today.




    Read more:
    From dead galaxies to mysterious red dots, here’s what the James Webb telescope has found in just 3 years


    Themiya Nanayakkara receives funding from Australian Research Council.

    – ref. You’ve heard of the Big Bang. Now astronomers have discovered the Big Wheel – here’s why it’s significant – https://theconversation.com/youve-heard-of-the-big-bang-now-astronomers-have-discovered-the-big-wheel-heres-why-its-significant-252170

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Canada: Ensuring long-term predictable public transit funding for Cape Breton Regional Municipality with over $8 million through the Canada Public Transit Fund

    Source: Government of Canada News (2)

    Sydney, Nova Scotia, March 17, 2025 — By working closely with its partners across Canada, the federal government is ensuring that more Canadians will be able to live near public transit, connecting them to jobs, services, and their communities.

    Today, Jaime Battiste, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs and Minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, and Member of Parliament for Sydney–Victoria; Mike Kelloway, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, and Member of Parliament for Cape Breton–Canso; and Mayor Cecil Clarke announced a federal investment of more than $8 million in transit funding for Cape Breton Regional Municipality, providing predictable and long-term funding.

    Through the new Canada Public Transit Fund’s Baseline Funding stream, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality will receive an annual funding allocation amounting to over $8 million over 10 years. Funding will upgrade, replace, or modernize the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s public transit infrastructure, and maintain it in a state of good repair.

    This investment, beginning in 2026 until 2036, will help increase the housing supply and affordability as part of complete, transit-oriented communities, while helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change.  

    MIL OSI Canada News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Russia: HSE student wins gold medal at All-Russian karate competition

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –

    The All-Russian Karate Competition was held in Odintsovo, Moscow Region, bringing together more than 2,000 participants from 42 regions of the country. A second-year student of the OP “Business management” Higher School of Business HSE Dmitry Konyaev became the winner in the category 18-20 years old, weight up to 65 kg. He managed to get ahead of several dozen athletes representing leading clubs from different regions.

    The tournament in Odintsovo is considered one of the most prestigious in karate and attracts the strongest athletes from all over Russia. For many participants, this is an important moment in their sports career, which opens the door to new opportunities and achievements.

    “The tournament was quite difficult, especially in comparison with last year,” comments Dmitry Konyaev. “There were no easy opponents at all, I had to get to work from the first fight. The goal was achieved – I met the standard for the title of candidate for master of sports, now we are collecting documents and will wait for the order to assign it.”

    The HSE student has been practicing karate since he was six years old: his parents took him to the section closest to his home, and soon he began winning competitions.

    “I am very grateful to fate for such a long and interesting path with such plot twists that you can make a movie. I got 90% of the people in my circle thanks to this sport,” the winner shared.

    Dmitry noted that he strives to win gold in any competition he participates in. The most successful seasons for the athlete so far were 2018 and 2019, when he managed to win three World Cups – in Croatia, Italy and Cyprus. “Before the pandemic, we traveled very often: Germany, Mexico, Estonia, Latvia. On the domestic stage, I once came in fifth at the Russian Championship and won more than a dozen All-Russian competitions, I lost count a couple of years ago. When I lived in St. Petersburg, I was a member of the city team and was a leader in all age and weight categories in which I participated,” said Dmitry Konyaev.

    When choosing a university to enroll in, he immediately decided to move: “The goal was to try myself in another city. I understood that if I moved to the capital, it would be hard without work, and so I looked for a program at a top university, studying in which would allow me to work at the same time. Actually, the choice fell on the educational program “Business Management” at the National Research University Higher School of Economics,” the student explained. He says that preparing for admission was typical for a person who wants to enroll in a prestigious university: “I am generally satisfied with my studies, I have found wonderful people, which I am very happy about. It is known that the best rest is a change of activity, so work, study and sports do not interfere with each other in my life. The main thing is to know why you are doing all this – and to enjoy it.”

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Global: The Mona Lisa is a vampire

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Frankie Dytor, Research Fellow, literature, art history and gender studies, University of Exeter

    Louvre Museum/Canva, CC BY-SA

    When Bernard Berenson learned that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre Gallery in Paris, the art critic heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Finally, he reflected, he could remove himself once and all from the dangerous influence of the work. “She had simply become an incubus,” he recalled years later, “and I was glad to be rid of her.”

    At long last, Berenson had freed himself from the vampiric face of the Mona Lisa.

    Today Leonardo’s painting, happily recovered in 1913 for generations of visitors after its theft in 1911, still looms large as perhaps the definitive symbol of Italian Renaissance art.

    French president Emmanuel Macron recently announced plans for a project titled Nouvelle Renaissance, which will see the artwork moved to its own exhibition room, relieving pressure on the main gallery space. One of the most visited artworks in the world, Berenson’s pronouncement of the enigmatically smiling figure as a male demon in female human form, sits oddly with her endless appearance on t-shirts and tea-towels.

    But looking again at how the myth of the Mona Lisa emerged, I believe that her fame is due not just to the painting’s display of artistic ingenuity – but to the troubling vampirism and gender ambiguity that 19th-century critics saw in Leonardo’s work.


    This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.


    Unlike many of his artistic contemporaries, Leonardo’s reputation remained relatively stable following his death in 1519. But praise for his work was, for centuries, caveated with one apparently intractable problem: he seemed a better draughtsman, inventor and scientist than artist proper.

    John Ruskin, England’s preeminent mid-Victorian critic, wrote off the Mona Lisa as a total mess. He lamented that the painting’s background was simply “grotesque” being all “blue and unfinished”.

    But as the century progressed, the tide began to turn, particularly in France. Writers newly praised the strange feelings that Leonardo’s paintings provoked, interrogating the nervous smiles and ironic stares of their subjects. “You are fascinated and troubled,” the historian Jules Michelet imagined in his monumental book Histoire de France (1855), describing himself in the Louvre moving like hypnotised prey towards the sinister artworks.

    The Mona Lisa was being slowly injected with a dose of eerie, haunted beauty. But it wasn’t until 1873, when the Oxford aesthete Walter Pater published his explosive book Studies in the History of the Renaissance that the character of the Mona Lisa took a decisively gothic turn. In it, Pater described her as one of the undead:

    She is older than the rocks on which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave

    “Lady Lisa”, as Pater memorably nicknamed her, turned from an Italian noblewoman into a dangerously deathly femme-fatale. Pater claimed that she carried all of time and history within her body, bearing the world’s experience from “the animalism of Greece” to “the sins of the Borgia”.

    The passage caused shockwaves, and a generation of readers were hooked. The poet Richard Le Gallienne recalled in his memoir how his friends were “all going round quoting the famous description”, as wannabe aesthetes endlessly recited, copied and reworked Pater’s lines.

    Pater scholar Michael Davis has explained how the book “queered the Renaissance”: he called on his readers to worship at the altar of a strange beauty, demanding that they “burn” with a “hard, gemlike flame” as they did so. Pater’s new reading of Mona Lisa was at the heart of an erotic revolution. The Mona Lisa had become a symbol of a new way of looking and feeling, charged with the aching pain of melancholic beauty.

    By the early 20th century, an industry of criticism had developed that took increasingly outrageous stances against the Mona Lisa.

    Stories circulated about virtuous mothers who refused to allow reproductions of the work to enter their home. Sigmund Freud reworked Pater’s interpretation of the Mona Lisa’s “unfathomable smile” to evidence his theory of Leonardo’s homosexuality, claiming that the Mona Lisa’s smile was in fact a painting of his dead mother’s smile. Pater’s passage, as the Irish writer W. B. Yeats summarised, had taken on a “revolutionary importance” and with it the Mona Lisa changed from a minor work to an icon of a decadent generation.


    Beyond the canon

    As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frankie Dytor’s suggestion:

    The lesbian poet couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published the poem La Gioconda (the Italian name for the Mona Lisa) under the pseudonym “Michael Field” in 1892:

    Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;

    A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek;

    Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies

    Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest

    Of cruelty that waits and does not seek

    For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast

    Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:

    Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies

    Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;

    Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest

    For those vicissitudes by which men die.

    The poets frequently turned to historical subjects and artworks to explore queer and same-sex desire. Here, they show themselves to be the disciples of Pater’s cult of beauty, openly incorporating his stress on the “cruelty” that surrounds the “historic” features of the figure.

    But they also go beyond Pater, revelling in the desire that saturates the work, such as the twilight touching the Mona Lisa’s breast “amorously”.

    Frankie Dytor receives funding from The British Academy.

    – ref. The Mona Lisa is a vampire – https://theconversation.com/the-mona-lisa-is-a-vampire-249987

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Global: Software is increasingly being built by AI – so it’s vital to know if it can be trusted

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Iván Alfonso, Assistant researcher, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)

    panuwat phimpha / Shutterstock

    Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The computerised systems in your car alone incorporate tens of millions of lines of code. The increasing digital transformation of our society means that demand for more and better software is likely to continue into the future.

    The dilemma is that there are not enough human programmers to build all this
    software. This means that more and more of the software you use every day is built with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).

    Software developers are already very familiar with tools such as GitHub Copilot, a kind of ChatGPT for programmers. It works something like a smart autocomplete tool to increase the productivity of human programmers.

    But we are now witnessing a more radical revolution, where AI “agents” are poised to carry out many types of development tasks on behalf of human programmers. Agents are programs that use AI to perform tasks and achieve specific objectives for a human user. AI agents can learn and make decisions with some level of autonomy, though they are still under human supervision – for now.

    We predict that in a near future, many software apps will be entirely built by AI agents. “Agentic” systems are communities of AI agents cooperating together, each one specialised in solving a specific type of task. With an agentic system, you can
    generate a software application from a plain English description of what you would like the application to do.

    This has potential positive impacts. Agentic systems could empower users without software programming skills to build or adapt software to their needs. There are also potential negatives consequences. Agents are far from perfect and they can easily generate code that is vulnerable to attacks, is not efficient or is biased against certain communities.

    For example, an agent building recruitment software might favour male over female candidates because of biases in the data used to train, or improve, the software. Therefore, we need to put mechanisms in place to minimise such risks, as required by AI regulations such as the EU’s AI Act.

    Researchers are addressing this challenge first by intensively testing the LLMs (Large Language Models) that are at the core of any agent. An LLM is an AI system trained on massive amounts of data. Agents rely on their internal LLM to predict and generate the best response to a user request.

    By evaluating all major LLMs against a number of concerns such as accuracy, security vulnerabilities and biases, software developers can choose the best LLM for an AI agent. This would depend on the specific tasks that the agent would be involved in.

    Users could customise new software with the help of blueprints, applying similar principles to the blueprints used in architecture and construction.
    Lee Charlie / Shutterstock

    This helps ensure a certain amount of ethical behaviour in the agents. But how can we be sure they understand and follow our instructions? Our solution is to start from the blueprints (the designs) of the software to be built.

    Broadly speaking, it’s possible to understand blueprints of a house even if you’re not an architect. Similarly, if we make a blueprint for software as easy to understand as possible, users without advanced software development skills should be able to grasp the concepts and how to make changes to it.

    From the user’s initial description, the AI agent or agents would propose a detailed blueprint of a potential solution and explain it to the user in plain English. The user could then validate it or request improvements. Only after the final validation would the software application be automatically generated from the blueprint.

    This way of building software is known as low-code or no-code development, as most of the code (all of it for some applications) is generated by the computer from the blueprints, instead of being hand written by a human from scratch. Our open source BESSER platform helps you build applications in this way.

    As the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke once observed: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And soon enough, this magic will be part of our daily lives. We just need to be careful that the magic doesn’t turn into sorcery with the potential to disrupt, rather than improve.

    We, and many other researchers, are working to put guardrails (mechanisms for preventing potential harms) on the behaviour of AI agents to keep them in check. This would help transform every citizen into a capable developer with the power to autonomously build the ideal software solutions for their companies or other aspects of their lives.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Software is increasingly being built by AI – so it’s vital to know if it can be trusted – https://theconversation.com/software-is-increasingly-being-built-by-ai-so-its-vital-to-know-if-it-can-be-trusted-251728

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Global: Parents abused by their children often suffer in silence – specialist therapy is helping them find a voice

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma Morgan, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Swansea University

    shutterstock Frame Studio/Shutterstock

    Home is not always a place of safety for everyone. This is an unspoken reality for some parents who endure abuse at the hands of their children. From physical violence to emotional manipulation, this largely hidden issue cuts across families of all backgrounds.

    For too long, stigma and silence have allowed child-to-parent abuse to fester in the shadows, unacknowledged in policy discussions and under-researched in academic circles. But a recent study of ours analysed a therapeutic programme designed to address child-to-parent abuse, and its transformative potential.

    Child-to-parent abuse affects families across socio-economic and cultural boundaries. But it’s particularly prevalent in homes where domestic abuse and intimate partner violence is present.

    Legally, child-to-parent abuse is ambiguously positioned in England and Wales. It is often subsumed under domestic abuse legislation, including the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. But the law primarily focuses on people aged 16 and older, and problematically labels children as perpetrators, despite youth justice policy and practice moving to child-first approaches.

    This adds to the societal stigmas around child-to-parent abuse, and it is often misattributed to poor parenting. The problem is then compounded, discouraging parents from seeking help and perpetuating a cycle of silence and isolation.

    The Parallel Lives Programme is a therapeutic intervention in Wales, which takes a non-punitive, relationship-focused approach to support families affected by child-to-parent abuse. Delivered over seven weeks, the programme uses therapeutic and relationship-based approaches to support children and their parents to prevent child-to-parent abuse.

    What we found

    We undertook an evaluation of the programme to understand its potential strengths for addressing the abuse and areas for development. We used interviews, online surveys, observations and file reviews. A total of 42 people participated, including six members of staff, 19 parents and 17 children.

    One of the most significant findings from our research is the importance of therapeutic spaces and the destigmatisation of the issue. The Parallel Lives Programme created safe spaces for families to discuss complex and often stigmatised issues. Therapists provided non-judgmental environments where parents and children felt heard and supported. By framing young people as “children first” and creating spaces free of blame, the programme helped families address their issues.

    One therapist described the kind of things that often prevent parents from speaking out:

    There’s a lot of guilt and shame attached to [child-to-parent abuse], and [the parents] don’t feel like they can talk about it. So “I must be the only parent whose kid kicks off and breaks my window.” I think it is a lot for them to say, okay, this is a thing, and these are the steps that we can take, and also give them strategy.

    Parents echoed this sentiment, highlighting how the programme provided a rare opportunity to speak openly in a supportive environment. One father of a 12-year-old boy described his experience:

    Talking about raw emotions with people who do not judge you, they do not gasp, they don’t laugh or tut, they feel what you feel, and they want to help; it’s a safe environment. I struggle to talk about my feelings, and this has helped me open up.

    Another important finding was the programme’s emphasis on parent-child relationship building. Both parents and children reported improved communication and reduced conflict as a result of the intervention. One 14-year-old girl reflected: “[Because of the programme] my mum is listening to me more. She used to always just talk at me and have a go at me without listening to my side of things. It’s so much better now.”

    The strength-based approach adopted by the programme was also critical. Rather than focusing on deficits, therapists emphasised the inherent capabilities of families. One 16-year-old boy described how this approach helped him “learn to deal with anger and about my strengths”.

    Explaining the ethos behind this method, one therapist said: “We focus on strengths. It’s in our [organisational] DNA – everything that we do is focused on children’s strengths.”

    Tailored support also emerged as a central factor. No two families are the same, so interventions were flexible and adaptive, considering the unique circumstances and needs of each family member.

    Child-to-parent abuse affects families across socio-economic and cultural boundaries.
    polya_olya/Shutterstock

    Recommendations

    Our evaluation has highlighted critical gaps and opportunities in addressing child-to-parent abuse. But more extensive research is needed to understand how much of it goes on. Future research should also focus on measuring the long-term effectiveness of interventions like the Parallel Lives Programme.

    In terms of policy, child-to-parent abuse requires its own legal and policy frameworks, distinct from domestic abuse. Legislative reforms must reflect the complexity of this kind of abuse and avoid stigmatising children or neglecting parents’ needs.

    Initiatives like the Parallel Lives Programme should also be scaled, ensuring accessibility for all families. Increased funding and therapist training are essential to sustaining and replicating such initiatives.

    Finally, destigmatisation efforts are vital. Public awareness campaigns may be crucial in breaking the silence surrounding child-to-parent abuse. Removing the sense of shame and disgrace from this issue may encourage more families to seek help and engage with support services.

    Gemma Morgan received funding from the Media Academy Cymru to undertake an external evaluation of the Parallel Lives Programme.

    Joseph Janes received funding from the Media Academy Cymru to undertake an external evaluation of the Parallel Lives Programme.

    – ref. Parents abused by their children often suffer in silence – specialist therapy is helping them find a voice – https://theconversation.com/parents-abused-by-their-children-often-suffer-in-silence-specialist-therapy-is-helping-them-find-a-voice-244859

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

    March 18, 2025
  • MIL-OSI Global: Museums have tons of data, and AI could make it more accessible − but standardizing and organizing it across fields won’t be easy

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Bradley Wade Bishop, Professor of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee

    Museum collections are invaluable to many researchers. Miguel Habano/E+ via Getty Images

    Ice cores in freezers, dinosaurs on display, fish in jars, birds in boxes, human remains and ancient artifacts from long gone civilizations that few people ever see – museum collections are filled with all this and more.

    These collections are treasure troves that recount the planet’s natural and human history, and they help scientists in a variety of different fields such as geology, paleontology, anthropology and more. What you see on a trip to a museum is only a sliver of the wonders held in their collection.

    Museums generally want to make the contents of their collections available for teachers and researchers, either physically or digitally. However, each collection’s staff has its own way of organizing data, so navigating these collections can prove challenging.

    Creating, organizing and distributing the digital copies of museum samples or the information about physical items in a collection requires incredible amounts of data. And this data can feed into machine learning models or other artificial intelligence to answer big questions.

    Currently, even within a single research domain, finding the right data requires navigating different repositories. AI can help organize large amounts of data from different collections and pull out information to answer specific questions.

    But using AI isn’t a perfect solution. A set of shared practices and systems for data management between museums could improve the data curation and sharing necessary for AI to do its job. These practices could help both humans and machines make new discoveries from these valuable collections.

    As an information scientist who studies scientists’ approaches to and opinions on research data management, I’ve seen how the world’s physical collection infrastructure is a patchwork quilt of objects and their associated metadata.

    AI tools can do amazing things, such as make 3D models of digitized versions of the items in museum collections, but only if there’s enough well-organized data about that item available. To see how AI can help museum collections, my team of researchers started by conducting focus groups with the people who managed museum collections. We asked what they are doing to get their collections used by both humans and AI.

    Museums can have vast collections – everything from samples from archeological sites to preserved insects to dinosaur bones. And huge collections means lots of data to collect and organize.
    Justin Pumfrey/The Image Bank via Getty Images

    Collection managers

    When an item comes into a museum collection, the collection managers are the people who describe that item’s features and generate data about it. That data, called metadata, allows others to use it and might include things like the collector’s name, geographic location, the time it was collected, and in the case of geological samples, the epoch it’s from. For samples from an animal or plant, it might include its taxonomy, which is the set of Latin names that classify it.

    All together, that information adds up to a mind-boggling amount of data.

    But combining data across domains with different standards is really tricky. Fortunately, collection managers have been working to standardize their processes across disciplines and for many types of samples. Grants have helped science communities build tools for standardization.

    In biological collections, the tool Specify allows managers to quickly classify specimens with drop-down menus prepopulated with standards for taxonomy and other parameters to consistently describe the incoming specimens.

    A common metadata standard in biology is Darwin Core. Similar well-established metadata and tools exist across all the sciences to make the workflow of taking real items and putting them into a machine as easy as possible.

    Special tools like these and metadata help collection managers make data from their objects reusable for research and educational purposes.

    Many of the items in museum collections don’t have a lot of information describing their origins. AI tools can help fill in gaps.

    All the small things

    My team and I conducted 10 focus groups, with a total of 32 participants from several physical sample communities. These included collection managers across disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, botany, geology, ichthyology, entomology, herpetology and paleontology.

    Each participant answered questions about how they accessed, organized, stored and used data from their collections in an effort to make their materials ready for AI to use. While human subjects need to provide consent to be studied, most species do not. So, an AI can collect and analyze the data from nonhuman physical collections without privacy or consent concerns.

    We found that collection managers from different fields and institutions have lots of different practices when it comes to getting their physical collections ready for AI. Our results suggest that standardizing the types of metadata managers record and the ways they store it across collections could make the items in these samples more accessible and usable.

    Additional research projects like our study can help collection managers build up the infrastructure they’ll need to make their data machine-ready. Human expertise can help inform AI tools that make new discoveries based on the old treasures in museum collections.

    Bradley Wade Bishop receives funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation.

    – ref. Museums have tons of data, and AI could make it more accessible − but standardizing and organizing it across fields won’t be easy – https://theconversation.com/museums-have-tons-of-data-and-ai-could-make-it-more-accessible-but-standardizing-and-organizing-it-across-fields-wont-be-easy-250487

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

    March 18, 2025
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