The Women’s Health Initiative was established in response to a growing realization that very little medical research existed to inform health care that was specifically relevant to women. In the U.S. in the 1970s, for example, almost 40% of postmenopausal women were taking estrogen, but no large clinical trials had studied the risks and benefits. In 1985 an NIH task force outlined the need for long-term research on women’s health.
Between 1993 and 1998, the project enrolled 161,808 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 79 to participate in four randomized clinical trials. Two of them investigated how menopausal hormone therapy affects the risk of heart disease, breast cancer, hip fractures and cognition. Another examined the effects of a low-fat, high-fiber diet on breast and colorectal cancers as well as heart disease. The fourth looked at whether taking calcium plus vitamin D supplements helps prevent hip fractures and colorectal cancer.
Women could participate in just one or in multiple trials. More than 90,000 also took part in a long-term observational study that used medical records and surveys to probe the link between risk factors and disease outcomes over time.
Clarifying the effects of hormone therapy
Some of the most important findings from the Women’s Health Initiative addressed the effects of menopausal hormone therapy.
The hormone therapy trial testing a combination of estrogen and progesterone was set to run until 2005. However, it was terminated early, in 2002, when results showed an increased risk in heart disease, stroke, blood clotting disorders and breast cancer, as well as cognitive decline and dementia. The trial of estrogen alone also raised safety concerns, though both types of therapy reduced the risk of bone fractures.
Although the Women’s Health Initiative’s four original clinical trials ended by 2005, researchers have continued to follow participants, collect new data and launch spinoff studies that shape health recommendations for women over 65.
One of the Women’s Health Initiative’s biggest yields is its vast repository of health data collected annually from tens of thousands of women over more than 30 years. The data consists of survey responses on topics such as diet, physical activity and family history; information on major health outcomes such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cause of death, verified using medical records; and a trove of biological samples, including 5 million blood vials and genetic information from 50,000 participants.
The Women’s Health Initiative set out to prevent heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis in menopausal women.
Any researcher can access this repository to explore associations between blood biomarkers, disease outcomes, genes, lifestyle factors and other health features. More than 300 such studies are investigating health outcomes related to stroke, cancer, diabetes, eye diseases, mental health, physical frailty and more. Thirty are currently running.
What does the future hold?
In addition to data amassed by the Women’s Health Initiative until now, about 42,000 participants from all 50 states, now ages 78 to 108, are still actively contributing to the study. This cohort is a rare treasure: Very few studies have collected such detailed, long-term information on a broad group of women of this age. Meanwhile, the demographic of older women is growing quickly.
Continuing to shed light on aging, disease risk and prevention in this population is vital. The questions guiding the project’s ongoing and planned research directly address the chronic diseases that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced as national priorities.
So I hope that the Women’s Health Initiative can continue to generate discoveries that support women’s health well into the future.
Jean Wactawski-Wende receives funding from the NIH.
Mark Lunsford appears at a July 2005 rally in support of the Children’s Safety Act on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Before his sentencing in March 2025, a convicted child rapist asked for a judgment that would have set him free in 2027. The Kansas resident received 25 years with no chance of parole.
The reason? Jessica’s Law, which Kansas lawmakers passed in 2006.
Although the law differs in some details from state to state, it generally directs judges to sentence people convicted of sex crimes involving children to a minimum of 25 years. Jessica’s Law also monitors offenders’ movements after prison and strives to keep them away from places where children congregate, such as schools and parks.
Jessica’s Law remains mostly intact throughout the country. But it has come under scrutiny and has undergone changes. As a journalism professor who directed a documentary about Lunsford’s efforts to convince politicians to pass the law that bears his daughter’s name, I’ve kept up with its trials and tribulations.
Twenty years after Florida introduced the law, the jury is still out on whether America’s children are safer as a result.
‘Jessie’s Dad’
In making “Jessie’s Dad,” I filmed Lunsford visiting state capitals and Capitol Hill and interviewed many of his allies and detractors. I also reviewed interrogation footage and newsreels, attended the trial of John Couey – Jessica’s killer – and pored over proposed and passed bills, court transcripts and police records.
The resulting 2011 documentary highlights the law’s major perceived pros and cons.
The most glaring of the legal system’s shortcomings before Jessica’s Law, according to Lunsford and other activist groups, was lax treatment by the police and courts. That, they said, allowed many sex offenders who target children to roam free.
As Lunsford hopscotched from state to state to push for the law’s passage, he often noted that prior to raping and killing Jessie, Couey was convicted twice of molesting children but served only fractions of his sentences.
“One time they gave him (Couey) a 10-year sentence; he did two years,” Lunsford told me. “One time, he (Couey) broke into a house and assaulted a child, and he would’ve gotten more time had he stolen their silverware.”
Besides mandatory minimum sentencing, most states that have passed Jessica’s Law require sex-offender parolees to wear a GPS monitor − something Couey never did.
Lunsford repeatedly pointed out that an electronic ankle bracelet, which tells the police the location of the person wearing it, could have led the police to Couey’s room in his sister’s trailer across the street from the Lunsford’s mobile home. That’s where Couey kept Jessie for three days before burying her alive in a backyard grave.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appears at an October 2006 news conference urging Californians to support Proposition 83, also known as ‘Jessica’s Law.’ The governor was joined by Mark Lunsford, left, father of Jessica Lunsford. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
‘Romeo and Juliet’ provisions
In 2007, soon after Ohio passed its version of the law, Lunsford’s son Josh faced felony charges for fondling his 14-year-old girlfriend. The girl’s mother, who disapproved of their relationship, turned him in as soon as he turned 18 and became an adult in the eyes of the legal system. Josh ended up being charged with a misdemeanor, to which he pleaded guilty. He served 10 days in jail and 12 months under supervised release.
Reeling from this incident, the elder Lunsford advocated amending Jessica’s Law with so-called Romeo and Juliet provisions. These stipulations typically exempt most young adults from harsh sentencing when the age difference between them and their romantic teen partners adds up to fewer than four or five years.
Legal challenges, too, have revamped parts of Jessica’s Law in some states. In 2015, for instance, California’s Supreme Court ruled the law violated the U.S. Constitution by infringing offenders’ liberty and privacy.
The law did so, the court determined, by universally ordering registered sex offenders to stay at least 2,000 feet away from schools and other places where children congregate. That meant they could not live within 2,000 feet of a school or places where children gathered.
Prior to the ruling, the Jessica’s Law residency restriction left many of California’s registered sex offenders with few viable housing options. It thus forced scores of them onto the streets and contributed to the Golden State’s homelessness crisis.
Although the California Supreme Court ruling technically applied only to San Diego County, it has spurred other parts of the state to restrict residency on a case-by-case basis.
Electronic tracking
Another divisive Jessica’s Law stipulation, however, may be too complex to simply modify.
When included in the original Florida law, electronic tracking appeared to hold great promise.
While others harmed children after cutting off their ankle bracelets, some, like Arkansas resident Leontarius Reed, committed sex crimes while wearing GPS devices. Reed was wearing the device after a previous nonsexual offense.
Despite the widespread adoption of Jessica’s Law, comprehensive research is still needed to measure its impact. Such a project would examine whether America’s children are truly safer now than they were on May 1, 2005.
Boaz Dvir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrew E. Busch, Professor and Associate Director, Institute of American Civics, University of Tennessee
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, center, introduces Russian and Japanese delegates during negotiations at the Portsmouth Peace Conference in Kittery, Maine, in August 1905. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Throughout his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump made diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine-Russia war a major priority, suggesting that he could bring peace within “24 hours.” Even before Trump resumed office in January 2025, as president-elect he named envoys and held preliminary discussions with a variety of leaders.
How does Trump’s mediation effort stack up historically? I’m a scholar of the presidency, and while we don’t yet know the outcome of the Trump-led negotiations, we do know one thing: He’s not conducting them in the ways presidents – including Trump himself – have conducted them in the past.
President Donald Trump erupted at Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting on Feb. 28, 2025, angrily sending the Ukrainian leader out of the White House because he was ‘not ready’ for peace with Russia. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Some worked, others didn’t
There are several examples of presidents who attempted to play a mediating role in foreign conflicts.
Bill Clinton: Clinton made two ambitious attempts to broker peace between old adversaries. One ended in success, the other in failure.
Clinton’s envoy, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, mediated an accord between the British government, the Republic of Ireland and the warring factions in Northern Ireland that was signed on Good Friday 1998.
Although all of these examples involved presidential leadership and involvement, they did not follow a single model.
How they did it
Former President Bill Clinton bows as he meets former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who spearheaded peace negotiations on behalf of Clinton that led to the end of 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. Liam McBurney/PA Images via Getty Images
Roosevelt never attended the peace negotiations over the Russo-Japanese War in Portsmouth, but he actively offered proposals through intermediaries before and during the conference. The final stages of negotiation were held on his yacht, the Mayflower.
Carter’s breakthrough came when he engaged in intense personal diplomacy at Camp David, where he, Sadat and Begin were sequestered for 13 days. To complete the deal, Carter had to shuffle back and forth between the principals and at one point had to make a frantic appeal to Sadat not to leave.
Clinton’s unsuccessful efforts to broker an agreement between Arafat and a succession of Israeli prime ministers extended over the duration of his two-term presidency and frequently involved personal meetings and exchanges.
On the other hand, Clinton’s involvement in the Northern Ireland resolution did not primarily come in the form of personal diplomacy at the end of the process. Rather, he set the conditions for a settlement earlier when he approved a visa for Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams to enter the U.S., against the wishes of Britain and Clinton’s own advisers.
Although each mediation effort was unique, there were some commonalities.
First, where sensitive issues of land possession were involved, many of the negotiations benefited from privacy in the process.
Second, successful mediations came most often when the U.S. was neutral, such as in the Portsmouth negotiations, or friendly toward both parties to some degree, such as with the Camp David, Good Friday and Abraham negotiations. Dayton was the exception in that the U.S. had become quite hostile toward the Serbs.
Trump appears to be violating the first rule above – no public negotiations over land – in order to chase compliance with the second, which is no mediation without neutrality. By, among other things, publicly offering proposals that the Ukrainians see as one-sided against them, Trump has largely erased the image of the U.S. as pro-Ukraine.
Whatever success Trump ultimately achieves, it is little surprise that the effort, which has been pursued over a period of six months so far, has been more difficult than he anticipated.
Andrew E. Busch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The men’s cricket World Cup final match between Australia and India on Nov. 19, 2023, had a peak of 59 million concurrent streaming viewers.AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool
Live and on-demand video constituted an estimated 66% of global internet traffic by volume in 2022, and the top 10 days for internet traffic in 2024 coincided with live streaming events such as the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match and coverage of the NFL. Streaming enables seamless, on-demand access to video content, from online gaming to short videos like TikToks, and longer content such as movies, podcasts and NFL games.
The defining aspect of streaming is its on-demand nature. Consider the global reach of a Joe Rogan podcast episode or the live coverage of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launch – both examples demonstrate how streaming connects millions of viewers to real-time and on-demand content worldwide.
I’m a computer scientist whose research includes cloud computing, which is the distribution of computing resources such as video servers across the internet.
Netflix claimed that it supported 65 million concurrent streams for the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match on Nov. 15, 2024, though many users reported technical issues.
‘Chunks’ of video
When it comes to video content – whether it’s a live stream or a prerecorded video – there are two major challenges to address. First, video data is massive in size, making it time-consuming to transmit from the source to devices such as TVs, computers, tablets and smartphones.
Second, streaming must be adaptive to accommodate differences in users’ devices and internet capabilities. For instance, viewers with lower-resolution screens or slower internet speeds should still be able to watch a given video, albeit in lower quality, while those with higher-resolution displays and faster connections enjoy the best possible quality.
To tackle these challenges, video providers implement a series of optimizations. The first step involves fragmenting videos into smaller pieces, commonly referred to as “chunks.” These chunks then undergo a process called “encoding and compression,” which optimizes the video for different resolutions and bitrates to suit various devices and network conditions.
When a user requests an on-demand video, the system dynamically selects the appropriate stream of chunks based on the capabilities of the user’s device, such as screen resolution and current internet speed. The video player on the user’s device assembles and plays these chunks in sequence to create a seamless viewing experience.
For users with slower internet connections, the system delivers lower-quality chunks to ensure smooth playback. This is why you might notice a drop in video quality when your connection speed is reduced. Similarly, if the video pauses during playback, it’s usually because your player is waiting to buffer additional chunks from the provider.
Video streams come to users at different quality levels based on the user’s device and internet connection. Chetan Jaiswal
Dealing with distance and congestion
Delivering video content on a large scale, whether prerecorded or live, poses a significant challenge when extrapolated to the immense number of videos consumed globally. Streaming services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix host enormous libraries of on-demand content, while simultaneously managing countless live streams happening worldwide.
A seemingly straightforward approach to delivering video content would involve building a massive data center to store all the videos and related content, then streaming them to users worldwide via the internet. However, this method isn’t favored because it comes with significant challenges.
One major issue is geographic latency, where a user’s location relative to the data center affects the delay they experience. For instance, if a data center is located in Virginia, a user in Washington, D.C., would experience minimal delay, while a user in Australia would face much longer delays due to the increased distance and the need for the data to traverse multiple interconnected networks. This added travel time slows down content delivery.
Another problem is network congestion. As more users worldwide connect to the central data center, the interconnecting networks become increasingly busy, resulting in frustrating delays and video buffering. Additionally, when the same video is sent simultaneously to multiple users, duplicate data traveling over the same internet links wastes bandwidth and further congests the network.
A centralized data center also creates a single point of failure. If the data center experiences an outage, no users can access their content, leading to a complete service disruption.
Content delivery networks
To address these challenges, most content providers rely on content delivery networks. These networks distribute content through globally scattered points of presence, which are clusters of servers that store copies of high-demand content locally. This approach significantly reduces latency and improves reliability.
Content delivery network providers, such as Akamai and Edgio, implement two main strategies for deploying points of presence.
The first is the “Enter Deep” approach, where thousands of smaller point-of-presence nodes are placed closer to users, often within internet service provider networks. This ensures minimal latency by bringing the content as close as possible to the end user.
This diagram, with the internet backbone at the top and users at the bottom, shows the ‘Enter Deep’ approach to placing content delivery servers ‘deep’ in the network, close to users. Chetan Jaiswal
The second strategy is “Bring Home,” which involves deploying hundreds of larger point-of-presence clusters at strategic locations, typically where ISPs interconnect: internet exchange points. While these clusters are farther from users than in the Enter Deep approach, they are larger in capacity, allowing them to handle higher volumes of traffic efficiently.
This diagram, with the internet backbone at the top and users at the bottom, shows the ‘Bring Home’ approach to placing content delivery servers between backbone and regional internet service providers. Chetan Jaiswal
Infrastructure for a connected world
Both strategies aim to optimize video streaming by reducing delays, minimizing bandwidth waste and ensuring a seamless viewing experience for users worldwide.
The rapid expansion of the internet and the surge in video streaming – both live and on demand – have transformed how video content is delivered to users globally. However, the challenges of handling massive amounts of video data, reducing geographic latency and accommodating varying user devices and internet speeds require sophisticated solutions.
Content delivery networks have emerged as a cornerstone of modern streaming, enabling efficient and reliable delivery of video. This infrastructure supports the growing demand for high-quality video and highlights the innovative approaches needed to meet the expectations of a connected world.
Chetan Jaiswal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Brady Thomas West, Research Professor of Survey and Data Science, University of Michigan
Demonstrators protest funding cuts outside of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., on March 8, 2025.Michael Mathes/AFP via Getty Images
In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has terminatedmore than US$2 billion in federal grants, according to a public source database compiled by the scientific community, and it is proposing additional cuts that would reduce the $47 billion budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, also known as the NIH, by nearly half.
The effects of these cuts are being felt at top-tier public research institutions such as the University of Michigan. In fiscal year 2024, of the $2 billion in total research expenditures at the university, $1.2 billion came in through federal research grants, with $762 million from NIH alone.
Brady West is a research professor at the University of Michigan who has been writing federal grant proposals for more than two decades. The Conversation U.S. spoke with him about what these cuts could mean for the university and scientific research in the U.S. going forward.
The University of Michigan’s research arm includes “soft money” institutes. What does that mean?
Brady West: A soft money institute is one where the salaries are entirely funded by the research grants and contracts that they’re able to obtain. This is the case for most of the research arm of the University of Michigan, which includes the Institute for Social Research where I work. The university sets the salary amounts for these positions, and the people filling them − whether faculty, staff or graduate students − have to raise the money to fund their salary.
Teaching faculty, on the other hand, usually are paid from general university funds, which might come in from sources such as tuition, rather than grant funding.
What is involved in applying for a grant from a federal institution like NIH?
West: In my experience, it’s an extremely competitive and stressful process.
On average, I would estimate that it takes about a year to craft a research proposal from scratch. Applicants do background research, look at all the relevant work that has already been done in the field, summarize the articles that they’ve written, and sometimes do initial preliminary studies. They have to sell their research as connected to past work but still innovative, something that will move the science forward.
Meanwhile, they’re working with a team of research administrators, whose jobs at the university are funded by soft money, on things like creating a budget and determining what sort of supplies, equipment and additional personnel will be required for the research project. These administrators also help the applicant format and submit the proposal.
How does NIH determine what proposals receive funding?
West: Every proposal submitted to NIH gets reviewed by a panel of experts in that particular field, so your peers are the ones reviewing your proposal and deciding whether it should be considered for funding.
Each panel is tasked with reviewing and scoring multiple proposals. About half of the proposals receive scores that do not warrant additional discussion for funding. The rest are scrutinized line by line.
Those with the best scores, based on their merits as well as agency budgets and priorities, are ultimately awarded grants. All applicants are sent the reviewers’ comments, and those not receiving funding may revise their proposal and resubmit. In my experience, few applications get funded the first time they are submitted, and most go through at least one round of revisions.
I’ve found it generally takes about two years from the time you start writing a proposal to the time that you get funded.
When did you learn that NIH and other federal grants were being rescinded at the University of Michigan?
West: The first notice I received was in mid-February of 2025. I was wrapping up a federally funded study where we were looking at different ways of measuring sexual identity in surveys. That study was funded by a $160,000 grant from NIH.
I received a notice from administrators for the National Center for Health Statistics – part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – that maintains the data I was working with. The email said my work was being reviewed for compliance with the president’s executive orders and would be paused.
The email Brady received from the National Center for Health Statistics, terminating his access to the secure data he’d been using for his NIH-funded research study. courtesy of Brady Thomas West, CC BY
I was lucky, because that particular grant was set to end at the end of February, so the project was nearly finished, and the paper was already written.
And then over the following weeks, it was like a waterfall. I started hearing from colleagues who were working on grants related to climate change, vaccination, vaccine hesitancy, sexual identity, gender identity, DEI – all of the work related to that, I just heard story after story of these grants being ended on the spot.
What does this mean for the researchers who lost their funding? What will they do now?
West: These terminations put jobs at risk – not only the research faculty, but also the teams who were working on these projects and the administrators who helped format and submit the grants.
One of my Ph.D. students received an email from NIH that simply said his grant has been terminated. So his source of support as a graduate student at the University of Michigan was gone in an instant.
The University of Michigan has developed a new research funding program where you can apply for support if you’ve had your grant terminated, and your local department can help share the costs. My student is waiting to hear if he will receive some of that funding. This is a welcome development, but only a short-term solution to this problem.
So right now, everybody’s pivoting. Your first thought is, how can I write a proposal that’s not going to have certain keywords in it? And that’s just not a good way to do science.
The University of Michigan is committed to doing the best possible science, but it’s going to require some adaptation in terms of how to think about the proposal process. And, honestly, for the immediate future, part of being a scientist in the U.S. is getting a firm understanding of what the current administration wants to fund.
Are you or your colleagues considering leaving the university?
West: That’s the million-dollar question. Do you decide to pack up your family and move to a different country? Do you shift to private industry? Do you wait it out for the next administration and hope that things swing back in a direction that’s going to support the kind of work that you’re doing? Those are the kinds of career decisions that people have to think about.
Is the U.S. going to lose a lot of top-tier faculty at top-tier universities like the University of Michigan because of what’s going on? That’s a significant concern.
Brady Thomas West has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Hewitt, Associate Professor in North American History, University of Birmingham
The greatest comeback since Lazarus. So went some of the sentiment around novice politician Mark Carney’s near-miraculous victory in the April 28 Canadian federal election.
His Liberal party was on political life support in January. The highly unpopular Justin Trudeau had just resigned and, after nearly ten years in office, the governing centrist Liberals seemed destined for an historic defeat. The Conservative party led by over 20 points in opinion polls and looked certain to enter government.
Then came a two-part salvation. First was the arrival of Carney as Liberal leader. Without a previous political record, Carney avoided the contamination attached to the Liberals’ time in office.
The other part of the revival came courtesy of President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly referred to the outgoing Trudeau as “governor” and mused continually, including on the day of the Canadian election, about his desire for Canada to become the “51st state” of the United States. Applying tariffs on Canadian goods made it clear that the threat was real and triggered a dramatic nationalistic reaction on the part of Canadians.
But are there lessons from the Carney triumph that might aid other struggling leaders, such as British prime minister Keir Starmer? Having achieved a large majority less than a year ago, Labour has lost a safe seat to Reform in a byelection and languishes in the polls.
Whereas Carney and the Liberals have been vocal in their resistance to Trump, Starmer and Labour have followed a path of obsequiousness, even to the point of avoiding criticism of the US president over threats to Canada. Instead of speaking out, Starmer has managed Trump by flattering him through an invitation for a second state visit.
Starmer and Labour seem determined to curry favour with Trump to gain a free trade agreement with the US. Setting aside the value of such an agreement, given how Trump has simply ignored the deal his first administration struck with Mexico and Canada in 2020, the toadying appears to have all been for naught.
According to the Guardian, the Trump administration has made a free-trade agreement with the UK a second or third level priority. So much for the “special relationship”.
This apparent disinterest would imply that Starmer and Labour have little to risk by taking a more aggressive stance. Playing a more overtly nationalistic card might play well with more centrist voters in the UK, as it did in Canada. There is clear evidence from opinion polls of growing unhappiness with the United States among Britons, along with increasing disdain for the idea of the “special relationship”.
Such an approach might undermine some of the momentum that the Reform Party has enjoyed over the last few months. Tying Nigel Farage to the Trump administration might be especially effective given his close connections over several years to the president.
Certainly, tarring your opponent as a mini-Trump represented an effective tool by the Liberal campaign against the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who not only lost the election but also was defeated in his own constituency after having won there seven previous times.
A case could be made that the Canadian situation has a uniqueness that isn’t necessarily transferrable elsewhere. There is, for instance, a long history in the country of anti-Americanism as a potent political force, especially on the left of the political spectrum.
Efforts to distance Canada from the US culturally and intellectually in the 1960s and 1970s were popular and led to a cultural flourishing. And elections in 1911 and 1988 were fought directly over the issue of free trade with the United States.
Major public concerns over American domination of Canada were key in both contests, even though the latter election was a victory for the Progressive Conservative party that advocated free trade with the US. Additionally, a significant element of Canadian identity outside of Quebec has long been defined in oppositional terms to Canada’s southern neighbour.
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Even though the Canadian example may be unique, other countries are certainly looking towards it. Taking an aggressive stance against Trump tariffs appears to be helping the Labor party in Australia. It may also have an impact in New Zealand. At this point, with Starmer and Labour struggling in troubled polling waters, Trump may be the best political lifeline available.
Steve Hewitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
One story dominates the elections held on May 1 in England: the dramatic Reform surge. The Runcorn and Helsby byelection was a stunning win for Nigel Farage’s party.
Labour’s 49th safest seat – supposedly safer than the prime minister’s – was hardly natural Farage territory. The town of Runcorn – Liverpool overspill mainly – makes up 60% of the constituency. Labour won more votes than all other parties combined in the general election of July 2024. Yet less than a year later, Reform has captured the seat, overturning a majority of 14,700 – albeit with the smallest ever byelection majority, beating Labour by just six votes.
This has delivered Reform its first woman MP, former Conservative councillor Sarah Pochin. Her arrival brings the party up to five MPs (a sixth having been suspended from the party earlier this year).
Do early byelections matter, with the general election so distant? They can be a signal of what is to come. Since the second world war, Labour has only once retained office at the next general election after losing a seat at a byelection less than one year after forming a government. A narrow loss to the Conservatives in Leyton in 1965 was sandwiched between 1964 and 1966 general election triumphs, but that was the exception to the rule.
The norm is for new governments to enjoy a honeymoon. No such joy for Keir Starmer’s Labour.
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Farage has made what is being called an economic “left turn” in a bid to attract Labour voters. He continues to push for tougher immigration policies but is now also backing greater nationalisation, including for British steel.
Starmer benefited from intra-right tussling between the Conservatives and Reform in July – the split vote on the right contributed to his loveless landslide. But things look different now Reform has shown it can take on Labour and win.
And while the Conservatives were never in the running in this byelection, they’ve been damaged in their own way. Farage’s assessment was that “after tonight, there’s no question, in most of the country we are now the main opposition party to this government.”
Given that the Conservatives have 20 times the number of MPs as Reform, that’s a bold claim from Farage. But Reform has more members and is well funded.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has compared her position to that of William Hague when he took over a Conservative party battered by Labour’s landslide win in 1997. It’s a dismal vista. Hague was similarly crushed at the next general election. Yet for the Conservatives there remained the prospect of an eventual swing back of the pendulum. As the fragmentation of politics gathers pace under the Reform surge, there are now no such guarantees.
Badenoch’s closest leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, has made clear that the right of British politics, the Conservatives and Reform, will be obliged to unite or both will fail. They believe Reform has yet to be properly scrutinised and could fade.
Yet Reform may continue to upend the old certainties of the Conservative-Labour duopoly. British electoral politics have never been more fragmented and, in that context, Farage is the bookmakers’ favourite to be the next prime minister.
Jonathan Tonge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Young Montanans, including Rikki Held, center, sued their state government and won a key ruling forcing the state government to consider greenhouse gas emissions when reviewing proposed development projects.William Campbell/Getty Images
An ancient legal principle has become a key strategy of American children seeking to reduce the effects of climate change in the 21st century. A defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025 has not stopped the effort, which has several legal actions continuing in the courts.
The legal basis for these cases is called the “public trust doctrine,” the principle that certain natural resources – historically, navigable waters such as lakes, rivers and streams and the lands under them – must be maintained in government ownership and held in trust for present and future generations of the public.
For the past decade, a nonprofit called Our Children’s Trust has argued for a 21st-century interpretation of the public trust doctrine to support lawsuits against state and federal agencies and officials, seeking to force them to take specific actions to fight climate change. Our Children’s Trust has focused on children, saying they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change because their futures, which the public trust doctrine protects, will be lived in an unsafe and unhealthy climate unless governments take action. Children around the world have filed similar lawsuits against their governments on alternate legal grounds, including claims of constitutional and human rights violations.
Initial uses of the public trust doctrine in the US
The U.S. Supreme Court first endorsed the public trust doctrine in 1892, when it ruled that the doctrine prevented the Illinois legislature from selling virtually the entire Chicago harbor in Lake Michigan to a private railroad company. In the 20th century, state courts have ruled that the doctrine bars states and local governments from selling off lakefront property or harbors to private owners and protects public access to beaches, lakes and oceans.
The public trust doctrine had little to do with environmental protection until the 1970s, however, after law professor Joseph Sax wrote an influential article arguing that the doctrine could form the basis for lawsuits to protect water and other natural resources from pollution, destruction and other threats.
Over the past five decades, some states’ courts have expanded the public trust doctrine’s application beyond access to water-based resources, ruling it can also require governments to protect parks and wildlife from development. And Montana, Minnesota and several other states followed Sax’s recommendation to pass laws or amend their state constitutions to impose broader obligations on states to protect natural resources.
In 2011, Our Children’s Trust argued for the first time that governments had a legal obligation to protect the atmosphere as a public trust resource. The group filed lawsuits in all 50 states on behalf of children. Most state courts dismissed the lawsuits quickly, holding that there were no court decisions in their states that supported extending the public trust doctrine to claims involving the climate or the atmosphere.
In 2015 the group filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in Oregon, this time against the federal government. That lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, alleged that the federal government’s inaction to address climate change violated the public trust doctrine as well as the 21 young plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty and property under the U.S. Constitution.
The plaintiffs asked the court to order the federal government to prepare an inventory of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions and to implement a national plan to phase out fossil fuels to “stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend.”
A talk with one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. government seeking to force regulatory action to reduce the effects of climate change.
An updated strategy
Since the initial wave of litigation, Our Children’s Trust has continued to file lawsuits to force governments to address climate change. These newer ones are more narrowly tailored to state-specific constitutional and statutory provisions that protect environmental and public trust resources. And, so far, they have been more successful.
The plaintiffs won at trial, and in a landmark opinion in 2024 the Montana Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s finding that greenhouse gases were harmful to the state’s “climate, rivers, lakes, groundwater, atmospheric waters, forests, glaciers, fish, wildlife, air quality, and ecosystem.” The court similarly found that “a stable climate system … is clearly within the object and true principles” of the state’s constitution.
Children in Hawaii filed a similar lawsuit in 2022 against the state Department of Transportation, alleging that its failure to reduce transportation emissions in the state violated the state public trust doctrine and the state’s constitution. The lawsuit relied on Hawaii courts’ previous rulings that the state’s public trust doctrine and state constitution broadly protect natural resources for present and future generations. In 2024, days before trial was to begin, the parties reached a landmark settlement in which the state agreed to take concrete actions to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.
In the Montana lawsuit, a U.S. court ruled that the government had failed to protect the rights of children by failing to take action to reduce or prevent climate change.
The road ahead
Looking back, it was perhaps not surprising that a one-size-fits-all nationwide legal strategy based on a doctrine that varies widely state by state would face long odds. But the public trust doctrine itself has been historically incremental, expanding and contracting as society and the needs of its citizens change over time. And Our Children’s Trust has several cases still pending, including in Alaska and Utah state courts, and in a federal court in California.
The campaign’s successes broke new legal ground: Montana courts held the first trial in the United States that examined evidence of the effects of climate change and states’ obligations to address them. The Hawaii settlement set concrete benchmarks and included provisions for continued feedback on state policies by the youth plaintiffs.
More broadly, Our Children’s Trust’s campaign demonstrates that a combination of legal advocacy and nationwide publicity over the plight of young people in a rapidly changing climate have the potential to result in real change, both in the law and in public perception of the importance of addressing climate change.
Alexandra Klass does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ian H. Stanley, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine & Clinical Psychologist, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Military kids tend to drink more and have more depression than nonmilitary peers.kail9/E+ via Getty Images
“When one person joins the military, the whole family serves.”
The origin of this statement is unknown, but it captures the reality that military families confront in 2025. One member’s service shapes the lives of the entire family.
Here’s a look at the numbers: More than 2 million Americans serve in the U.S. military. About 1.3 million are on active duty, nearly half of them are married, and just over one-third have children. Many of the rest are otherwise partnered, or they live with extended family members.
These military families encounter unique psychological stressors. Frequent relocations disrupt a spouse’s job, a child’s schooling, and family routines. Deployments and the constant threat of war may strain relationships. For dual-military couples, these pressures are compounded. For them, prolonged separation and increased child care needs are even more common.
When a military parent is deployed, some kids react with irritability and aggression.
Depression, alcohol and suicidal thoughts
Most military families demonstrate remarkable resilience and lead happy, healthy, and productive lives. For so many of them, being part of a military family and serving their country is a source of great pride and honor.
Word seems to be getting out: Research shows military-connected youth with mental health challenges are less likely than peers to carry guns.
For many military families, financial stress is a top concern.
Overcoming barriers
All this is happening at a time of unprecedented challenges for military families. The U.S. military is enhancing warfighter readiness; increased training requirements may take service members away from home for weeks to months at a time, adding to family stress. What’s more, future military conflicts will likely mean longer deployments.
The Defense Department, along with several nonprofits, has made significant efforts not only to decrease stigma, but also increase services that foster psychological health. Research shows existing programs do help. This includes free services from Military OneSource, Military and Family Life Counseling, Families OverComing Under Stress and 4-H Military Partnership. But despite what appears to be an abundance of these programs, many military members and their families are still unaware they exist or have difficulty accessing them.
Children from military families are more likely than peers to serve in the military. That means protecting their psychological well-being at an early age may ultimately translate to a stronger military in the next generation. Expanding youth- and family-focused programs is an investment, not only in these families, but in the future of the nation.
Ian H. Stanley receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, USAA/Face the Fight Foundation, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is affiliated with the Scientific Advisory Board for Face the Fight.
Anne Ritter receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.
Donald Trump is everywhere, inescapable. His return to power in the United States was always going to have some impact on the Australian federal election. The question was how disruptive he would be.
The answer is very – but not in the ways we might have thought.
As soon as Trump was elected president, the political debate in Australia focused on whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would be best suited to managing him – and keeping the US-Australia security alliance intact.
Initially, at least, this conversation was predictable.
The Coalition looked set to continue an ideological alignment with Trumpism that had flourished under the prime ministership of Scott Morrison. Dutton prosecuted the argument that given his party’s experience with the first Trump administration, it would be better placed than Labor to handle the second.
Albanese, meanwhile, appeared caught off guard by Trump’s victory and timid in his response.
But as has become all too clear, the second Trump administration is radically different from the first. That has rattled the right of Australian politics and worked to Labor’s advantage.
A turning point at the White House
In January, the Coalition announced that NT Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price had been appointed shadow minister for government efficiency – a direct importation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being led by Elon Musk in the US.
In a barely disguised imitation of the Trump administration’s attacks on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) measures, members of the Coalition, including Price, singled out Welcome to Country ceremonies as evidence of the kind of “wasteful” spending it would cut.
When the Coalition seemed to be riding high in the polls, Dutton, too, nodded at “wokeism” and singled out young white men feeling “disenfranchised”.
Soon after, however, this began to change. The first few weeks of Trump’s second term were marked by a cascade of executive actions targeting trans people, climate action and immigration. Trump and his new appointees began the process of radically reshaping the United States and its role in the world.
In February, polling by the independent think tank The Australia Institute found Australians saw Trump as a bigger threat to world peace than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
And then Volodymyr Zelensky went to the White House.
The Ukrainian president was humiliated in an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, laying bare how the administration was willing to treat the leader of an ally devastated by a war it hadn’t started.
Trump’s territorial threats towards Canada and Greenland, in addition to his dismissive statements about European allies, shattered the long-held assumptions about the US as a force for stability in the world.
MAGA ideology isn’t ‘pick and choose’
After this incident, Dutton was careful to distance himself from Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine. He even went so far as to say that leadership might require “standing up to your friends and to those traditional allies because our views have diverged”.
it’s hard to see America made great again if the Trump administration’s message to the world is that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
Therein lies the bind for the Coalition – an ideological alignment with “Make America Great Again” cannot be fully reconciled with a nationalism that puts Australian interests first.
MAGA ideology is all-or-nothing, not pick-and-choose.
During the election campaign, the Coalition attempted to walk the path of “pick-and-choose”. And Labor quite successfully used this against them. Assertions the opposition leader was nothing but a “Temu Trump”, or “DOGE-y Dutton”, stuck because they had at least a ring of truth to them.
The opposition’s pledge to dramatically reduce the size of the public service, for example, was clearly linked to Musk’s efforts at DOGE to take a chainsaw to the public service in the US. This idea has been deeply unpopular with Australian voters, and the Coalition has faced innumerable questions about it.
For all the talk of “shared values” and how essential the US alliance is to Australian security, this campaign shows that Australia is not like America.
Most Australians concerned about Trump’s impact
When Trump’s tariffs arrived on “Liberation Day” in early April, both leaders claimed they were best placed to negotiate.
Albanese insisted Australia had got one of the best results in the world, while Dutton asserted, without evidence, that he would be able to negotiate a better one.
More broadly, the Trump tariffs have contributed to a growing sense of unease in the electorate.
A recent YouGov poll found that 66% of Australians no longer believe the US can be relied on for defence and security. According to Paul Smith, the director of YouGov, this is a “fundamental change of worldview”.
In the same poll, 71% of Australians also said they were either concerned or very concerned Trump’s policies would make Australia worse off.
While neither party has signalled it would make a fundamental shift in Australia’s alliance with the US if elected, that doesn’t mean changes aren’t possible.
Independents and minor parties may well play a significant role in the formation of the next government. Some, like Zoe Daniel and Jacqui Lambie, are increasingly vocal about the risks the Trump administration poses to Australia.
A limit to Trumpism’s appeal
As election day approaches, many of the assumptions driving conventional Australian political thinking are under pressure.
Labor’s recovery in the polls, and the Liberals’ election win in Canada, suggest assumptions about the dangers of incumbency might have been misplaced. The dissatisfaction with incumbent governments last year may have had more to do with unresponsive political parties and systems.
There’s evidence emerging, instead, that in more responsive democracies with robust institutions like Australia and Canada, Trumpism does not have great appeal.
The idea that “kindness is not a weakness” may yet prove to be a winning political strategy.
Emma Shortis is Director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
Written in French, the book is the outcome of decades of botanical research and scientific collaboration between institutions and botanists from Burkina Faso, Mali, France, Switzerland and Germany. For the first time, it provides a complete inventory of ferns and flowering plants in Burkina Faso and Mali. It catalogues 2,631 species – both native and introduced – with 2,115 identified in Burkina Faso, 1,952 in Mali, and 1,453 shared between both countries.
Featuring over 800 photographs, 2,631 scientific illustrations, detailed descriptions, distribution maps, and identification keys, it serves as an essential tool for scientific research and biodiversity conservation. It’s also useful for sustainable development in the region.
We are a team of botanists from Burkina Faso, Mali and Europe who worked on this guide. One of our team is the botanist Jean César, who has carried out botanical research in the region for over 30 years. We based the guide on his earlier work in researching the flora of West Africa, and training young botanists.
By identifying plant species – whether common, rare, overexploited, or invasive – this guide can play a crucial role in conservation efforts: one can only protect what one knows.
The publication lays the groundwork for conservation of Sahelian ecosystems, which face increasing degradation with direct consequences for rural communities.
How we came up with the guide
As a team, we’ve conducted more than 40 years of research in Burkina Faso and Mali, documenting different plants. We also studied herbarium collections in Paris, Montpellier, Frankfurt and Geneva in Europe and Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso.
The book is written in French and includes an index of local plant names in the local languages of Bambara, Dogon, Sonrai, Sénoufo and Peulh. This makes it a valuable resource for local communities and researchers alike. There is an open access digital version to make sure that everyone can use the new illustrated guide.
Discovering new and rare species
The book highlights species previously known from only a few observations. These are both widely distributed species and plants that are rare, only found in unprotected areas facing heavy urbanisation.
About 330 of the plant species in the guide have only ever been seen once in Burkina Faso or Mali, although some are present in neighbouring countries.
Another 40 near-endemic species (mainly only found in Burkina Faso and Mali) have only been seen once 40 years ago. Most of those are aquatic plants, growing along the Niger River, or in small wetland environments.
Additionally, this research updates information on more than a hundred poorly understood species that require further study. Some of these are likely new to science and have not even been given formal names. For instance, we found a new type of Brachystegia tree in the Geneva Botanical Garden’s herbarium. It is new to science and will have to be described.
Many plants documented here hold ethnobotanical value. They are part of the indigenous knowledge of Burkina Faso and Mali and play roles in traditional medicine, agriculture and crafts.
We found more than 120 species that have medicinal uses. Identifying them with correct scientific names will be crucial for the study of how people can continue to use these plants, especially as medicine.
Unfortunately, the current insecurity in the region has made field studies extremely dangerous, threatening conservation projects. For instance, forest rangers can no longer travel freely, and some regions have become inaccessible.
Publishing this book at such a difficult time brings renewed momentum to scientists and serves as a positive sign of continued collaboration. It gives visibility to botanical studies in both countries and highlights the importance of collaborations among botanists from different continents.
By recording this biodiversity, this work not only preserves valuable ecological knowledge but also ensures that the knowledge of these species is not lost to conflict-driven environmental degradation. It sheds light on the importance of preserving plants for future generations.
Cyrille Chatelain receives funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
Adjima Thiombiano, Blandine Marie Ivette Nacoulma, and Mamadou Lamine Diarra do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a visit with Michigan Air National Guard troops, April 29.Getty Images
With US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “proud” cancellation this week of the military’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program, the “war on woke” has found its latest frontier – war itself.
Stemming from a United Nations Security Council resolution in 2000, the WPS initiative aimed to increase the participation of women in public institutions, including in the security sector and in peace-making roles.
The WPS agenda aims to better understand how women, men, boys and girls experience war, peace and security differently. It increases operational effectiveness and supports the underlying goal of gender equality, described by the UN as the “number one predictor of peace”.
In the military context, it emphasises the need to increase the participation of women and to better protect non-combatant women in war, particularly from the prevalence of conflict-related sexual violence.
The decision to end the program as part of a wider war on diversity, equity and inclusion seems to assume national security and military power are incompatible with the promotion of racial and gender equality.
In other words, it assumes certain types of people aren’t really cut out to be “warfighters”. And it asserts that anything other than basic skill (such as weapons handling) undermines readiness and ability in warfare.
History and the available evidence suggest both ideas are wrong.
The archetypal warrior envisaged by Hegseth and others is one who relies on very traditional concepts of what constitutes a warrior and who that might be: not female, definitely not transgender, ideally also not gay.
Recent bans on transgender personnel in the US military, the removal of mandatory mental resilience training, and the
“disappearance” from US museums and memorials of the records of the military contribution of women and minorities, reinforce these ideas.
The ideal soldier, according to the new doctrine, is straight, white, physically fit, stoic and male. Yet people of all stripes have served their countries ably and with honour.
Hard-won progress in retreat
Military service is allocated a privileged kind of status in society, despite (or perhaps because of) the ultimate sacrifice it can entail. That status has long been the preserve of men, often of a particular class or ethnicity.
But women and minorities around the world have fought for the right to enter the military, often as part of broader campaigns for greater equality within society in general.
But there remains resistance to these “interlopers”. No matter their individual capabilities, women are painted as too physically weak, as a threat to combat unit cohesion, or a liability because of their particular health needs.
Women, in particular, are often perceived as being too emotional or lacking authority for military command. Minorities are seen as requiring distracting rules about cultural sensitivity, presenting language challenges, or are stereotyped as not cut out for leadership.
But problem solving – a key military requirement – is best tackled with a range of views and approaches. Research from the business world shows diverse teams are more successful, including delivering higher financial returns.
At a more granular level, we also know that minority groups have often outperformed other military units, as exemplified by the extraordinary feats of the New Zealand Māori Pioneer Battalion in World War I and the 28th Māori Battalion in World War II.
Women, too, have proved themselves many times over, most recently in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As well as matching the skills of their male counterparts, they also had different, useful approaches to roles such as intelligence gathering in conflict zones.
US Marines on a military exercise – but history shows us there’s more than one type of successful soldier. Getty Images
Any suggestion that military units are best served by being made up of only heterosexual men with “alpha” tendencies is undermined by the evidence. In fact, a monocultural, hypermasculine military may increase the potential for harrassment, bullying or worse.
Modern military roles also involve a much wider range of skills than the traditional and stereotypically male infantry tasks of digging, walking with a pack, firing guns and killing an enemy.
In modern warfare, personnel may also need to engage in “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency, or in “grey zone” tactics, where specialisations in intelligence, cyber or drone piloting are more highly prized. Militaries are also much more likely to be deployed to non-warfighting roles, such as humanitarian aid and disaster relief.
This isn’t to say “controlled aggression” and other traditionally alpha-male attributes don’t have their place. But national military strategies increasingly stress the need to train ethical and compassionate soldiers to successfully carry out government objectives.
The evolution of war requires the evolution of the military forces that fight them. The cancellation of the Women, Peace and Security program in the US threatens to put a stop to this process, at least in that country.
Despite Pete Hegseth’s claim to be increasing “warfighting” capability, then, there is a real chance the move will decrease operational effectiveness, situational awareness and problem solving in conflict situations.
Far from being peripheral, the Women, Peace and Security program is central to the future of all military activity, and to developing conceptions of war, peace and security. Hegseth’s “proud moment” looks less like winning a “war on woke” and more like a retreat from an understanding of the value a diverse military has created.
Bethan Greener does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tamsin S. Mitchell, Visiting Researcher, Centre for Freedom of the Media, University of Sheffield
Humberto Padgett was reporting on the effects of drought in Cuitzeo, a rural area of central Mexico, when his car was intercepted by armed men on September 13 2024. They threatened him and stole the car, his identity papers and work equipment, including two bullet-proof jackets.
Padgett, a Mexican investigative journalist and author, was reporting on Mexico’s growing environmental worries for national talk radio station Radio Fórmula. It proved to be his last assignment for the station. Two days later, he tweeted:
Today I’m leaving journalism indefinitely. The losses I’ve suffered, the harassment and threats my family and I have endured, and the neglect I’ve faced have forced me to give up after 26 years of work. Thank you and good luck.
Padgett made this decision despite the fact he, like many other journalists in Mexico, has been enrolled in a government protection scheme for years – the Protection Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders, set up in 2012. Several other Latin American countries have similar protection programmes, including Honduras since 2015.
These programmes offer journalists measures such as panic buttons and emergency phone alerts, police or private security patrols, and security cameras and alarm systems for their homes and offices. Some are provided with bodyguards – at times, Padgett has received 24-hour protection.
In Honduras, reporter Wendy Funes, founder of the online news site RI, was given a police bodyguard after being threatened while covering an extortion trial that linked the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), an international criminal gang, with the Honduran government of former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who is now serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking and arms offences.
Yet even once journalists are enrolled in these government protection schemes, the attacks and threats continue. Shockingly, many come from state employees who, in both Mexico and Honduras, are thought to be responsible for almost half of all attacks on journalists. But the prospect of punishment is remote: at least 90% of attacks on journalists go unprosecuted and unpunished, meaning there is little deterrent for committing these crimes.
Both Mexico and Honduras currently have leftwing governments which have promised to protect journalists, following a long history of crimes against media professionals in both countries. Yet the risk to journalists posed by the state has worsened in recent years amid increasing use of spyware, online smear campaigns, and rising levels of anti-media rhetoric.
Journalists perceived as critical of the leadership are regularly accused of being corrupt, in the pay of foreign governments, and putting out fake news. Donald Trump’s vocal criticism of mainstream media since returning to power in the US is likely to have encouraged this anti-media hostility in Mexico and Honduras, as elsewhere in the world.
When I tell people about my research into how journalists in Latin America deal with the relentless violence and impunity, their first question is usually: “Oh, you mean drug cartels?” And indeed, both Padgett and Funes have received death threats for their investigations into cartels and other organised crime groups.
Padgett was once sent an unsolicited photo of a dismembered body in a morgue. He was beaten and kicked in the head by armed men who threatened to kill him and his family while he was reporting on drug dealing on a university campus in Mexico City in 2017. He wears a bullet-proof jacket – or did until it was stolen – and keeps his home address a closely guarded secret.
But cartels and gangs are only part of the story when it comes to anti-press violence and impunity in these countries. In many ways, the bigger story is the threat from the state. This has been a constant despite changes in government, whether right or left wing.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
My research project and resulting book were inspired by my work providing advocacy, practical and moral support for journalists at risk in Latin America for an international NGO between 2007 and 2016. The extent of the risk posed by state agents – acting alone or in cahoots with organised crime groups – is clear from the many journalists I’ve spoken to in both Mexico and Honduras.
I first interviewed these reporters, and the organisations that assist them, in 2018, then again in 2022-23 (89 interviews in total), to chart how journalists struggle for protection and justice from the state in the face of growing challenges at both domestic and international level.
For both Padgett and Funes, the intimidation, threats and attacks from organised crime groups often followed them reporting on state agents and their alleged links with such groups. Organised crime groups have deeply infiltrated the fabric of society in many parts of Mexico and Honduras – including politics, state institutions, justice and law enforcement, particularly at a local level.
In Padgett’s case, the suspected cartel threats came after he published a book and investigation into links between state governments and drug cartels, including drug money for political campaigns in Tamaulipas and a surge in cartel-related violence in Morelos under a certain local administration.
Padgett had first joined the federal protection mechanism after he was attacked by police when filming a raid in central Mexico City in 2016. The police confiscated his phone and arrested him.
He was later assigned an around-the-clock bodyguard after the Mexico City prosecutor’s office made available his contact details and his risk assessment and protection plan – produced by the state programme that was supposed to safeguard him – for inclusion in the court file on the 2017 attack on him at the university. This meant the criminals behind the attack had full access to this information.
Being part of this protection programme did not stop the threats by state employees. In April 2024, while trying to report from the scene of the murder of a local mayoral candidate in Guanajuato state, Padgett was punched in the face by a police officer from the state prosecutor’s office, who also smashed his glasses and deleted his photos.
Years earlier, he had been subjected to a protracted legal battle by former Mexico state governor and presidential candidate Eruviel Ávila Villegas, who sued Padgett for “moral damages” to the tune of more than half a million US dollars. His offence? A 2017 profile which mentioned that the politician had attended parties where a bishop had sexually abused male minors.
Padgett eventually won the case – but only on appeal, thanks to a pro bono legal team, after 18 months of stress and travelling to attend the hearings. This is a part of a growing trend of “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (Slapps) in Mexico and Latin America, aimed at silencing journalists and other critical voices.
As Padgett put it: “[Even] once we manage to win, there are no consequences for the politicians who call us to a trial without merit – no consequences at all. Eruviel Ávila is still a senator for the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]” – and he was not even liable for costs.
Mexico’s federal government and army have also carried out illegal surveillance of the mobile phones of journalists and human rights defenders investigating federal government corruption and serious human rights violations on multiple occasions, including by using Pegasus spyware.
In Honduras, Funes is no stranger to state harassment either. In 2011, she was among around 100 journalists, many of them women, who were teargassed and beaten with truncheons by officers of the presidential guard and the national police during a peaceful protest against journalist murders.
In recent years, according to Funes, she and her team at RI have been targeted by cyberattacks and orchestrated smear campaigns on social media that have sought to tar them as being corrupt or associated with criminal gangs. She suspects the army is behind some of these attacks since RI has written in favour of demilitarising the police. Several RI team members have been stopped at army checkpoints; when they have denounced this on TikTok or Facebook, they have been flooded by negative comments.
Profile of investigative journalist Wendy Funes, winner of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression journalism award.
RI has also been attacked by government supporters unhappy with its critical coverage of the Honduras president Xiomara Castro’s leftwing administration. In August 2024, Funes was threatened with prosecution by the governor of Choluteca, southern Honduras, over RI’s investigation into alleged involvement by local government officials in migrant trafficking. And earlier in 2025, Funes and a human rights activist were subjected to misogynistic and sexist diatribes and threats by the head of customs for the same regional department, for demanding justice for a murdered environmental defender.
Almost half of all attacks on journalists in Mexico and Honduras are attributable to state agents, particularly at the local level. In Mexico, the NGO Article 19 has attributed 46% of all such assaults over the last decade to state agents including officials, civil servants and the armed forces.
In Honduras, according to the Committee for Free Expression (C-Libre), 45% of attacks on journalists in the first quarter of 2024 were attributed to state agents, up from 41% in 2021. These include the national police, the Military Public Order Police, officials and members of the government.
Impunity is a fact of life
One key reason for the failure of the journalist protection schemes in Mexico and Honduras is they lack the power to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible for the attacks that caused the journalists to enter the programmes in the first place.
Padgett is yet to see justice, either for the attack on him by drug dealers at the university campus almost eight years ago or the results of the official investigation into the Mexico City prosecutor office’s apparent leaking of his contact details to the assailants. When he asked the prosecutor’s office for an update on its investigation in June 2024, he was told it had been closed two years earlier. His request for a copy of the file was denied.
When he went to the office to ask why, he was detained by police officers. “This is justice in Mexico City,” he said in a video he filmed during his arrest, adding:
Drug dealing is allowed. My personal data is leaked to the organised crime [group] that threatened to kill me and my family. Then the matter is shelved. I come to ask for my file and instead of giving it to me, they take me to court. That is the reality today.
News report by Al Jazeera English (February 2023)
Padgett lodged a complaint and, following “a tortuous judicial process”, eventually managed to get the investigation re-opened. But he says he has lost hope in the process and the justice system in general. Even something as simple as filing a report on the theft of his bullet-proof jacket during the armed attack in September 2024 has proved beyond the official responsible for the task, so the protection programme has not replaced it.
Funes says she reported one of the cyber-attacks on RI to the special prosecutor established by Honduras in 2018 to investigate crimes against journalists and human rights defenders. Funes provided the name and mobile phone number used by the hacker. However, she said the case was later closed for “lack of merit”.
Previously, the official investigation into the 2011 attack on her and other women journalists had also been quietly shelved after the evidence was “lost”. Funes says this put her off reporting subsequent incidents to the authorities:
What for? I just want them to protect me … why waste my time? Really, you get used to impunity, you normalise it.
There have been a few important advances in Mexico in recent years, including the successful prosecution of some of those behind the 2017 murder of two high-profile journalists, Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach, but such cases remain the exception. Around 90% of attacks on journalists still go unprosecuted and unpunished by the state in both Mexico and Honduras, meaning there is little deterrent against these crimes.
Safer, better ways of working
Many of the journalists I have interviewed prioritise covering under-reported issues relating to human rights and democracy, corruption, violence and impunity. They use in-depth, investigative journalism to try to reveal the truth about what is happening in their countries – which is often obscured by the failings and corruption of the justice system and rule of law.
Many are developing safer, better ways of working, with three strategies having grown noticeably in recent years: building collaborations, seeking international support, and professionalising their ways of working.
Journalists from different media outlets often overcome professional rivalries to collaborate on sensitive and dangerous stories. In Mexico, members of some journalists’ collectives and networks alert each other of security risks on the ground, share and corroborate information, and monitor their members during risky assignments. Others travel as a group – when investigating the mass graves used by drug cartels, for example.
In Mexico and increasingly in Honduras, they publish controversial stories, such as on serious human rights violations involving the state, in more than one outlet simultaneously to reduce the chance of individual journalists being targeted in reprisal. Such collaborations build trust, solidarity and mutual support among reporters and editors – something that has traditionally been lacking in both countries.
Increasingly, international media partners also play an important role regarding the safety of Mexican and Honduran journalists and amplifying public awareness of the issues they report on – encouraging the mainstream media in their own countries to take notice and increasing pressure on their governments to act.
According to Jennifer Ávila, director of the Honduran investigative journalism platform ContraCorriente, transnational collaborations are a “super-important protection mechanism” because they give journalists access to external editors and legal assistance – as well as help leaving the country if necessary.
International partners also bring increased resources. In Mexico and Honduras, as in other Latin American countries, the main source of funding is government advertising and other state financial incentives. But these come with expectations about influence over editorial policies and content, so are not an option for most independent outlets. Private advertising is also challenging for these and other reasons. So, most independent media outlets and journalistic projects are heavily dependent on US and European donors such as the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned), Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations.
Much of Latin America has high levels of media concentration, with the mainstream media typically being owned by a handful of wealthy individuals or families with wider business interests – and close economic and political links to politicians and the state. Combined with the strings of government advertising, this often results in “soft” censorship of the content that these outlets publish. Some journalists are escaping this either by setting up their own media digital outlets, like Funes, or by going freelance – as Padgett has decided to do following the attack on him in Cuitzeo in 2024.
At the same time, there has been a widespread raising of standards through increased training in techniques such as journalistic ethics, making freedom of information requests, digital and investigative journalism, and covering elections. This all helps to promote “journalistic security” – using information as a “shield in such a way that no one can deny what you’re saying”, according to Daniela Pastrana of the NGO Journalists on the Ground (PdP). It also helps counter the perception – and in some cases, reality – of longstanding corruption in parts of the profession.
Hostile environment puts progress at risk
Despite the promise of transforming journalism through increasing collaboration, professionalisation and international support, the current outlook for journalists in Mexico and Honduras – and other countries in Latin America – is not encouraging. Hostile government rhetoric against independent reporters and media outlets is on the rise, despite the presidents of both Mexico and Honduras having pledged to protect journalists and freedom of expression.
In Honduras, the hostile rhetoric towards journalists is growing in the run-up to the presidential elections in November. According to Funes: “There is a violent public discourse from the government which is repeated by officials [and] prepares the ground for worse attacks on the press … This is dangerous.”
In both countries, such attitudes at the top are often replicated by local politicians and citizens, including online, with the threat of violent discourse leading to physical violence. This hostility appears likely to grow given the example of Donald Trump’s aggressive and litigious attitude towards journalists and the media in the United States.
Indeed, the policies of the second Trump administration are already jeopardising progress made in terms of transforming journalism in Mexico and Honduras. In late January 2025, the US government suspended international aid and shuttered USAID, amid unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and corruption.
According to the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, the USAID freeze included more than US$268m (£216m) that had been allocated to support “independent media and the free flow of information” in 2025.
USAID has been a key funder of organisations such as the nonprofits Internews and Freedom House, which in turn have been vital to the development of independent and investigative journalism in Latin America through their support of new media outlets, journalistic projects and media freedom groups. Another important donor, Ned – a bipartisan nonprofit organisation largely funded by the US Congress – has had its funding frozen.
Ned’s chair, Peter Roskam, explains its legal action against the Trump funding cuts.
Uncertainty about future funding has led to the immediate suspension of operations and layoffs by many nonprofit media organisations in Mexico, Honduras and across the region. While this seismic shift in the Latin American media landscape reinforces the urgent need to diversify its sources of funding, there is no doubt that in the short and even medium term, it has dealt a serious blow to the development of free and independent journalism and the safety of all journalists.
In a region of increasingly authoritarian leaders, it is now a lot harder to hold them accountable for corruption, human rights violations, impunity and other abuses.
International impotence
Anti-press violence and impunity are global problems, with more than 1,700 journalists killed worldwide between 2006 and 2024 – around 85% of which went unpunished, according to Unesco.
Although international organisations, protection mechanisms and pressure can be important tools in the fight against anti-press violence and impunity, they are ultimately limited in impact due to their reliance on the state to comply. Some journalists in Mexico and Honduras suggest the impact of such international attention can even be counter-productive, due to their governments’ increasing hostility toward any criticism by international organisations, journalists and other perceived opponents.
Twenty years ago, Lydia Cacho, a renowned journalist and women’s rights activist, was arbitrarily detained and tortured in Puebla state, east-central Mexico, after publishing a book exposing a corruption and child sexual exploitation network involving authorities and well-known businessmen. Unable to get redress for her torture through the Mexican justice system, Cacho eventually took her case to the United Nations.
Finally, in 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that her rights had been violated and ordered the Mexican state to re-open the investigation into the attack, and to give her adequate compensation. This judgment has led to several arrests of state agents in Puebla, including a former governor and chief of the judicial police and several police officers, as well as a public apology from the federal government.
Journalist Lydia Cacho speaking at the 2020 Camden Conference.
But cases like Cacho’s are the exception. Securing rulings from international bodies requires resources and energy, the help of NGOs or lawyers – and can take years. What’s more, enforcement of international decisions relies on the state to comply.
While international pressure was key to persuading the Mexican and Honduran states to set up their government protection schemes for journalists and specialised prosecutors to investigate attacks against them, these institutions have generally proved ineffective.
Resourcing is always an issue: typically, protection mechanisms and prosecutors’ offices are underfunded and the staff are poorly trained. Some bodies have limited mandates, such as protection mechanisms that lack the power to investigate attacks on journalists. Sometimes, these failings are believed to be deliberate. According to Padgett, the Mexican journalist protection scheme has “political biases against those whom officials consider to be hostile to the regime”.
Indeed, many journalists and support groups suspect the Mexican and Honduran governments don’t really want these institutions to work. As the pro-democracy judge Guillermo López Lone commented about the repeated failure to secure convictions for crimes against journalists and human rights defenders in Honduras: “These are international commitments [made] due to pressure, but there is no political will.”
López Lone, who was illegally removed from his position after the 2009 coup in Honduras and only reinstated as a judge after a years-long struggle, including a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alleged that these institutions “play a merely formal role” in Honduras, because they have been “captured by the political interests of the current rulers, and by criminal networks”.
Similarly, according to Sara Mendiola, director of Mexico City-based NGO Propuesta Cívica, it’s not enough to talk about a lack of resources or training: “Even if you doubled the [state] prosecutors’ offices’ budgets, you’d still have the same impunity because the structures [that generate impunity] remain.”
Activism is a risky business
It’s clear that in both Mexico and Honduras, despite the governments’ stated commitment to freedom of expression, there is a deep-seated ambivalence about how important or desirable it is to protect journalists and media freedom.
The heart of this issue is the contradiction of the state as both protector and perpetrator – a state that does not want to, or is incapable of, constraining or investigating itself and its allies. This in turn is linked to longstanding structural problems of corruption, impunity and human rights violations, and a legacy of controlling the media dating to pre-democracy days.
Activism by journalists against this situation – another form of self-protection – takes various forms, including public protests and advocacy, and working for and setting up NGOs that support colleagues at risk. Increasingly, activism also involves the coming together of those who are the victims of violence.
But activism is a risky business in Mexico and Honduras, opening journalists and their loved ones up to further repression and attacks by the state – and sometimes raising questions about their impartiality and credibility. While many journalists have taken part in activism out of necessity or desperation, in both countries their main source of optimism in the face of violence and impunity is journalism itself.
Journalism as the solution
Fortunately, journalists like Padgett don’t give up easily. After an eight-month hiatus following the attack in Cuitzeo and its aftermath, he now feels ready to go back to reporting.
Although he succeeded in getting the shelved investigation into the 2017 attack on him and subsequent data leak reopened, the lack of any action since means he’s decided to draw a line under this labyrinthine process. He is now looking for “alternative means of justice to compensate for the impunity”.
As a part of the reparations, he has been promised a formal apology from the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the apology received by Cacho). Such a ceremony is not justice and may largely be symbolic, but Padgett feels it will allow him to move on and focus on journalism again – this time as a freelancer. He is keen to make the point that Mexico remains “an extraordinary place to be a reporter”.
Despite the lack of state protection and all the other challenges, journalists like Padgett and Funes are determined to keep going – investigating their countries’ ills, probing the root causes, transforming their profession. Their commitment offers a ray of hope for the emergence of a truly free and independent media in Mexico, Honduras and beyond.
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This article draws on research which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Tamsin Mitchell’s new book, Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence: How Journalists Survive and Resist, is published by Routledge.
In the midst of all this, it’s important to remember ours is not the first generation to face dark times. As my recent research argues, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy can offer us valuable tools for navigating today’s challenges.
Kant’s vision of possible progress
A painted portrait of German philosopher and Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant circa 1790. (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1776, the same year the U.S. was founded, Kant was preparing his breakthrough critical philosophy and lecturing on freedom and pragmatic anthropology, all while living in the absolutist monarchy of Prussia.
Amid this, Kant observed the contradictions of human nature — people who acted both good and bad, cruel and respectful of others — and described humanity as “crooked timber.” Yet Kant insisted on viewing this “crooked timber” through the lens of freedom.
At the centre of Kant’s universalist, freedom-focused vision for the future was the idea of a world where all people lived in dignity. It is focused on autonomy as the capacity to self-legislate. Freedom served as his North Star for what is today called “backcasting,” or thinking backward from a desired future to identify possible paths toward achieving it.
In this spirit, Kant observed the rise of competitive markets that rewarded selfishness and greed, and argued that law and international co-operation — what he called a federation of republics — could turn antagonism into springs of progress. In other words, he analyzed the discord and conflict of his present for signs of possible progress.
Crucial for the identification of such possibilities was the freedom of public reason: people thinking for themselves and contributing to public debate.
Thinking long-term about freedom
What can we learn from Kant about navigating today’s multiple crises?
First, focus on freedom from a long-term perspective. The current trade war will likely reduce economic growth, but they may also advance the re-regionalization of economies — an idea long supported by post-growth economists seeking sustainable prosperity.
However, regional production is not inherently good. Rather, we need a public discussion about which essential goods — food, for example — are best mostly supplied regionally, by whom and where international co-operation is called for.
The climate crisis requires plans not fixes
Second, Kant’s insights remind us that freedom must be pursued within the reality of a shared, finite planet. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved overnight. Emissions don’t care about the threats and angry fits of autocrats. It’s a global, complex challenge that requires long-term planning processes.
There are signs of progress in this regard: in 2024, the United Kingdom reported greenhouse gas emissions to be at their lowest levels since 1872 thanks to long-term planning. Canada, after opting out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, finally saw emissions start to fall in 2025 following a renewed commitment to international climate goals and planning.
But this progress is fragile. The chaos of Trump’s tariff wars must not lead our politicians and policymakers to prioritize short-term economic and political gains over long-term climate strategies.
It also diverts public money away from cheaper sources of renewable energy and supporting citizens through a just energy transition. With trade wars and economic insecurity, inflation will likely increase costs of living. This will hit poorer households harder, making this a matter of both environmental and social justice.
Rebuilding the public sphere
Third, for Kant, current lifestyle expectations are no guide for the core of future freedom. So if the American treasury secretary asserts that “cheap goods are not part of the American dream,” can we, paradoxically, detect an unexpected sign of possible progress?
The answer is yes — if we take that example as evidence that worthwhile aspirations cannot be captured by consumerism but call for a more sustained effort.
While modern consumers are willing to make big efforts — such as for daily gym and running routines — can similar energy be released to collective dreams of progress and saving the planet? For Kant, future freedom requires seeing beyond individual to collective aspirations. This relies on shared goals that can be articulated through foresight and supported by a vibrant, critical public sphere.
In Kant’s time, the public sphere mainly consisted of the Republic of Letters, a network made of intellectuals and writers in the late 17th and 18th centuries engaging in open debate.
Today, by contrast, much of our communication takes place on social media platforms that prioritize short-form formats, reward anger over analysis and are owned by a few global corporations structured to maximize profits rather than the quality of public deliberation. To counter this trend, regionally diverse, independent news providers are needed along with decentralized, open source social media.
But above all, in an era of climate crisis, political polarization and economic instability, Kant reminds us of what he called a “Denkungsart:” an “art of thinking” or mindset based on freedom and possibility in a long-term perspective.
Rafael Ziegler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Donald Trump promised he could sort out a peace deal for the Ukraine war in 24 hours. It still hasn’t happened. Instead the US administration has taken 100 days just to sign a mineral deal with Ukraine.
This agreement will give the US access to revenue from Ukrainian natural resources, including 100 major deposits of critical minerals. It also has huge symbolism. Ukrainians see it as a sign that the US is committed to staying involved in their country, and also as a warming of the relationship between Ukraine’s president and Trump. It will also be a signal to Russia that what hurts Ukraine could also hurt the US economy.
Of course, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls the deal “historic” and puts its brilliance down to Trump’s amazing negotiation skills.
However, in the week that Trump celebrated 100 days in office, others would argue that Trump’s deal-making skills are nowhere near as astute as he thinks they are. That he gave Russia way too much room to manoeuvre in the early months of 2025 by leaning so clearly in Putin’s direction, allowing the Russian leader to think he could pretty much do anything he fancied and win as much of Ukraine as he desired.
US and Ukraine sign a mineral deal.
But US national security advisor Michael Waltz, who has announced he is standing down, has signalled that the balance may now be shifting, when he said the minerals deal was “a momentous step” and: “Russia needs to come to the table.”
As Bridget Storrie from UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity has pointed out, this deal was all about what the global super power was going to get as justification for its support in the war, rather than about how it could increase prosperity in a war-torn country.
Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer in history and international studies at Leiden University, has looked at the details and believes Kyiv is getting more than many expected, and more than was on offer earlier in the year, when Trump fell out so publicly with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a White House press conference. As part of the deal Ukraine will retain ownership of its natural resources. All profits are to be invested in Ukraine for ten years after the agreement comes into force. It also looks like Washington will contribute new military aid.
Trump’s first 100 days have been tumultuous, not just for the US, but for most of the world. His “liberation day” tariffs on international goods have turned existing economic balances and expectations upside down.
Countries that have long seen themselves as confident allies of the US – Canada, Denmark and Germany, for instance – now see the landscape somewhat differently, given the high US tariffs that have landed on their doorsteps. No longer convinced of the strength of their relationship with the world’s superpower, many are rethinking both their economic plans and their alliances.
Meanwhile, China, the main focus of Trump’s tariffs, can see opportunities opening up to forge stronger relationships with, and sales to, other countries also looking for new markets. China has not crumbled yet under the weight of 145% US tariffs. And China’s president, Xi Jinping, is showing no sign of blinking first and heading to Washington to negotiate as Trump was clearly expecting.
Trump now swings daily from claiming he is negotiating with China and that their tariffs can come down, to stating that Beijing will cave. All that sound and fury sounds a good deal like wavering. And with US supermarket bosses warning of empty shelves around the corner, and US ports expecting traffic from China to significantly slow this month, as Nottingham University’s Chee Meng Tan sets out, there is every reason to expect Trump will cave and open negotiations before Xi Jinping does.
Many nations now see the US as a far less trustworthy partner now than in the past. The most obvious of these is Canada, which just elected the leader of a party that was 20 percentage points behind in the polls in January and expected to be beaten badly not long ago. But when Trump decided that he wanted Canada as the 51st state, normality went out the window over its northern border.
This week, newly elected Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he would seek meetings with Trump with the “full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States”, promising to strengthen relations with “reliable partners” in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
“We are over the shock of America’s betrayal,” he said. He is ready to write a new foreign policy. He’s not the only one.
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Two of the US’s firm friends for decades, South Korea and Taiwan, are now not so sure that they see Washington as a dependable ally, according to a report from research organisation the Brookings Institution. It saw a significant jump in the numbers of people who saw the US as untrustworthy from July 2024, to March 2025.
This matters, as Steve Dunne, a political scientist at the University of Warwick points out, because without trust people and nations are likely not to honour their commitments. After the second world war, the western allies decided to create a series of international bodies to avert such a disaster happening again, and to encourage nations to follow a set of rules that would encourage democracy and trust in each other.
In his first 100 days, says Dunne, Trump broke the compact of trust with countries that had a long alliance with the US, and that could have a deep impact on the trust that has existed for decades between western nations.
Declining trust in the US could well reduce other forms of its global power. As well as financially and politically, in the post-war decades the US has influenced the world, by exporting its culture, its films, its television programmes and its ideas, as well as importing tourists to visit its national treasures, from Yosemite national park to New York City.
In the past 100 days, international tourists are reported to be cancelling their bookings, partly worried about the welcome, or the lack of it, they may encounter at the border. Summer airline bookings from Canada (21%), Germany (17%) and the Netherlands (12%) to the US have fallen significantly for this year, although other countries such as UK show only a minor fall.
Admittedly, Trump told voters that he wanted to put “America first”. However, at his inauguration, the president declared he wanted to make America the “most respected nation on earth”. That achievement is looking quite far off at the moment. In fact, in many countries it is going the other way.
That international respect took a significant hit at one of the most remarkable moments of the past 100 days, when Trump proceeded to take Zelensky to task publicly for a range of offences including not being grateful enough for US support and not wearing a suit.
So what has Trump achieved domestically in his first 100 days and how does that match up against the promises he made? Let’s look at some of the plans he set out in his inauguration speech.
Trump said he wanted to increase US wealth. But current economic indicators are more than a bit shaky, with US stock markets falling and rising on a regular basis as they follow Trump’s on-and-off-again announcements on tariff negotiations with various countries. On April 30, the day after Trump’s big 100 days rally, stocks fell after data was released showing a contraction in the GDP of the US in the first quarter.
But Trump has told his supporters that, in the long term, tariffs will work and manufacturing jobs will benefit. So far, Republican voters still believe in Trump’s policies on jobs and the economy, with 82% approving, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Only 8% of Democrats and 32% of independent voters do though.
Many of the big decisions we have seen playing out in the first 100 days – including the Elon Musk-led dismantling of some parts of government and Trump’s swing at driving down immigration – were detailed in the Project 2025 document, published the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation before the election, says Dafydd Townley of the University of Portsmouth. But it also hints at what may come next, including more legislation restricting American women’s access to abortion further.
On January 20 Trump thought that Americans stood “on the verge of the four greatest years in American history”. For many Americans worried about their pensions, savings and the cost of groceries, the future is not looking so great right now. But for those who were sharp focused on cutting immigration, Trump may have made the great start they were hoping for.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gavin D. J. Harper, Research Fellow, Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials, University of Birmingham
Ukraine and the US have signed a much-anticipated deal on natural resources. The deal would open up some of the war-torn country’s mineral and energy resources to the United States.
The Conversation spoke to Dr Gavin Harper a Critical Materials Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials about the deal and what it means for both Washington and Kyiv.
What mineral resources exist in Ukraine?
The agreement between Ukraine and the US provides a list of 57 mineral resources which it applies to. Ukraine has reserves of lithium and rare earth metals valued in the trillions of dollars. Rare earth metals are a group of 17 elements, including scandium and yttrium, that are used in technology and important industrial processes.
Ukraine is also a producer of manganese, a key material in metallurgy and some of the widely used lithium-ion batteries, as well as graphite which is also used in lithium ion batteries. Ukraine also holds major deposits of zirconium silicate, which is indispensable in the ceramics industry. Ukraine’s extraction of graphite is limited, and lithium deposits have gone untouched due to the ongoing war and the need for new mining technology and investment.
The regions of Ukraine that are currently occupied by Russia are known to possess considerable reserves of critical minerals, which are vital for modern technologies. These critical minerals include lithium, titanium, graphite, and rare earth elements.
There are, however, significant challenges. Many geologists have contended that some of the critical materials Ukraine possesses are not particularly desirable to extract from an economic point of view. Some in the mining industry believe that other aspects of the deal, such as oil and gas, and access to mining infrastructure, may in the near term be the more desirable components of the deal.
While the agreement considers the primary, mined resources from the ground, Ukraine is also a large importer of new and used electric vehicles. When the components in these vehicles reach the end of life, there is an enormous opportunity to harvest and recycle these critical materials “above the ground”. There may be ways to processing these materials in tandem with the new industries that will be developed to take advantage of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
Why is the US so interested in Ukraine’s mineral resources?
Elements and materials that are economically important, but at risk of short supply are known as critical materials. There are various reasons why these might be in short supply.
Sometimes one or a small number of countries have a monopoly on the supply of a material and can leverage that position for geopolitical influence. For some materials, it is not about the accessibility of material in the ground, but the ability to process and refine it. This is known as “mid-stream processing”.
The US realises that critical materials are key to the technologies that will power the economies of the future, and seeks to secure their supply. This allows them to capitalise on the economic opportunity.
Many of these materials are essential to building the technologies that will aid decarbonisation. Given that China currently controls around 60% of global critical materials supply chains and 85% of processing capacity, it is clear why the US sees a strategic interest in developing other supply chains.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already caused significant challenges around the supply of certain materials, and the ongoing war presents significant challenges to being able to take advantage of and develop the mineral resources Ukraine possesses.
What applications are these minerals used in?
Graphite and lithium are key to electric vehicle batteries and are considered important critical materials due to their essential roles in the booming lithium-ion battery industry, powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and grid storage.
Beryllium, valued for its exceptional lightness, stiffness, and thermal conductivity, is crucial for demanding specialised applications in aerospace, defence and electronics. Manganese is vital in steel production, because it significantly enhances steel’s strength and resistance to wear. It’s also an increasingly important component of some batteries.
Uranium’s most well-known application is as the fuel source in nuclear reactors, and it also has niche uses in medicine and industry.
The implementation of the US-Ukraine minerals deal will be challenging because of Russia’s war. A primary concern revolves around the significant geographical overlap between Ukraine’s critical mineral deposits and the active war zones in the eastern and southern regions of the country.
The significant damage to Ukrainian infrastructure presents a challenge to the development of new industries and the movement of extracted goods to onward markets.
The economic case for developing critical material deposits rests on a clear and accurate understanding of the mineral wealth that exists, and for some of the resources, it is unclear how accurate that data is.
For some of the types of deposit that are in Ukraine, extractive technologies have not been currently developed to a level where they can be commercialised. It takes a long time to develop new mines and the industries associated with them. So the timescales of developing Ukraine’s mineral wealth will be longer than those of political administrations.
It has taken some time for the parties to negotiate the deal, which at times has been contentious. The deal has evolved significantly from the initial proposals, and Ukraine has now agreed to the revised terms.
One thing to note is that the US was one of the signatories, alongside the UK and Russia, of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. The memorandum’s signatories agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and to refrain from threat and use of force and economic coercion against Ukraine. Given the distressed situation Ukraine finds itself in, the at times challenging negotiations sometimes felt at odds with the wording of this document.
Gavin D. J. Harper does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The price of eggs might mean more to some Americans than what’s going on with GDP.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the latest U.S. gross domestic product data on April 30. In the first three months of 2025, it said, GDP contracted by 0.3%. The GDP growth rate captures the pace at which the total value of goods and services grows or shrinks. Together with unemployment and inflation, it usually receives a lot of attention as an indicator of economic performance.
Some economists and analysts said the economy might not be as bad as this rate’s decline might suggest. While this is the first time in three years that GDP has shrunk instead of growing, it is a relatively small decline.
This raises a critical question: Does a relatively small GDP contraction mean the economy is in trouble? I have spent much of my working life studying economic well-being at the level of individuals or families.
What I’ve learned can offer a different lens on the economy than you’d get from just focusing on the most popular indicators, such as the GDP growth rate.
GDP problems
The GDP growth rate has many limitations as an economic indicator. It captures only a very narrow slice of economic activity: goods and services. It pays no attention to what is produced, how it is produced or how people assess their economic lives.
GDP gets a lot of attention, in part, because of the misconception that economics only has to do with market transactions, money and wealth. But economics is also about people and their livelihoods.
Many economists would agree that economics treats wealth or the production of goods and services as means to improve human lives.
Since the 1990s, a number of international commissions and research projects have come up with ways to go beyond GDP. In 2008, the French government asked two Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, as well as the late economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, to put together an international commission of experts to come up with new ways to measure economic performance and progress. In their 2010 report, they argued that there is a need to “shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”
Considering complementary metrics
One approach is to use a composite index that combines data on a variety of aspects of a country’s well-being into a single statistic. That one number could unfold into a detailed picture of the situation of a country if you zoom into each underlying indicator, by demographic group or region.
The production of such composite indices has flourished. For example, the Human Development Index of the United Nations, started in 1990, covers income per capita, life expectancy at birth and education. This index shows how focusing on GDP alone can mislead the public about a country’s economic performance.
In 2024, the U.S. ranked fifth in the world in terms of GDP per capita, but was in 20th place on the Human Development Index due to relatively lower life expectancy and years of schooling compared to other countries at the top of the list, like Switzerland and Norway.
Monitoring other indicators
Another approach is to rely on a larger number of indicators that are frequently updated. These other data points reflect a variety of perspectives about the economy, including subjective ones that convey personal perceptions and experiences.
For instance, in addition to inflation rates, there is data on stress due to inflation as well as inflation expectations. Both offer insights into people’s perceptions, perspectives and experiences about inflation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual U.S. inflation rate increased from 1% in July 2020 to 8.5% in July 2022. My research partners and I found, using U.S. Census data, that more than 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. were experiencing moderate or high levels of stress due to inflation at that time and continued to do so even after inflation went down in 2023.
More recently, the Trump administration’s sporadic tariff changes have made future prices more uncertain, which exposes people to risks. That, in turn, makes people adjust their expectations and feel worse off.
Consumers also have negative expectations about their own future income and worry about their own economic status.
At this moment, the U.S. economy has not officially entered a recession – which requires a longer period of GDP contraction than just one quarter. Although unemployment and inflation rates remain relatively low, the broad picture of the economy that takes into account people’s expectations and perceptions is troubling. To be clear, I’m not saying that just because of what the GDP data may indicate.
Sophie Mitra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Coercive or controlling behaviour in an intimate or family relationship became a criminal offence in the UK in December 2015. The legislation was the result of a long campaign by the charity Women’s Aid to extend understanding of domestic abuse beyond physical violence. But, over 150 years earlier, Emily Brontë placed coercive control at the heart of her celebrated gothic romance, Wuthering Heights.
In the novel, Cathy declares that “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Coercive control, like Cathy’s love, may not be fully visible, but it nonetheless underpins the emotional logic of Brontë’s plot.
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.
Wuthering Heights is a novel of two halves. The first focuses on spirited, passionate Cathy, caught between her tamely domestic husband Edgar Linton and the thrilling wildness of Heathcliff, her soulmate from childhood. To revenge himself on Cathy for marrying Edgar, Heathcliff elopes with Edgar’s infatuated sister Isabella. Isabella initially sees Heathcliff as a brooding romantic hero, but she soon repents, fleeing with their baby son Linton.
Heathcliff’s abuse of Isabella is sometimes physical, but more often psychological. He takes care, as he tells the family servant Nelly Dean, to “keep strictly within the limits of the law” to avoid giving Isabella “the slightest right to claim a separation”.
The law grants him ownership of his wife’s money and property, but subtler refinements of abuse include humiliation, isolation from family and friends, and deprivation of food, privacy and personal care. At Wuthering Heights, Nelly is shocked to see Isabella unwashed, shabbily dressed. She’s “wan and listless; her hair uncurled: some locks hanging lankly down”.
Isabella has already reported that she is forced to sleep in a chair because Heathcliff keeps “the key of our room in his pocket”. Heathcliff delights in humbling her before Nelly and his own servants, calling her “an abject thing”, “shamefully cringing”, “pitiful, slavish, and mean-minded”.
Isabella escapes Heathcliff clad only in “a girlish dress” and “thin slippers”, and goes into hiding with her brother’s financial help. After her death, Heathcliff recovers their son Linton and uses him to engineer a second coercive marriage to his cousin, Cathy and Edgar’s daughter Catherine.
A sickly, peevish adolescent, Linton Heathcliff is perhaps the most unappealing character in Victorian fiction, lacking altogether the strength and charisma of his father. But his puny physicality casts the coercive nature of his abuse into relief.
Catherine is imprisoned at Wuthering Heights and blackmailed into consenting to marry Linton, who becomes the legal owner of all her property. Incapable of dominating her physically, Linton delights in psychological torment, conspiring in his father’s surveillance and depriving her of beloved possessions:
All her nice books are mine; she offered to give me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of our room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all mine. And then she cried, and took a little picture from her neck, and said I should have that; two pictures in a gold case, on one side her mother, and on the other uncle [Catherine’s father], when they were young. That was yesterday – I said they were mine, too.
After Linton’s death, Heathcliff inherits everything, leaving the widowed and orphaned Catherine his penniless dependant. Wuthering Heights is a dark parable about the absolute power that marriage can grant to abusive men.
Real-life inspiration
Brontë’s plot was rooted in a real-life local case of domestic torment. In 1840, a Mrs Collins came to Haworth Parsonage to ask Emily’s father Patrick’s advice about her alcoholic, abusive husband. He was Patrick’s colleague and fellow clergyman, Rev. John Collins, assistant curate of Keighley.
Unusually for the time, Patrick advised her to leave him and take her two children with her. In April 1847, just seven months before Wuthering Heights’ publication, Mrs Collins returned to Haworth to thank him. She told the Brontë family how she had settled in Manchester with her children, supporting them all by running a lodging house.
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Mrs Collins’ experience of abuse did not only shape the chilling psychodrama of Wuthering Heights. There are echoes of Patrick’s advice in Emily’s sister Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), and her eponymous heroine’s famous declaration of autonomy: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”
Mrs Collins’ strength and resilience also inspires the bravery of Helen Huntingdon in Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Like Emily’s “eternal rocks,” coercive control lurks beneath the Brontës’ best-loved fictions, warning Victorian readers of the terrifyingly real dangers of psychological abuse long before the law caught up.
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 the suggestion from Hannah Roche and Katy Mullin:
Like the Brontës’ famous novels, George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) shows an acute awareness of the impact of psychological abuse. Against her better judgement, the 21-year-old Monica Madden marries Edmund Widdowson, a man 23 years her senior who attempts to police every aspect of her domestic, social, intellectual and psychological life.
Gissing’s fictional abuser is a classic coercive controller, a perpetrator of a crime that did not yet exist, and his pattern of behaviour is now so familiar and identifiable that it appears both prescient and predictable. Intensely jealous and possessive, Widdowson deploys tactics of surveillance, stalking, regulation and isolation, making decisions about where Monica goes, who she sees, and even what she reads.
Of course, like Heathcliff and Linton, Widdowson does not have access to online communication tools or spyware. But the many red flags in his treatment of Monica are likely to appear strikingly modern to readers today.
Katy Mullin receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (“Coercive Control: From Literature into Law”, an AHRC Research Network).
Hannah Roche receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (“Coercive Control: From Literature into Law”, an AHRC Research Network).
The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s movie slate, Captain America: Brave New World, arrived earlier this year with the hopes of continuing the legacy of the beloved sub-franchise. But the film struggled to hit the heights of the three earlier instalments. Critics hit out at its messy plot, unremarkable characters, tired visuals – and an overall absence of creativity.
This raises an interesting and broader question about creativity at work. Most advice on this focuses on having one creative idea. But what does it take to stay creative over time? After all, creativity at work isn’t just about having great ideas – it’s about having them consistently.
Yet over time, even the most innovative minds and organisations like the Marvel Cinematic Universe can hit a creative slump that they struggle to recover from.
Long-term creativity is often hindered by two broad factors. The first is the “expertise trap”. Expertise can initially be great for creativity. After all, as a person develops greater knowledge and skills, they can combine different elements of that knowledge to develop unique ideas and solutions to problems.
Over time however, expertise can actually limit flexibility and creativity. When people become exceptionally skilled or knowledgeable in a particular field, they tend to experience “cognitive entrenchment”, a fixation where deeply ingrained knowledge of a topic leads to rigid ways of thinking.
This might work well in familiar situations, but it can also make it harder for people to see things in a new light.
The second factor is the “success trap”. Research suggests that success – and receiving recognition for a creative idea or outcome – can affect creativity in unexpected ways.
Creative success can motivate people to come up with more ideas, increasing the quantity and pace of their output. But on the other hand, it can also encourage creators to focus on the things that worked well in the past. They often try to replicate or tweak them instead of coming up with something genuinely new.
Of course all is not lost. There are inspiring examples of people and organisations who break out of a creative slump. Taylor Swift faced being pigeonholed after her initial country-pop success, but came back even stronger with her shift to synth-pop in 2014.
It’s hard to believe Danish firm LEGO ever struggled – but it built back better. olrat/Shutterstock
And Danish firm LEGO, which was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2003, regained its supremacy in the toy sector by coming up with new ways of making their core products – LEGO bricks – popular again. This even included taking the creative leap into movies based on their bricks.
Get your creative spark back
Research indicates that if you want to be consistently creative, it is important to break away from the things that helped you achieve creative success in the past.
This can mean moving away from familiar environments as your career advances. Or it could be adding to your knowledge sources so that you are not merely reliant on the depth of your knowledge but also on the breadth. You may also benefit from collaborating with people who already have that additional knowledge so you can combine your brainpower.
Second, if you have had a recent success this can often come with expectations to replicate it and chase more opportunities. While this may have some short-term benefits, in the long run insulating yourself from those expectations – and the rapid increase in opportunities – can give you the time and space to come up with new ideas instead of retreading old ground.
My own research suggests that sustaining creativity over time is not just about generating ideas repeatedly, it is also about managing a portfolio of developing ideas. This is a better approach than merely focusing on one central idea.
It involves putting aside (or stockpiling) ideas that have limited use or value right now and turning your attention to other ideas in the portfolio. Stockpiled ideas can exist and develop in the background, but you can return to them in the future and use them flexibly to learn from, seek inspiration or develop new projects.
For people who work in the knowledge economy, ideas can be their primary currency. But beyond that, creativity can also improve wellbeing and so is a fundamental part of being human. By following these tips to reignite your creative spark, you can reap those benefits of continued creativity over a long period of time.
Poornika Ananth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney and the governing federal Liberals must work to reverse the trends in rising violent crime. Canada needs a federal minister with clear responsibility for the prevention of violent crime, supported by a deputy minister with no other responsibilities than stopping violence before it happens.
The evidence and successes in other countries suggest this approach could reduce violent and serious crime by 50 per cent in the next five years.
Canadian homicide rates have increased by 50 per cent in the past 10 years, returning to levels from the early 2000s. Black and Indigenous Canadians are victimized at rates several times higher than the national rate. Intimate partner and sexual violence are at epidemic levels, with one in three women experiencing some form in their lifetime.
Recent federal and provincial election campaigns left the impression that spending more on prisons and policing is enough to stop violent and serious crime.
Current crime-fighting proposals lack concrete, evidence-based actions and proven public health strategies that are known to significantly and cost-effectively reduce violent crime.
Over the last 50 years, research in Canada and internationally has identified a short list of programs proven to reduce violent crime by as much as 50 per cent within three years.
These initiatives are promoted by prestigious organizations such as the World Health Organization and the United Kingdom’s Youth Endowment Fund. The non-partisan Washington State Institute for Public Policy has also demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of many of these programs compared to the dominant systems of policing and incarceration. These initiatives include:
• Community violence interveners who build trust with the young men most involved in violence and help them go back to school, get job training and gain control over the emotions that lead to senseless violence.
• Stop Now and Plan, developed in Toronto, reaches young men as they enter adolescence to problem-solve instead of resorting to violence.
Public health strategies that diagnose the risk factors that contribute to crime and implement effective solutions have cut crime in half in other countries.
In the 2000s, the Scottish city of Glasgow established a small violence reduction unit and organized community outreach to young men most involved in a violent lifestyle. The results were a 50 per cent reduction within three years.
By 2020, the U.K. replicated the violence reduction unit model across more than half the country, where independent evaluations have demonstrated a 25 per cent reduction in violent crime in areas with a unit. While some areas are still facing problems with youth violence, experts point to multi-agency work as most effective when partners prioritized youth violence.
In 2023 in the United States, Joe Biden’s administration established the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention and provided funding for cities to implement proven solutions, including community violence interveners.
The mayor of Boston based her public health strategy on convening citywide departments, community organizations and experts in violence prevention. By increasing outreach workers and teaching problem-solving skills, Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reduce violence by 20 per cent within three years — only to overachieve by cutting it by 50 per cent in two years
What Canadian officials should do
The Ontario Police Act calls for public health strategies called community safety and well-being plans to tackle the risk factors that contribute to crime and monitor results.
When she was elected in 2023, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow called for strategies to combat gun violence and violence against women. She called for “a scientific public health approach, like the one exemplified by Glasgow’s efforts to address violence as a public health issue (that) has proven effective in reducing violence.”
No Canadian officials are doing the smart planning or making the affordable and smart investments to reduce violent and serious crime significantly.
Carney can and should lead by example. The federal government can invest in stopping violence before it happens by:
Developing the human capacity nationally for smart community safety planning;
Establishing a knowledge centre on violence prevention;
Shifting from its current funding model of short-term projects to partnering with the provinces via sustained and adequate funding of effective violence prevention programs.
Prevention saves money
Parliamentary committees have recommended an annual investment equivalent to five per cent of spending on police and corrections, or about $400 million federally, and $900 million from other orders of government.
Research, results and best practices make clear that a 25 per cent reduction in violent and serious crime could be achieved within five years, and a 50 per cent reduction in a decade.
That would mean 200 fewer lives lost and more than 500,000 fewer victims of violence in the next five years, and significantly less money — as much as $1.5 billion — spent annually on police and prisons.
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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steven W. Kerrigan, Professor of Precision Therapeutics, School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
The mouth is often described as a window to overall health – and for good reason. A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease. While these two areas of health may seem unrelated, the condition of your oral health can have far-reaching effects on the heart.
Gum disease and oral infections can trigger inflammation, allow harmful bacteria into the bloodstream, and, in severe cases, even lead to direct infection of heart tissue. Together, these effects can contribute to serious, sometimes life-threatening, cardiovascular conditions.
At the centre of this connection lies periodontitis – a severe form of gum disease caused by long-term plaque buildup and inadequate oral hygiene. Left untreated, plaque irritates and inflames gum tissue, eventually causing it to recede and deteriorate.
This breakdown gives oral bacteria easier access to the bloodstream. Everyday actions like brushing, flossing, or chewing – and especially dental procedures – can provide a pathway for these microbes to travel through the body.
Once in the bloodstream, certain bacteria can attach to the endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessels. This disrupts the vascular barrier, making it easier for infection to spread throughout the body, including to vital organs. In extreme cases, this can lead to organ failure – or even death.
Inflammation and infection
Systemic inflammation is one of the main ways oral health affects heart health. Chronic periodontitis triggers a prolonged immune response, increasing levels of key inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein and cytokines.
These molecules can damage blood vessel linings and contribute to the development of atherosclerosis – a condition that narrows arteries, raises blood pressure and dramatically increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Inflammation is now recognised not only as a symptom of cardiovascular disease but also as a driving force behind it. This insight elevates oral care from a cosmetic concern to a critical aspect of heart disease prevention.
Poor oral hygiene can also increase the risk of infective endocarditis (IE), a serious infection of the heart’s inner lining or valves. This condition typically occurs when oral bacteria – especially from the streptococcus viridans group –enter the bloodstream and colonise damaged areas of the heart.
People with pre-existing valve abnormalities, prosthetic valves, or congenital heart defects are particularly vulnerable. For patients with prosthetic valves or certain heart conditions, dentists may even recommend antibiotics before specific procedures to minimise the risk of infective endocarditis. IE is a medical emergency requiring prolonged antibiotic treatment or, in some cases, surgery.
Epidemiological studies support this oral-cardiac link. People with gum disease are significantly more likely to suffer from heart disease. While these studies can’t always prove direct causation, the correlations are strong – even after accounting for shared risk factors like smoking, diabetes and poor diet.
One study found that people with periodontitis were up to twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease compared to those with healthy gums. Other studies point to a “dose-response” effect: the more severe the gum disease, the greater the cardiovascular risk.
Oral microbiome
Smoking, unhealthy diets, excessive alcohol consumption and diabetes all contribute to both poor oral health and heart disease. Tobacco weakens gum tissue and suppresses immune function. Alcohol can dry out the mouth and disrupt the oral microbiome. And poorly controlled diabetes impairs circulation and slows healing, worsening both periodontal and cardiovascular conditions.
This overlap doesn’t make the research less meaningful – in fact, it strengthens the case for addressing health holistically. Healthy habits benefit the whole body, not just isolated systems.
Emerging research also suggests that oral hygiene may influence heart health through changes in the body’s microbiome. A poorly maintained mouth allows harmful bacteria to overtake beneficial microbes, causing an imbalance known as dysbiosis. This can disrupt immune function and contribute to chronic inflammation and atherosclerosis.
To be clear, good dental hygiene alone won’t eliminate heart disease risk. Genetics, diet, exercise and underlying conditions all play crucial roles. But maintaining oral health is a simple, effective and often overlooked part of preventive health care. Regular brushing and flossing, routine dental visits and prompt treatment of gum disease can all reduce the risk of systemic complications.
Increasingly, health professionals are recognising the importance of collaboration. Cardiologists are being encouraged to ask about oral health, and dentists are urged to consider cardiovascular risk factors during checkups. This integrated approach can lead to earlier detection, more personalised care, and better long-term outcomes.
The mouth is far more than just the beginning of the digestive system – it plays a vital role in overall wellbeing. The connection between oral health and heart disease underscores the need to treat oral care as a foundational part of preventive medicine. By brushing up on good habits, individuals can protect not only their smile – but their heart, too
Steven W. Kerrigan receives funding from Science Foundation Ireland, Health Research Board of Ireland, Irish Research Council and Enterprise Ireland .
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ruth Itzhaki, Professor Emeritus of Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professorial Fellow, University of Oxford
The common cold sore virus, which is often caught in childhood, usually stays in the body for life – quietly dormant in the nerves. Now and then, things like stress, illness or injury can trigger it, bringing on a cold sore in some people. But this same virus – called herpes simplex virus type 1 – may also play an important role in something far more serious: Alzheimer’s disease.
Over 30 years ago, my colleagues and I made a surprising discovery. We found that this cold sore virus can be present in the brains of older people. It was the first clear sign that a virus could be quietly living in the brain, which was long thought to be completely germ-free – protected by the so-called “blood-brain barrier”.
Then we discovered something even more striking. People who have a certain version of a gene (called APOE-e4) that increases their risk of Alzheimer’s, and who have been infected with this virus, have a risk that is many times greater.
To investigate further, we studied brain cells that we infected with the virus. They produced the same abnormal proteins (amyloid and tau) found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
We believe that the virus stays mainly dormant in the body for years – possibly decades. But later in life, as the immune system gets weaker, it can enter the brain and reactivate there. When it does, it will damage brain cells and trigger inflammation. Over time, repeated flare-ups could gradually cause the kind of damage that leads to Alzheimer’s in some people.
We later found the virus’s DNA inside the sticky clumps of these proteins, which are found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Even more encouragingly, antiviral treatments reduced this damage in the lab, suggesting that drugs might one day help to slow or even prevent the disease.
Large population studies by others found that severe infections, specifically with the cold sore virus, was a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s, and that specific antiviral treatment reduced the risk.
Our research didn’t stop there. We wondered if other viruses that lie dormant in the body might have similar effects – such as the one responsible for chickenpox and shingles.
Herpes hides out in our body from childhood – occasionally erupting as cold sores. Domaskina/Shutterstock
Shingles vaccine offers another clue
When we studied health records from hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, we saw something interesting. People who had shingles had only a slightly higher risk of developing dementia. Yet those who had the shingles vaccine were less likely to develop dementia at all.
This supported our long-held proposal that preventing common infections could lower the risk of Alzheimer’s. Consistently, studies by others showed that infections were indeed a risk and that some other vaccines were protective against Alzheimer’s.
We then explored how risk factors for Alzheimer’s such as infections and head injuries could trigger the hidden virus in the brain.
Using an advanced 3D model of the brain with a dormant herpes infection, we found that when we introduced other infections or simulated a brain injury, the cold sore virus reactivated and caused damage similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s. But when we used a treatment to reduce inflammation, the virus stayed inactive, and the damage didn’t happen.
All of this suggests that the virus that causes cold sores could be an important contributor to Alzheimer’s, especially in people with certain genetic risk factors. It also opens the door to possible new ways of preventing the disease, such as vaccines or antiviral treatments that stop the virus from waking up and harming the brain.
What began as a link between cold sores and memory loss has grown into a much bigger story – one that may help us understand, and eventually reduce, the risk of one of the most feared diseases of our time.
Ruth Itzhaki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Britain’s booming green energy generation has a costly side-effect: the national electricity system operator has had to compensate wind turbine operators that could have produced more clean electricity than the grid could take.
The cost of paying windfarms to temporarily switch off rose significantly in early 2025, surpassing £250 million in the first two months of the year. This figure not only includes these “constraint payments” to windfarm operators, but also payments to gas power plants to switch on and meet demand in the south of England that could theoretically be met by wind energy.
Wind power is often generated in remote areas like the Scottish Highlands, where there is low electricity demand. To transmit this power over long distances to areas of higher demand (mostly in the south of England) requires power lines, but these have transmission limits and there are not enough of them.
Britain will only make effective use of its energy potential if grid-scale energy storage keeps pace with the expansion of new windfarms and other forms of intermittent renewable energy, such as solar.
Large-scale battery systems, pumped hydro and other storage methods could capture the excess energy injected by windfarms on windy days and release it when needed. But are these energy storage options arriving quickly enough?
Why is storage so important?
Most British consumers will not see a significant change in how they use electricity with the introduction of planned storage installations, other than fewer blips in power quality, such as flickering or dimming lights.
You might spot these new energy storage facilities in rows of what look like shipping containers but are actually batteries. And the national grid (which serves England, Wales and Scotland – Northern Ireland has a separate electricity network) will be more capable of responding quickly to even minor variations in electricity supply and demand, meaning fewer headlines about curtailed windfarms.
The UK government is aiming to build up to 27 gigawatts of battery storage by 2030 (in 2023, battery capacity was estimated to be around 5 gigawatts). There are applications totalling 59 gigawatts of battery storage in the connections queue for 2030.
Some of these are speculative – introduced to secure connection slots and permissions, with the intention of selling the rights on. These connections will not necessarily be built, yet contribute to long delays in approvals.
As a result, the energy regulator Ofgem has been working with network operators to reform the connections queue. This includes new rules and more coordination between grid operators and project developers, as well as incentives (such as lower connection charges) to encourage battery developers to ensure their output can be adjusted to accommodate network constraints when necessary.
Having substantial grid-scale energy storage could help stabilise electricity prices, which might give households lower and less volatile bills. It would also reduce the need to fire up gas generators during supply lulls, lowering the influence of expensive imported gas on electricity prices.
Options and opportunities
Storing excess renewable energy involves a range of technologies. Short-duration storage options such as batteries can supply energy ranging from seconds to a few hours. Long-duration storage, such as pumped hydro, can supply energy for several hours, days or more.
Pumped hydro is the oldest long-duration storage technology. It involves storing vast amounts of energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir when electricity is plentiful, and releasing it to a lower reservoir through a turbine when needed. Dinorwig in north Wales and Cruachan in western Scotland are capable of storing 9 and 7 gigawatt-hours of energy, respectively.
Major expansions are planned, such as the new pumped hydro storage scheme Coire Glas in Scotland. Expected to be completed around 2030-31, it is designed to store 30 gigawatt-hours, adding vast reserves of energy to the grid.
Britain’s largest grid-scale battery installation, the Minety battery storage project completed in 2022 in Wiltshire, southern England, is capable of absorbing or delivering 150 megawatts – roughly equivalent to the power demand of 450,000 UK households.
There is a drive by energy companies to develop new forms of long-duration storage. Along with hydrogen, liquid‑air storage is capable of inter-seasonal storage. This would allow solar energy collected during the summer to be available for release during the duller autumn and winter months.
In liquid-air plants, excess electricity is used to cool air to a liquid which can then be stored in insulated tanks. When electricity is required, the liquid air is heated and turned back into a gas, which moves a turbine and generates electricity. A 50-megawatt liquid-air plant planned near Manchester is expected to start commercial operation in 2026.
In hydrogen energy storage plants, surplus electricity powers an electrolyser that splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is stored and, when electricity is needed, fed into a fuel cell or turbine to generate the electricity. An example is the proposed Aldbrough facility in east Yorkshire, which is expected to be in operation by 2030 and will have a storage capacity of 320 gigawatt-hours. This facility will use three repurposed salt caverns originally developed to store natural gas.
Energy storage technology has become a serious business opportunity, with companies investing billions of pounds into building new facilities. The variety of projects in the pipeline suggests the UK will be better able to avoid curtailing wind energy in the future, even accounting for growth in wind power capacity. Paying windfarm operators to switch off may soon be a thing of the past.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Victor Becerra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
For decades, neuroscientists have developed mathematical frameworks to explain how brain activity drives behaviour in predictable, repetitive scenarios, such as while playing a game. These algorithms have not only described brain cell activity with remarkable precision but also helped develop artificial intelligence with superhuman achievements in specific tasks, such as playing Atari or Go.
Yet these frameworks fall short of capturing the essence of human and animal behaviour: our extraordinary ability to generalise, infer and adapt. Our study, published in Nature late last year, provides insights into how brain cells in mice enable this more complex, intelligent behaviour.
Unlike machines, humans and animals can flexibly navigate new challenges. Every day, we solve new problems by generalising from our knowledge or drawing from our experiences. We cook new recipes, meet new people, take a new path – and we can imagine the aftermath of entirely novel choices.
It was in the mid-20th century that psychologist Edward Tolman described the concept of “cognitive maps”. These are internal, mental representations of the world that organise our experiences and allow us to predict what we’ll see next.
Starting in the 1970s, researchers identified a beautiful system of specialised cells in the hippocampus (the brain’s memory centre) and entorhinal cortex (an area that deals with memory, navigation, and time perception) in rodents that form a literal map of our environments.
These include “place cells”, which fire at specific locations, and “grid cells” that create a spatial framework. Together, these and a host of other neurons encode distances, goals and locations, forming a precise mental map of the physical world and where we are within it.
And now our attention has turned to other areas of cognition beyond finding our way around generalisation, inference, imagination, social cognition and memory. The same areas of the brain that help us navigate in space are also involved in these functions.
Cells for generalising?
We wanted to know if there are cells that organise the knowledge of our behaviour, rather than the outside world, and how they work. Specifically, what are the algorithms that underlie the activity of brain cells as we generalise from past experience? How do we rustle up that new pasta dish?
And we did find such cells. There are neurons that tell us “where we are” in a sequence of behaviour (we haven’t named the cells).
To uncover the brain cells, networks and algorithms that perform these roles, we studied mice, training the animals to complete a task. The task had a sequence of actions with a repeating structure. Mice moved through four locations, or “goals”, containing a water reward (A, B, C and D) in loops.
When we moved the location of the goals, the mice were able to infer what came next in the sequence – even when they had never experienced that exact scenario before.
When mice reached goal D in a new location for the first time, they immediately knew to return to goal A. This wasn’t memory, because they’d never encountered it. Instead, it shows that the mice understood the general structure of the task and tracked their position within it.
The mice had electrodes implanted into the brain, which allowed us to capture neural activity during the task. We found that specific cells in the cortex (the outermost layer of the brain) collectively mapped the animal’s goal progress. For example, one cell could fire when the animal was 70% of the way to its goal, regardless of where the goal was or how far away.
Some cells tracked progress towards immediate subgoals – like chopping vegetables in our cooking analogy – while others mapped progress towards the overall goal, such as finishing the meal.
Together, these goal progress cells created a system that gave our location in behavioural space rather than a physical space. Crucially, the system is flexible and can be updated if the task changes. This encoding allows the brain to predict the upcoming sequence of actions without relying on simple associative memories.
Common experiences
Why should the brain bother to learn general structural representations of tasks? Why not create a new representation for each one? For generalisation to be worthwhile, the tasks we complete must contain regularities that can be exploited — and they do.
The behaviour we compose to reach our goals is replete with repetition. Generalisation allows knowledge to extend beyond individual instances. Throughout life, we encounter a highly structured distribution of tasks. And each day we solve new problems by generalising from past experiences.
A previous encounter with making bolognese can inform a new ragu recipe, because the same general steps apply to both (such as starting with frying onions and adding fresh herbs at the end). We propose that the goal-progress cells in the cortex serve as the building blocks – internal frameworks that organise abstract relationships between events, actions and outcomes. While we’ve only shown this in mice, it is plausible that the same thing happens in the human brain.
By documenting these cellular networks and the algorithms that underlie them, we are building new bridges between human and animal neuroscience, and between biological and artificial intelligence. And pasta.
Special thanks to Alison Cranage for her support in writing this article.
Mohamady El-Gaby receives funding from the Wellcome Trust.
As temperatures rise and sandals make their seasonal debut, our feet step into the spotlight. But summer presents challenges that make foot care especially important. Heat, sun exposure and the temptation to go barefoot can lead to dry, cracked heels – leaving feet feeling uncomfortable.
The good news? A few simple habits can keep your feet healthy, smooth and ready for sandal season.
Cracked heels – also known as heel fissures – develop due to dry skin and reduced elasticity. Because feet lack sebaceous glands, they don’t produce natural oils, which makes them more prone to dryness. In response to friction and pressure, the skin thickens, but this added thickness can split under the stress of walking or standing.
Summer tends to exacerbate the issue. Open-back shoes like flip-flops allow the heel’s fat pad to expand, increasing stress on the surrounding skin. Research shows that repeated exposure to hot and dry environments significantly reduces skin hydration, increasing the risk of fissures developing. So, long hours standing at events or walking on hot surfaces – like pavement or poolside tiles – further weaken the skin’s barrier.
Other contributing factors include obesity, which places greater pressure on the heels. Conditions like eczema and psoriasis, especially when they cause broken skin, significantly compromise the skin barrier. These conditions can lead to inflammation, dryness and reduced moisture retention, weakening the skin’s ability to act as a protective barrier. Excess moisture from sweating or prolonged soaking may soften the skin too much and reduce its resilience, making it prone to fissures.
Cracked heels aren’t just a cosmetic problem – they can become painful and even dangerous. Without treatment, fissures can deepen and bleed, making walking uncomfortable and increasing the risk of infection.
For those with health conditions like diabetes, hypothyroidism or vascular disease, even small cracks can escalate into serious complications, including cellulitis or ulcers. Poor circulation and reduced healing ability mean these issues can quickly become severe.
Prevention
Prevention is simple and effective when made part of your daily routine.
Moisturise daily – use creams with 10% urea or lactic acid to retain moisture and soften thickened skin.
Wear supportive footwear – while sandals are summer staples, many lack proper support. Choose shoes with cushioning and heel support when possible. If you wear open-back styles, alternate with more structured footwear to minimise heel stress.
Avoid going barefoot – walking on rough or hot surfaces dries out the skin and causes micro-traumas that increase the risk of cracking.
Exfoliate weekly – briefly soak your feet (for up to five minutes), then gently remove dead skin with a pumice stone or file. This prevents the buildup of thickened skin.
Treatment
If cracks have already formed, timely treatment can help heal and restore your skin’s health.
Apply a heel balm – use a formula containing 10–25% urea and up to 6% salicylic acid. Urea deeply hydrates and softens thick skin, while salicylic acid aids in exfoliation. Avoid using these products during the day if you’re wearing open shoes, as they can make your feet slippery, increasing the risk of falls and injuries.
Nighttime occlusion – apply balm before bed and cover your feet with cotton socks to lock in moisture. Studies show this improves hydration and speeds up healing.
See a professional if needed – if your heels are severely cracked, infected, or not responding to at-home care, consult a podiatrist. They may use medical adhesives or prescribe stronger treatments to support healing.
Take extra care if you’re in a high-risk category – if you have diabetes, circulatory issues or inflammatory skin conditions, regular foot checks and prompt treatment of minor cracks are crucial. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines recommend professional care and properly fitted footwear to help avoid serious complications.
Caution: foot peel socks
Exfoliating foot peels – often sold as “foot peel socks” – contain exfoliants like glycolic, lactic or salicylic acid, usually in concentrations of 5–17%. These acids help shed layers of dead skin and can be effective for general roughness. However, they are not recommended for cracked heels or heel fissures.
When used on broken or fragile skin, these peels can cause irritation, delay healing and increase the risk of infection. Those with underlying health issues that affect skin integrity – such as diabetes, poor circulation or chronic skin conditions – should be particularly cautious. In these cases, experts advise against chemical exfoliants due to the higher risk of skin damage and slower healing.
Instead, targeted treatments like heel balms containing 10–25% urea offer a safer, more suitable option. These help soften and hydrate dry, thickened skin without compromising the protective barrier.
Your feet support you every day; this summer, return the favour. With a bit of daily care, smart footwear choices and early intervention when problems arise, you can keep your feet looking and feeling great.
Cracked heels don’t have to be part of your summer story.
Craig Gwynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel B. Oerther, Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Tatooine’s moisture farming equipment stands in the desert of Tunisia, where parts of the ‘Star Wars’ movie series were filmed.Véronique Debord-Lazaro via Flickr, CC BY-SA
Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.
Moisture farming
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side.
May the Fourth – and the Force – be with you.
Daniel B. Oerther is affiliated with the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists.
William Schonberg occasionally receives funding from NASA.
Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent accusers of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has died at age 41. Her family said she died by suicide at her farm in Australia.
Giuffre had long accused Prince Andrew of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. She brought a civil sexual assault case against him, which Andrew ultimately settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. He has denied all claims against him. But the accusations and his friendship with Epstein ultimately led to Andrew’s partial withdrawal from public life.
Giuffre’s story is a poignant reminder of the great consequences to anyone who speaks out about their abuse, especially someone who speaks out against the powerful.
Giuffre was not just a victim of Epstein’s crimes, she was also the focus of brutal tabloid media coverage in the UK and around the world. That’s not to say there weren’t moments of great reporting. But those were often overshadowed by sensationalising and stereotyping that regularly accompany reporting on those who come forward with allegations of sexual abuse.
A search for Virginia Giuffre on news database Factiva yields over 25,000 results. It’s hard to imagine carrying the weight of so much attention, positive or negative.
News coverage was a mix of support and scrutiny, starting almost 15 years ago and then intensifying in the last six years, when Epstein was arrested. He died while in jail, awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
The first wave of news coverage on Giuffre dates back to early 2011. The tabloids and broadsheets often referred to Giuffre (known as Virginia Roberts then) as a “masseuse” or more explicit terms, while also reporting that she was a minor when she was first allegedly sexually exploited and abused by Epstein and only 17 when she first met Prince Andrew. Coverage largely included one-word quotes from Giuffre, but nothing that humanised her to readers.
The Times and other publications reported on Andrew’s friendly connection to Epstein – though there was no direct accusation against him at that time.
There was a breezy tone to coverage that focused on catchy wordplay headlines between the prince and the “pervert” Epstein. Epstein was already a registered sex offender in 2008, but there was little reflection on his horrendous actions that led him to that title.
More glaringly, there was little to no concern for Giuffre or other survivors. They were salacious fodder. There was little empathy for what they experienced and the risks they took speaking publicly. The main focus was on the apparent embarrassment of Andrew’s friendship with Epstein, which eventually led to the prince stepping down from his trade envoy role.
The important men and their roles were the news angles. Giuffre was only a supporting character.
The second wave of news coverage on Giuffre happened in 2019, when Epstein was arrested for accusations of child sex trafficking. She was named in court documents and noted as a victim of Epstein in media, but was again overshadowed by Epstein’s connections to other powerful men such as Donald Trump or Bill Clinton (both deny knowing of Epstein’s crimes).
None of this is to imply that those linked to Epstein shouldn’t be named and investigated. But, as my research shows, when powerful men are accused, the coverage largely revolves around those powerful men and the monetary or career consequences to them. The survivors and the abuse and trauma they experience are a footnote.
Research shows that how journalists evaluate the newsworthiness of a story often values power structures, men’s perspectives and celebrity status. Therefore, when someone like Giuffre does come forward, her story and voice come secondary to the more powerful accused.
Changing headlines
A shift in the tone of coverage came in 2020, when Giuffre and others were the focus of a Netflix docuseries on Epstein’s crimes. Watching the detailed accounts from so many humanised Giuffre and others, while showing the tremendous weight put on survivors when they come forward. Their stories elicited empathetic responses from viewers.
News coverage has made some progress in the last decade due to the ##MeToo movement and survivors speaking out. However, this has since been tempered by a backlash to #MeToo – and problematic attitudes persist within news and entertainment industries. Threats of legal action from those accused can leave journalists hesitant to report on sexual abuse.
In February 2022, Andrew settled a civil sexual assault case with Giuffre for an undisclosed amount. The coverage was more sensitive to Giuffre than a decade prior – the mislabelling and scandalising were mostly left out – but still lacked survivors’ perspectives. Andrew was stripped of his royal and military titles at the time but appears to remain in standing with the royal family unofficially.
There has also been compassion in the coverage of Giuffre’s death, particularly in interviews with her family and friends. There are calls for accountability from Andrew, as well as the usual, terrible tabloid coverage exploiting the situation.
One limitation of reporting on sexual abuse cases is that often survivors don’t want to speak publicly to news media because of the tremendous risks and consequences they face. Survivors face backlash when telling friends and family in their private circles because they are blamed, or are not believed. These consequences are intensified when survivors go public.
Several organisations have provided guidelines to news organisations on how to report more fairly and accurately on sexual abuse.
Many people who experience sexual abuse never come forward. Giuffre did, and repeatedly spoke to media for over a decade. While some news organisations learned how to be more sensitive, the focus has never been enough on her story, her life and her determination.
If any of the content in this piece affects you or someone you know, resources are available.
In the UK: Samaritans are available by phone, for free, at 116 123, or by email at jo@samaritans.org. Further resources can also be found here.
If you are in crisis in the US, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Lindsey Blumell receives funding from City St George’s, University of London
Ukraine has finally signed its minerals agreement with the US. The deal states that Washington will eventually receive a share of the profits from the sale of Ukrainian natural resources, providing an economic incentive to continue investing in Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction.
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessant, says the deal demonstrates the Donald Trump administration’s commitment to peace in Ukraine.
On the surface, there is nothing surprising about the deal. The idea that natural resource extraction can play a role in building peace has been around for a decade or two, and has been promoted by the World Bank, the UN and the mining industry itself.
But what is surprising is how the conversation about mining and peace has changed. It used to be about increasing prosperity in war-torn countries, rather than the “who gets what” that has been associated with this deal.
The idea that mining can contribute to peace emerged somewhat paradoxically from the demonstrated capacity of natural resources to drive conflict in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone. The theory is that mining can also lead to development – and therefore peace – if it is managed properly.
If local communities are consulted, revenues are shared fairly, harms are minimised, and if there is transparency and accountability, a mine can play a role in lifting countries out of the economic, environmental and social mess war brings.
In reality, things are more complicated. The idea that mining can bring about positive change suffers from the same top-down and externally led approach to building peace as the wider peacebuilding model in which it sits. It doesn’t necessarily take local realities and aspirations into account.
But over the past two decades, natural resources in conflict-affected areas have attracted an enormous amount of attention from UN agencies. The United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep), for example, established an initiative in 2008 aimed at understanding the risks and opportunities presented by high-value natural resources.
It developed policies and practices related to mining intended to be part of the UN’s peace and security architecture. These included guidance for UN staff working in post-conflict countries that are rich in resources.
In Sierra Leone, Unep identified the inability of the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor environmental performance and force compliance as a significant risk to the sustainable development of the mining industry. The agency had become overwhelmed by the number of environmental impact assessments submitted for review as the sector expanded after the end of the civil war in 2002.
A dedicated project to build capacity in Sierra Leone was set up by the UN to remedy this. The project team report that the environmental impact assessment process itself provided an opportunity for dialogue and trust-building between those involved.
Around the same time, a raft of initiatives were was developed for the extractive sector itself to encourage responsible mining. These included the Kimberley Process, a UN-mandated certification scheme designed to eliminate the trade in conflict diamonds. Sierra Leone has been a member since it was launched in 2003.
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based organisation of government, industry and civil society representatives was also established in 2003. Its aim is to promote the good governance of oil, gas and mineral extraction through the reporting of revenues and payments.
The concept of good governance has been expanded to include promoting the participation of women, as well as the disclosure of information relating to the environmental impact of a mine. Over 50 countries now implement the EITI Standard.
All these initiatives and processes can be criticised. But the point is that natural resources in conflict zones have, to a degree at least, been understood as sites for negotiation and dialogue for some time.
Lowering the bar
The natural resources beneath Ukraine have become sites for something else – a conflict-riven back-and-forth over their control. And it’s not just in Ukraine. The US is reportedly considering a minerals-for-security deal in the DRC, where Rwandan-backed rebels are currently seizing resource-rich territory in the east.
The bar appears to have dropped substantially where mining and peacebuilding is concerned. In the heyday of the liberal peacebuilding project, metal and mineral deposits in war-torn countries, like the copper beneath Afghanistan, promised a more positive future, albeit with caution. That optimism now seems misplaced.
In Afghanistan, this is because the country has fallen back under the control of the Taliban. Mines are quickly being developed to take advantage of the country’s mineral wealth. But the technical, financial and environmental checks associated with mining are reportedly being bypassed. There are concerns that any revenues won’t benefit the population in the way they should.
In Ukraine, it’s something different. The mineral deposits there are being used to prop up geopolitical ambitions that reflect the dangerous, transactional and increasingly extractive world we now seem to live in. Specifically, the Ukrainian mineral deposits are bringing an authoritarian, Trumpian version of peace to life.
It is a peace that comes through the geopolitical expression of power by the operation of mines, the acquisition of territory, the expulsion of citizens from certain places, and the top-down transformation of other people’s space.
This has already expressed itself in Trump’s vision for the US to take over the Gaza Strip, which prompted the UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, to warn against ethnic cleansing.
I have written about the problem of natural resource-related peacebuilding before. Whether liberal or illiberal, this problem is the same: geological resources are non-renewable.
There is a profound paradox here. Whatever we want these resources to do for us, they can’t do it indefinitely. And we are heading for even more trouble if we think they can.
Expecting a voracious Trump administration or a beleagured Ukrainian one to think about this is expecting too much. But therein lies the tragedy of current peacebuilding endeavours.
They are fixated on the here-and-now, in the hope that the social, environmental, ecological and geological future will take care of itself. Unfortunately, it won’t.
Bridget Storrie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Vatican’s College of Cardinals will soon gather in Rome to elect a new head of the Catholic Church following the death of Pope Francis.
As the church prepares for the papal conclave, the world is assessing Francis’s legacy and his stance on the role of women in the church, LGBTQ+ rights and the needs of migrants and refugees.
In many ways, it’s a remarkable document. At once rational and urgent, it calls on all of us — “every person living on this planet” — to think about what we are doing to the only planet we have.
Our common home, Francis wrote, “is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.” And yet, we “have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”
Unlike the IPCC report, however, Francis didn’t pull his punches. “The Earth, our home,” he wrote, “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
Francis didn’t hold back
A few months after the publication of Laudato Si’, the world gathered in Paris to draft a new climate treaty. It too is a remarkable document. However, if the authors of the Paris Agreement couldn’t mention the economic roots of the climate crisis – they couldn’t even use the term fossil fuels — the pope could and did.
Francis relentlessly called out our “models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment,” our “irrational confidence in progress and human abilities” and our “blind confidence in technical solutions.”
He was critical of “current models of production and consumption” and our faith in “the invisible forces of the market,” as well as our “misguided anthropocentrism” and our “throwaway culture.”
Francis pointed a finger at obstructionism and denial. He worried about the rise of social media, which has led to disconnection from each other and from nature. And he was critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth.”
Although terribly “attractive to economists, financiers, and experts in technology,” it’s a fantasy based on the lie “that there is an infinite supply of the Earth’s goods.” There isn’t, and the planet is “being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”
Using ironic quotation marks, he even criticized “green” rhetoric, so fashionable in eco-capitalist circles.
It wasn’t the first time Francis talked about a global economy that doesn’t work. A few years earlier, in 2012, he caused a minor fit in some circles with the publication of Evangelli Gaudium. Wealth moves up, not down, he argued, while the poor are excluded and grow in number.
The late American pundit Rush Limbaugh called it “pure Marxism.” Undeterred, Francis went further in Laudato Si’ when he linked the climate crisis to an economy premised on constant consumption.
Of course, Francis had stuck to his knitting in one important way: on at least four separate occasions in Laudato Si’, he singled out abortion — or, in his words, “eliminating children” — as part of the climate problem. He wrote:
“Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.”
No, it doesn’t. Moreover, empowering women through access to birth control and abortion care is part of the solution to poverty in both the Global South and the Global North, something Francis cared deeply about, like his namesake St. Francis of Assisi.
In 2023, Francis published Laudate Deum, a short followup to Laudato Si’. At the same time as he urged the world to act, he condemned those who blame climate change on the poor for having so many children and who “attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries.”
Still, Laudato Si’ invites all of us to connect the dots between growth, consumption, poverty and climate breakdown. One doesn’t need to be Catholic, or even religious, to read Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change for what it is: a powerful and deeply moral reminder that the climate is not something separate from us.
To quote Francis, it’s a “common good” that belongs to all of us.
Donald Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton
Supporters of charter schools rally outside the Supreme Court building on April 30, 2025, during oral arguments over a proposed Catholic charter school.AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
As demonstrators gathered outside, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 30, 2025, about whether Oklahoma can operate the nation’s firstfaith-basedcharter school. St. Isidore of Seville would be a virtual, K-12 school run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa.
Charters are typically public schools of choice, funded by taxpayer dollars. Unlike regular public schools, they are free from most state regulations on curriculum and teacher qualifications. Until now, however, charters, like other public schools, have been secular.
The litigation over St. Isidore reveals a built-in tension in the First Amendment religion clauses, under which “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” While the free exercise clause guarantees people the right to believe as they wish, controversy remains over what constitutes an “establishment” of religion.
Here, the specific question is the extent to which, if any, states can spend public funds to allow parents to enroll their children in a faith-based charter school. Supporters are appealing a 2024 ruling from the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, which held that a religious charter school violated state law, as well as the Oklahoma and federal constitutions.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court bench in the state Capitol building in Oklahoma City. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
On the other hand, the attorney for St. Isidore’s challengers – led by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who blocked the school’s opening – said that a victory for St. Isidore “would result in the astounding rule that states not only may but must fund and create public religious schools, an astounding reversal from this court’s time-honored precedents.”
It remains to be seen whether a ruling in favor of St. Isidore’s would prove to be a win for religious freedom, as Stitt claimed, or a threat. Even so, as a professor focused on education law, I believe an order to continue expanding taxpayer aid to faith-based institutions looks more likely after Wednesday’s arguments, where five of the eight participating justices seemed sympathetic to St. Isidore.
First, do the teachings of “a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state to offer a free educational option for interested students?” In other words, is a charter school a state actor?
Second, the justices will weigh how the First Amendment religion clauses apply to a faith-based charter school. According to the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The question is whether Oklahoma violates the free exercise clause by excluding schools from the charter program “solely because the schools are religious.” If so, is the exclusion justified by concerns about the government “establishing” religion?
The dispute over St. Isidore comes at a time when the Supreme Court has been steadily expanding the limits of aid to faith-based schools. Starting in 2016, a trio of cases have held that states cannot deny institutions and believers generally available, taxpayer-funded aid based solely on their religions. These cases covered aid to enhance playground safety at a Missouri preschool, the right to participate in Montana’s educational tax credit program, and providing tuition assistance to Maine parents in districts lacking public secondary schools.
The other issue – the “state actor” question – essentially asks whether a state-funded school teaching Catholicism would constitute the government promoting a religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against doing so.
The Supreme Court building on April 30, 2025, the day of oral arguments in St. Isidore’s case. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, is also a Republican. However, he reversed his predecessor’s action allowing St. Isidore’s creation, arguing that the school “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion.”
In a 2024 brief to the Supreme Court, Drummond noted that Oklahoma’s “charter schools bear all of the hallmarks of a public school,” such as being entirely state-funded. During April arguments, his attorney emphasized that charters are “required to be public schools by the Congress of the United States and the legislatures of 47 states.”
If this argument prevails, it means St. Isidore is a government actor, and therefore it cannot promote any one religion over another.
The state action claim may be difficult for St. Isidore’s supporters to overcome. However, the ace in the hole is the Supreme Court’s recent trend of expanding the boundaries of government aid to faith-based schools and their students.
Justice Amy Barrett, a supporter of increased aid to faith-based schools, recused herself from participating in the oral arguments, without explanation. This leaves five justices who support expanding public aid for faith-based schools: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Roberts.
Oral arguments
During questioning, Roberts commented that St. Isidore’s creation seems like “much more comprehensive [state] involvement” with a religious organization, compared with the previous cases that expanded taxpayer aid to religious schools – leaving the door open to speculation over how he might vote. Nevertheless, he and the other four proponents of aid appeared open to St. Isidore’s argument that to exclude faith-based schools from charter programs is unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion.
“All the religious school is saying is don’t exclude us on account of our religion,” Kavanaugh commented. He added, “You can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second class in the United States.”
The remaining justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – appeared skeptical of expanding state aid to faith-based schools.
Illustrating the tensions within the First Amendment, Sotomayor remarked to the attorney representing St. Isidore, “what you’re saying is the free exercise clause trumps the essence of the establishment clause.”
Jackson said to the same attorney that St. Isidore is “not being denied a benefit that everyone else gets. It’s being denied a benefit that no one else gets, which is the ability to establish a religious public school.”
If Roberts agrees with these three justices, resulting in a 4-4 tie, the judgment of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma would remain undisturbed.
In the words of the baseball sage Yogi Berra, “it ain’t over ‘till it’s over.” The court is expected to rule near the end of its term, likely in late June.
Charles J. Russo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
