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Category: Report

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump shrugs off stock market slump, but economic warning signs loom

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Conor O’Kane, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Bournemouth University

    bodrumsurf / Shutterstock

    During Donald Trump’s first term as US president, he regularly referred to rising stock markets as evidence of the success of his economic policies. “Highest Stock Market EVER”, Trump wrote on social media in 2017 after record gains. “That doesn’t just happen!”

    And after securing a second term in November 2024, some of Trump’s close advisers told the New York Times that the president “sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices”.

    This, in addition to a broader economic policy agenda committed to lower regulation and significant tax cuts, had Wall Street investors bullish about their prospects under the new Trump administration.

    But fears of an escalating trade war have seen the S&P 500, an index of the leading 500 publicly traded companies in the US, drop more than 10% from its February 2025 high. A decline of this magnitude in a major index is what professional traders refer to as a “correction”. In less than a month, roughly US$5 trillion (£3.9 trillion) has been wiped off the value of US stocks.

    So, what exactly is driving down stock prices? Economists cite the president’s brinkmanship, as well as his start-stop approach to tariffs with Canada and Mexico, as having rattled global investors. Some commentators believe this “chaotic” trade agenda has created huge uncertainty for consumers, investors and businesses.

    In view of such policies, a recent JP Morgan report said that US economic policy was “tilting away from growth”, and put the chances of a US recession at 40%, up from 30% at the start of the year. Moody’s Analytics has upped the odds of a US recession from 15% to 35%, citing tariffs as a key factor driving the downturn in its outlook.

    Any economic downturn would have an adverse impact on the profitability of US corporations, and the declining share prices reflect the negative outlook from investors.

    So far, the Trump administration appears unfazed by the US stock market decline. In an address to Congress on March 4, Trump declared his use of tariffs was all about making America rich again. “There will be a little disturbance, but we’re okay with that,” he said.

    The White House has, since then, announced that some short-term pain may be necessary for Trump to implement his trade agenda successfully, which is designed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.

    So, should we read this economic turbulence as a temporary blip? Or is it symptomatic of a more fundamental shift in the US economy?

    Change of strategy

    Stephen Miran, who was recently confirmed as chairman of Trump’s council of economic advisers, wrote a paper in November 2024 titled: A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. The paper gives us an insight into the Trump administration’s wider economic strategy.

    It sets out Trump’s desire “to reform the global trading system and put American industry on fairer ground vis-a-vis the rest of the world”. Miran cites persistent US dollar overvaluation as the root cause of economic imbalances.

    Miran does not believe that tariffs are inflationary, and argues that their use during Trump’s first presidential term had little discernible macroeconomic consequences. He does concede that tariffs may eventually lead to an appreciation – or further overvaluation – of the US dollar. However, Miran sees the extent of that appreciation as “debatable”.

    He sees tariffs as a tool for leverage in trade negotiations. The administration could, for example, agree to a reduction in tariffs in exchange for significant investment is the US by key trading partners. China investing in car manufacturing in the US is specifically mentioned in his analysis.

    Miran also states his belief that tariffs can be used to raise tax revenues from foreigners in order to retain low tax rates on American citizens.

    Some economists agree that the US dollar is overvalued. A combination of its role as the world’s reserve currency, as well as the attractiveness of the US economy as an investment destination, fuels demand for the US dollar and makes it stronger.

    A strong US dollar has made American manufacturing exports less competitive. This has cost American jobs. The “rust belt” states of the north-eastern and mid-western US have experienced a decline in manufacturing employment over the past 40 years, which is evidence of this.

    However, it is worth noting that the many US manufacturers who import manufactured parts or components to make their products do benefit from a stronger dollar. This is because it makes the parts and materials they are importing cheaper. US mortgage holders and investors also benefit from a stronger dollar through lower interest rates on loans.

    Steven Englander, the head of research and strategy at Standard Chartered bank, believes there are some contradictions in the Trump administration’s approach.

    In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Englander said: “The problem for the new administration is that it simultaneously wants a weaker dollar, a reduced trade deficit, capital inflows, and the dollar to remain the key currency in international reserves and payments.”

    Reduced trade deficits and capital inflows would typically strengthen the US dollar, as does its position as the world’s reserve currency.

    As Miran says in his paper: “There is a path by which the Trump administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit. But it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimise adverse consequences.”

    Only time will tell whether the Trump administration can successfully navigate this “narrow” path. In the meantime, the recent turbulence in US stock prices appears to be acceptable to the Trump administration in their pursuit of reforming the global financial system.

    Conor O’Kane 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.

    – ref. Trump shrugs off stock market slump, but economic warning signs loom – https://theconversation.com/trump-shrugs-off-stock-market-slump-but-economic-warning-signs-loom-251988

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The women spies who fooled the Nazis with simple tricks

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Josephine Durant des Aulnois, PhD student in Sociology, University of Oxford

    If spy films have taught us anything, it’s that the people chosen for a career in espionage are special. They are the cream of the crop selected because they exhibit unique skills: high levels of intelligence and certain emotional traits that made them perfect for spying.

    During the second world war, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British agency tasked with training spies to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and in east Asia. Active from 1940 to 1946, SOE was a pioneering British secret service. This is because it employed civilians, from all backgrounds, including women, which was unusual at a time where most spies were recruited from the army.

    The women hired by the agency were the only ones allowed to take on a combatant role by the British Army during the second world war. However, many have been unjustly forgotten.

    These women were active throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, but most women worked in France. They were not French, but French speakers who tried to pass for local. On paper, this might seem impossible, since being fluent in a language does not make you a spy.

    SOE recruited prospective agents on the basis of their language skills, and trained most of them in England before sending them into the field. Despite their lack of experience, many SOE women successfully duped German soldiers. Here are some of the simple but effective ways they managed such deception.

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    Emotional control

    First, women spies sometimes fooled people simply by appearing calm. Irish agent Maureen Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan had grown-up in Belgium and was renowned for her daring personality. In a post-war interview, she described how she avoided a thorough search while carrying compromising documents. O’Sullivan acted confident and friendly to divert the soldier’s attention from her bag:

    As she laughed and joked with the German, he was distracted from making a closer examination.

    The spies’ cool was frequently praised in post-war commendations. Remaining calm was no mean feat, especially since most SOE recruits had never worked undercover. In France, they could be questioned by Nazis at any time and nervousness made them look suspicious.

    Agent Yvonne Cormeau joined SOE after losing her husband during a bombing at the beginning of the war. In a 1989 interview, she summarised the situation perfectly: “We learned to live with fear.”

    Physical appearance

    SOE spies did alter their appearance in order not to be recognised, but for most, this merely involved picking clothes which matched their cover. Yvonne Cormeau was sent to a farm in southern France, where the pro-Allied owners gave her new clothes and an apron. She was supposed to pass as their assistant and needed to look like one.

    A few agents went a step further and dyed their hair. This was the case of Noor Inayat Khan (code name Madeleine), a Sufi Muslim of royal lineage born to Indian and American parents. Betrayed to the Germans, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944.

    Noor Inayat Khan.
    Imperial War Museums/Wikimedia, CC BY

    Inayat Khan’s contribution to SOE proved invaluable. For several months in 1943, she was the sole radio operator still active in Paris amid the growing Gestapo presence.

    However, her constant hair dyeing was less effective. To try and escape the notice of the Gestapo, she regularly bleached her hair blonde, but this actually brought her to the attention of the Germans.

    They questioned Alfred and Emilie Balachowsky, her contacts who lived near Paris and led a local resistance network, about the presence of a woman “sometimes blonde and sometimes brunette”. The agent was not arrested on that occasion, but her efforts had backfired.

    Everyday habits

    Locals like the Balachowskys provided crucial support for SOE women, who could be given away by any small gesture. Despite having grown up near Paris, Inayat Khan threatened her cover just by pouring tea.

    Shortly after her arrival, Mrs Balachowsky invited neighbours to a tea party, during which the SOE agent poured the milk first into her cup, leading a neighbour to comment that she behaved like a Brit. Emilie Balachowsky quickly corrected Inayat Khan, who was not the only spy to make errors based on cultural differences.

    Yvonne Cormeau.
    Imperial War Museums/Wikimedia, CC BY

    While at the farm, Yvonne Cormeau was asked to watch the owner’s cows. She was about to bring her knitting kit, until her contact explained that this would give her away: “I was forbidden from knitting, as we Englishwomen knit differently.”

    These anecdotes are a testament to the importance of everyday habits and of the agents’ local contacts. For SOE women, espionage in France was very much about teamwork.

    While Inayat Khan was compromised and executed, for the most part the SOE’s civilian programme for women was a success. The SOE paved the way for other agencies which gradually started to recruit civilians of all genders after the second world war.

    Some of its methods are also used by modern secret services, such as the illegals programme, a Russian initiative which involves sending Russian operatives fluent in English undercover in the US.

    Despite this success, the contribution of women like Patricia O’Sullivan, Yvonne Cormeau and Noor Inayat Khan has remained widely overlooked. They deserve to be remembered along with the period’s male spies.

    Josephine Durant des Aulnois receives funding from the Clarendon Fund, managed by Oxford University.

    – ref. The women spies who fooled the Nazis with simple tricks – https://theconversation.com/the-women-spies-who-fooled-the-nazis-with-simple-tricks-251653

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why Americans care so much about eggs prices – and how this issue got so political

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Clodagh Harrington, Lecturer in American Politics, University College Cork

    The price of eggs has risen dramatically in recent years across the US. A dozen eggs cost US$1.20 (92p) in June 2019, but the price is now around US$4.90 (with a peak of US$8.17 in early March).

    Some restaurants have imposed surcharges on egg-based dishes, bringing even more attention to escalating costs. And there are also shortages on supermarket shelves.

    In the coming months, the US plans to import up to 100 million of this consumer staple. Government officials are approaching countries from Turkey to Brazil with enquiries about eggs for export.

    Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously said that one option to the crisis was for people to get a chicken for their backyard, suggested in the Wall Street Journal that prices are unlikely to stabilise for some months. And Donald Trump recently shared an article on Truth Social calling on the public to “shut up about egg prices”.

    The main cause of the problem is an outbreak of avian flu that has resulted in over 166 million birds in the US being slaughtered. Around 98% of the nation’s chickens are produced on factory farms, which are ripe for contagion.

    According to the Centers for Disease Control, the flu has already spread to several hundred dairy cattle and to one human. The USDA recently announced a US$1 billion plan to counter the problem, with funding for improved bio-security, vaccine research and compensation to farmers.

    In January 2025, Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, blamed the previous administration for high egg prices. It is true that birds were slaughtered on President Joe Biden’s watch, but this was and remains standard practice at times of bird flu outbreaks and had also been the case during the Obama and first Trump administrations.

    However, this points to the way the rising price of eggs has become a political touchstone. It was referred to regularly in campaign speeches and press briefings as a sign of things going wrong and a symbol of the US economy faced. Donald Trump promised to fix the price of eggs swiftly if elected, but so far the issue shows no sign of going away.

    Prices are still trending up. Even when prices suddenly drop, as they have this week, the public know how much cheaper they used to be until recently, and do not tend to feel better.

    There are a number of reasons why egg prices have become an important to US politicians. First, almost everyone buys eggs. So the shortage and subsequent price rise is newsworthy and affects consumers in all income brackets.

    Secondly, they are a measure of broader economic vulnerabilities, so egg-related problems tend to be part of a larger story about how weak the economy is. And thirdly, egg prices are political because of Trump’s promise to bring them down.



    Read more:
    US inflation has increased since Trump took office – why prices are unlikely to come down soon

    Polls showed that the economy and inflation were key factors in voter choice on election day 2024. In February 2025, Donald Trump did an interview with NBC News in which he said he won the election on the border and groceries.

    On immigration, voters often base their opinions on what they perceive to be true. For example, tough rhetoric on building a wall may equate with a sense of feeling that the president is taking strong action, whether anything tangible actually materialises or not.

    With groceries, reality trumps perception. The price of eggs is printed on the box and the cost is paid directly by voters.

    Donald Trump on what he’s doing on egg prices and the economy.

    Then there are the egg producers. US farmers tended to overwhelmingly support Trump on election day, so it is prudent for him to feel their pain, or at least appear to. Farming areas voted for him increasingly in his three election efforts, even increasing their support for him in 2020 after trade wars and price increases which would have negatively impacted them.

    Another factor that may push up egg prices is that an estimated 70% of the factory farm workforce is immigrant labour, and as many as 40% are undocumented. Should the administration’s plans for high tariffs and mass deportations come to fruition, the industry would struggle to function.

    Further food price increases will be inevitable, with potential exacerbation via the funding freezes for some USDA programmes that Trump has enacted. As of March 2025, US$1 billion in cuts has been announced, the consequences of which are already being felt by farmers. The “pain now for gain later” message is a tricky political sell.

    Even in the current era of international turbulence, elections are largely won on more pedestrian matters. Specifically, “kitchen-table” economics is relatable to every voter, regardless of how grand, or not, their table is.

    Americans will be aware that in neighbouring Canada, egg prices have not risen dramatically and there have not been shortages. But prices in Canada have been traditionally higher than the US, this is in part at least because farming standards differ.

    The US does not have high welfare standards for agricultural workers or animals, and this shortcoming needs to be addressed in order to help reduce future risk of flu, but this is likely to also raise prices.

    Blaming the previous incumbent is not a durable stance for Donald Trump. As former president Harry Truman might remind him: “The buck stops here.” Right at his desk.

    Clodagh Harrington 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.

    – ref. Why Americans care so much about eggs prices – and how this issue got so political – https://theconversation.com/why-americans-care-so-much-about-eggs-prices-and-how-this-issue-got-so-political-251752

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Plans to link electricity bills to where you live are unlikely to bring down prices – and that’s a big problem for net zero

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nicholas Harrington, Research Associate in Electricity Market Reform, University of Glasgow

    Diana Mower/Shutterstock

    A proposed reform to the way electricity is priced in Britain could see households pay a different bill based on their postcode.

    Presently, Britain’s electricity system operates as a single market across England, Wales and Scotland. Around 30% of electricity is traded through half-hourly auctions, known as the spot market, while the remaining 70% is traded in forward markets via contracts covering weeks, months, or even years of demand in advance.

    The price of electricity is, broadly speaking, determined by the spot market, as forward market contracts are hedged on the basis of current and expected future spot market prices.

    “Zonal pricing” would divide the British market into multiple separate zones instead, each with its own spot and forward markets to serve demand within it. In effect, zonal pricing would split one large market into a series of smaller, interconnected markets.

    Whether it is the right approach depends on what you expect it to achieve, and where your interests lie. The UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, tasked with the decision, has three main objectives: decarbonising the country’s power sector, securing the supply of power and lowering the prices consumers pay.

    I’m an academic investigating the factors that influence the UK’s ability to decarbonise the housing sector, in particular, the way people heat their homes. I’m most concerned with the affordability of electricity, since I take the view that the lower the price of electricity, the easier our journey to net zero emissions will be – and vice versa.

    A lower electricity price would make clean heating systems (such as heat pumps, which run on electricity) more attractive to consumers and reduce the scale of insulation and draughtproofing required to make the running cost of these systems competitive with gas boilers. My research suggests that the UK’s high electricity price is behind the country’s comparably low rate of heat pump adoption.

    Zonal pricing, as an electricity market reform, seems unlikely to lower electricity prices and drive decarbonisation on its own. Closer scrutiny of the electricity system and its mechanisms suggests it may only make things more complicated.

    The root cause of high bills

    At €0.321 (£0.27) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), the UK has the second-highest electricity price when compared to European Union countries. The EU average is €0.218 per kWh, meaning UK electricity costs around 47% more than it does for most of our EU neighbours.

    Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which triggered a spike in energy prices) starting more than three years ago now, electricity prices across the UK remain about 53% higher than pre-crisis levels. If the UK is generating more electricity from renewables each year — and renewable electricity is the cheapest on the market — why do prices keep rising instead of falling, as one might expect?

    The UK’s high electricity prices are the result of system marginal pricing, which lies at the heart of the spot market. At the end of each half-hourly auction, all electricity that is bid into the market is purchased at the price of the last unit required to meet demand.

    Since total demand is rarely met by renewables, the much more expensive gas generators typically set the price. It’s like going to a fruit market to buy ten apples, finding the first nine for £1 each, the last one for £3, and then having to pay £30 for the lot, rather than the expected £13.

    Because forward markets follow the spot market, and the spot market operates under system marginal pricing, UK consumers end up paying gas-generated electricity prices 98% of the time.



    Read more:
    How gas keeps the UK’s electricity bills so high – despite lots of cheap wind power

    Will zonal pricing lower these prices? On its own, no. This is because all zones under the scheme will still have spot markets operating under the marginal pricing model. Zonal pricing doesn’t address the fundamental problem that’s keeping electricity prices in Britain so high.

    Advocates of zonal pricing argue that it will encourage investment in the infrastructure required to lower electricity prices – namely, storage and transmission.

    Grid-scale and home batteries, pumped hydro and thermal energy storage help reduce final electricity prices by storing excess renewable energy for use when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, so grid operators don’t have to rely on expensive gas-generated electricity to fill supply gaps. Meanwhile, transmission lines and cables ensure that renewable electricity is delivered where it is needed.

    By creating price differences between zones, so the argument goes, the market receives clear signals about where such investments would be most profitable.

    Would zonal pricing help build more of these?
    EOSMan/Shutterstock

    This argument, however, assumes that electricity prices will fall in some zones, and that the market has a strong incentive to invest in high-price areas.

    I’m compelled to ask two questions. What prevents zones that generate a lot of renewable electricity from selling their supply at higher prices in other zones, which could prevent renewables from meeting total demand and lead to the same price distortions currently seen due to marginal pricing?

    And if investments in storage and transmission are underwhelming when electricity prices are high everywhere, why would they suddenly become more likely when prices are only high in specific areas?

    Overall, I think the argument in favour of zonal pricing is unconvincing as it doesn’t address the structural issue underlying the UK’s high electricity prices: spot markets that operate according to system marginal pricing.

    If zonal pricing neither lowers consumer electricity prices nor significantly stimulates investment in storage and transmission on its own — and does not alter the geographic and planning factors that determine wind and solar farm locations — then it is unclear what it would achieve beyond adding complexity to an already complex electricity system.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Nicholas Harrington receives funding from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSCR).

    – ref. Plans to link electricity bills to where you live are unlikely to bring down prices – and that’s a big problem for net zero – https://theconversation.com/plans-to-link-electricity-bills-to-where-you-live-are-unlikely-to-bring-down-prices-and-thats-a-big-problem-for-net-zero-251922

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: BBC Gaza documentary: how an editorial blame game overshadowed an important film and destroyed trust

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dorothy Byrne, President of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

    The war in Gaza has been a notoriously controversial and difficult story to cover as a journalist. The Israeli government banned international journalists from the territory. At least 171 journalists and media workers in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank have been killed since the war began.

    The BBC has faced relentless accusations of bias from all sides. You would think, then, that when it commissioned the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, billed as a “vivid and unflinching view of life” in Gaza seen through the eyes of children, it would have been meticulous in its commissioning and oversight.

    Yet almost as soon as the programme was broadcast on February 17, a journalist outside the BBC revealed that one of the children featured in the film, 13-year-old Abdullah, who also acted as its narrator, was the son of a Hamas official. His father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, is a deputy minister of agriculture and therefore, as Hamas runs the government of Gaza, a Hamas official.

    No major investigation was required to find out who this man was – an expert on wastewater treatment, in particular on the removal of heavy metals from industrial wastewater, who received degrees from UK universities. No evidence has emerged that he is linked to Hamas’s militant operations. But getting someone with any link to what is classified as a terrorist organisation by western governments to narrate the film was inevitably going to be criticised – especially because the link wasn’t explained to viewers.

    The BBC pulled the film four days after its premiere and said it would investigate the matter. Where it really went wrong was that, for 12 days, the BBC tried to pin the blame elsewhere. It dumped on the production company, Hoyo Films, stating: “The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.” T

    I argue this is a weak defence. A broadcaster can’t blame someone else when a mistake appears in a film.

    Under Ofcom regulations, the broadcaster has full editorial responsibility, regardless of whether a freelance or independent crew carried out filming. Any mistake is the BBC’s mistake.

    I was head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 for 17 years. We sometimes made mistakes. It happens. But the key is not to make things worse by trying to wriggle out of blame.

    As it happens, Channel 4 also featured this child in some of its news coverage without initially disclosing his father’s role. “As international media access is restricted, Abdullah was sourced through an established journalist who has also worked for other major global media outlets,” Channel 4 News said in a statement.

    Ofcom regulations

    The BBC’s second excuse was even weaker. It said that filmmakers were asked in writing a number of times whether this child had any connection with Hamas.

    Here is a journalistic tip for the BBC’s news bosses: if you ask someone a question and they don’t answer, you don’t just keep asking. You demand answers or you go and get the answer yourself. As a former news boss myself, I would have demanded to see the boy’s entire family tree.

    Finally, after 12 days, the BBC took responsibility and issued an apology.
    BBC chair Samir Shah told MPs that people “weren’t doing their job” when it came to oversight of the production. Shah described it as “a dagger to the heart of the BBC claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy”.

    A child of 13 should arguably not have narrated the film at all. He was not narrating his own words but a script written by the programme makers, which included facts about the history and geopolitics of Gaza. I would point the BBC to Ofcom guidance that children under 16 should not be asked for views on matters likely to be beyond their capacity to answer properly without the consent of a responsible adult.

    On a subject like this, I would not have had a child narrate a film – especially not when one of the responsible adults in his life was a Hamas official.

    This was a powerful and beautifully shot film. It’s hard to see how any of its content could be described as pro-Hamas propaganda. The strongest moment was when a child said he hated Hamas because they had caused the war and all the misery being suffered now. But it’s almost certainly politically impossible for an amended version of the documentary to now be shown, which is a great loss.

    This debacle even resulted in a bizarre decision by the Royal Television Society to drop an award recognising the brave and brilliant work of journalists in Gaza (it has since reversed this after backlash from journalists). We have relied on journalists in Gaza to show us what is happening.

    They have continued filming when their own families have been killed. Their reports have been powerful and moving and true. Why should they be punished for a BBC cock-up?

    Falling trust

    I have never worked for the BBC, but I have always admired it for two things. First, for the brilliance of its journalists. Second, for its ability to turn a mistake into a PR catastrophe.

    The film contained editorial errors, but in my view the outrage built over days, resulting in calls not just for a public inquiry, but even a police inquiry, because the BBC wouldn’t take the rap. My journalistic heart went out to the great people who work at the BBC.

    This ghastly incident sits alongside other (quite different) recent scandals about the BBC: the bad behaviour (whether alleged or proven) of powerful presenters and figures Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, Tim Westwood and Gregg Wallace. In each case, it turned out that BBC bigwigs had received complaints over long periods of time before the stories went public.

    For many reasons beyond the BBC’s control, trust in the broadcaster is falling. It is constantly being attacked by the right-wing press, and undermined by conspiracy theorists who say you can’t trust the so-called mainstream media and that there is no such thing as truth.

    In a 2023 YouGov survey on trust in media, only 44% of Britons said they trust BBC journalists to tell the truth. That was nearly half the level of trust in the BBC 20 years earlier, yet it still made the BBC the most trusted media outlet in the UK. Other surveys by Ofcom of people who actually watch TV news put trust in its accuracy much higher – something like 70%.

    There is a general fall in trust in all institutions in the UK. The politicians and tabloids who attack the BBC are trusted far less than BBC journalists. But their unfair assaults make it all the more essential that the BBC avoids errors like this, and is transparent when those errors are revealed.

    Dorothy Byrne was formerly Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel Four, and Editor at Large at Channel Four.

    – ref. BBC Gaza documentary: how an editorial blame game overshadowed an important film and destroyed trust – https://theconversation.com/bbc-gaza-documentary-how-an-editorial-blame-game-overshadowed-an-important-film-and-destroyed-trust-251760

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why we are so scared of space – and how this fear can drive conspiracy theories

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tony Milligan, Research Fellow in the Philosophy of Ethics, King’s College London

    klyaksun/Shutterstock

    There are many home-grown problems on Earth, but there’s still time to worry about bad things arriving from above. The most recent is the asteroid 2024 YR4, which could be a “city killer” if it hits a heavily populated area of our planet in the early years of the next decade.

    The chances of that happening are now estimated to be around 0.001%. But there was a brief moment after the asteroid’s discovery last year when the estimated danger of a direct hit crossed the 1% threshold of comfortable risk.

    There’s a need to worry about planetary defence if we are to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. But there are many other things that could kill us, including climate change and wars. So what is it about space that grabs our attention? And how do these fears affect us – individually and as a society?

    In the long run, something big will hit us, unless we can redirect it. The responsibility for preparation begins with us.

    Yet preparation also carries risks. Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in the US, has warned that the technologies used for planetary defence can not only guide asteroids away from Earth – they can also guide them towards it as a tool in a military conflict.

    As explained in his book Dark Skies, Deudney’s solution is to reverse, regulate and relinquish most of our human activities in space for several centuries to come. The more we do in space, he believes, the greater the likelihood that states will end up in catastrophic conflict. “The avoidance of civilisation’s disaster and species extinction now depends on discerning what not to do, and then making sure it is not done,” he writes.

    He ultimately argues space expansion has come too soon, and we must reverse the process until we are ready. That said, he thinks we may still need some form of planetary defence, but that it can be limited.

    Holding off for centuries is an unlikely option though. The chances of an asteroid strike may well be too high. And the political interest in space expansion is, at this point, irreversible.

    Fear of space has grown alongside space programs. Worries about asteroid strikes and over-militarisation lean into deeper fears about space as the unknown. Yet they also lean into worries about the self-destructive side of humanity.

    Both fears are very old. One of our earliest traceable human tales, the story of the Cosmic Hunt dating back at least 15,000 years, combines the two.

    An indigenous Sami version, surviving in Scandinavia, describes how a great hunt in the skies would go wrong if the hunter is impatient and fires an arrow which misses its target and accidentally strikes the pole star. This would bring the canopy of the night sky crashing down to Earth. Again, fears about misguided human actions and the threat from above fuse.

    We can see this in modern technologically driven fears such as UFOlogy. Some hard-core believers in UFOs are not only concerned about hostile visitors, but about secret collaborations among scientists on Earth, or, an entire conspiracy to keep the truth from the public.

    Without belief in a conspiracy to suppress the evidence, the whole idea falls apart. But without belief that there is actually something to fear from space, there is nothing for the conspiracy to be about. Fear of space is a necessary part of this picture.

    This is an idea neatly captured in recent times by the Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, who compares space to a “dark forest” in which alien civilisations are trying to hide from each other.

    All of this presupposes something of a bunker mentality, an over-separation of Earth and space, or sky and ground. This is something I have referred to as ground bias. The bias allows space to appear as a threatening outside, rather than something that we, too, are part of.

    Alien viruses

    The rationalisation for such fear shifts about and is not restricted to asteroids, aliens, meteors and runaway military conflict. There is even a theory that viruses come from space.

    When COVID sceptics went looking for an idea to explain why mask wearing was pointless, what many of them struck upon was an obscure theory put together by the astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe in 1979.

    Some believe Covid came from space.
    Viacheslav Lopatin

    The duo ultimately had a good idea which they followed up with a bad idea. The good idea was that the components for the emergence of life may have come from space. The bad idea was that they came ready formed, as viruses and bacteria, and that they are still coming.

    According this theory, well known pandemics of the past (such as the lethal 1918 flu pandemic and even epidemics in antiquity) were apparently the result of viruses from space and could not be the result of person-to-person transmission – least of all from asymptomatic carriers.

    The COVID version involved a meteor exploding over China. In an interview, Wickramsinghe claimed “a piece of this bolide containing trillions of the COVID-19 virus broke off from the bolide as it was entering the stratosphere” releasing viral particles which were then carried by prevailing winds.

    The idea illustrates the way in which fears about space are used to drive anxiety about human failings or wrongdoing. COVID scepticism has since gone all the way into the White House.

    But fears about space can also be used to critique those in power. In our own times, they are used to fuel narratives about billionaires with private space agendas and presidential access, wealthy space tourists and even wealthier prospective colonisers of Mars and beyond. It is a tempting narrative, but one that sees Earth as closed system, which should not be opened to the outside.

    We may, at some level, be afraid of space itself. We certainly have an exaggerated sense our our Earthly separateness from it. And there are some particular things that we do have cause to worry about. But there is also the risk that a fear of space can combine with suspicions about governments, leading us to embrace conspiracy theories as a way to consolidate different kinds of worries into a single, manageable, set of beliefs.

    Tony Milligan receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 856543).

    – ref. Why we are so scared of space – and how this fear can drive conspiracy theories – https://theconversation.com/why-we-are-so-scared-of-space-and-how-this-fear-can-drive-conspiracy-theories-252195

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Thirty years ago Ukraine got rid of its nuclear arsenal – now some people regret that decision

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Mathers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University

    Around 73% of Ukrainians now want their country to “restore” its nuclear weapons, according to a recent opinion poll. Most Ukrainians (58%) were in favour of their country owning nuclear weapons, even if it meant losing western allies.

    This suggests an underlying regret that Ukraine agreed to relinquish the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal as part of the Budapest Memorandum around 30 years ago. This agreement, signed in December 1994, provided security guarantees for Ukraine from the US, the UK and Russia in return for giving up the weapons. Ukraine also agreed it would not acquire nuclear weapons in the future.

    The focus on nuclear weapons is intensifying all over Europe. This week the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, called on the US to station its nuclear weapons in his country to deter Russian attacks. He cited Moscow’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons just across the border in Belarus during 2023 as part of his reasoning.

    Trump’s apparent weakening commitment to Nato has also prompted the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to suggest that France could extend protection of its own nuclear weapons to its allies.

    It’s clear that some Ukrainians now believe that their country would have been less likely to have experienced a Russian invasion if it had held on to its nuclear capacity. Ukrainians now question how much they can rely on other states after the failure of security guarantees that were central to the 1994 agreement.

    The pledges by the US, UK and Russia to protect the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine were put to the test in 2014 when Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea and began providing financial and military backing for militia leaders in eastern Ukraine who claimed to lead pro-Russian separatist movements.



    Read more:
    Are Ukrainians ready for ceasefire and concessions? Here’s what the polls say

    The US and UK imposed economic sanctions against Russia and provided training, equipment and non-lethal weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces. But these measures fell well short of ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and were insufficient to help Ukraine retake its territory.

    Similarly, US and UK support for Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, although valuable and much appreciated by the Ukrainians, has not been enough to allow Kyiv to completely expel Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

    What was the Budapest Memorandum?

    What if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?

    But what if Ukraine had never given up its nuclear weapons? The logic of deterrence suggests that Putin would have not have invaded and attacked a nuclear-armed Ukraine. But the argument that Ukraine should not have surrendered the Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory overlooks the specific circumstances. For while physical components of a nuclear weapons capability – delivery vehicles and nuclear warheads – were within Ukraine’s grasp, the launch codes remained in Moscow, and Russian leaders showed no willingness to relinquish them.

    So, Kyiv would have had no control over whether, when or against whom those weapons might have been used. The risk to Ukraine of becoming the target of another state’s nuclear strike would have been considerable, and the Kyiv government would have been unable to do anything to reduce that risk. Retaining nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet period would have probably made Ukrainians less rather than more secure.



    Read more:
    What is the value of US security guarantees? Here’s what history shows

    Ukraine also lacked the economic resources to maintain the nuclear weapons on its territory, or develop them into a credible deterrent force. In exchange for giving up nuclear weapons, Ukraine received much-needed economic assistance from the west.

    In the 1990s Ukrainian views were shaped by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This had a devastating and lasting impact on the land and the people in that part of Ukraine, highlighting the risks of the nuclear sector. In 1994, when the Budapest Memorandum was being negotiated, only 30% of Ukrainians were in favour of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons.

    What now?

    Ukraine would face considerable technical challenges in developing nuclear weapons today, both in creating the necessary quantities of fissile material for warheads and manufacturing delivery vehicles.

    Kyiv would also need to pay for an expensive nuclear weapons development programme at a time when the Ukrainian economy is struggling to supply its soldiers with conventional weapons and meet the needs of civilians.

    And unless Ukraine’s international supporters were on board, Kyiv might face the withdrawal of economic and military aid at a crucial juncture. If Moscow detected any move on Ukraine’s part to develop nuclear weapons, there would be a strong motive for a preemptive Russian strike to put an end to that plan.

    But even though it may not be feasible for Ukraine to develop an independent nuclear deterrent in the short term, Kyiv may feel compelled to pursue a nuclear weapons programme unless Ukraine is provided with serious and reliable security guarantees. With the Trump administration apparently ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine, the onus is on the country’s international supporters to come up with an alternative unless they want to see further nuclear proliferation in Europe.

    Jennifer Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Thirty years ago Ukraine got rid of its nuclear arsenal – now some people regret that decision – https://theconversation.com/thirty-years-ago-ukraine-got-rid-of-its-nuclear-arsenal-now-some-people-regret-that-decision-251733

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Europe had worst measles outbreak since 1997 – new data

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton

    SamaraHeisz5/Shutterstock

    Europe has had the highest number of measles cases since 1997, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO). There were 127,350 cases in 2024 – about double the number from 2023.

    “Measles is back, and it’s a wake-up call,” says Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe. “Without high vaccination rates, there is no health security.” Last year, there were 38 deaths from measles.

    Transmission is similar to COVID, with respiratory droplets and aerosols (airborne transmission) spreading the virus between people. The infection produces a rash and fever in mild cases, and encephalitis (brain swelling), pneumonia and blindness in severe cases.

    Hospitalisation and deaths are overwhelmingly in unvaccinated people, with mortality rates in developed countries around one in 1,000 to one in 5,000 measles cases.

    Each person infected with measles will, on average, spread the virus to between 12 and 18 other people. This is more infectious than COVID. For example, someone with the omicron variant would spread the virus to around eight others.

    In 2022 the WHO had described measles as an “imminent threat in every region of the world”. The widespread impact of COVID made it harder for people to access healthcare, reducing the ability of regular health services, like vaccinations, to function properly.

    These new stark figures from WHO Europe are an inevitable consequence of lower vaccination rates. Measles is almost entirely vaccine-preventable, with two doses providing greater than 99% protection against infection. The vaccine has an excellent safety record, with severe harm being extremely rare.

    The proportion of the population that needs to be vaccinated to keep local transmission low and prevent outbreaks (so-called “herd immunity”) is around 95%.

    WHO Europe highlighted some examples of where there are clear gaps in vaccine coverage. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania, fewer than 80% of eligible children were vaccinated in 2023, with rates below 50% for the past five or more years. Romania had the highest number of measles cases in Europe in 2024 – an estimated 30,692 cases.

    Misinformation is the driver

    Misinformation is an important factor that reduces vaccine uptake. For example, in the UK, former physician Andrew Wakefield presented falsified data in 2002 claiming the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused autism. He somehow got these claims published in The Lancet – although the paper was later retracted.

    This fake scare received sustained media coverage, which resulted in lower uptake in young children at the time and was then a key factor a large measles outbreak among teenagers in England in 2012.

    The claims have spread internationally. In 2020, a US population survey found that “18% of our respondents mistakenly state that it is very or somewhat accurate to say that vaccines cause autism”.

    Sadly, misinformation about health can even be found at the highest levels of government. US President Donald Trump repeatedly made false claims during the COVID pandemic, including the suggestion that injecting disinfectant might cure COVID. In 2025, he appointed Robert F. Kennedy as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has long espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints, including being required to apologise in 2015 for comparing vaccination programmes to the Holocaust.

    RFK Jr. was made to apologise for comparing vaccination programmes with the Holocaust.
    Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock

    In a recent interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Kennedy said of the MMR vaccine: “It does cause deaths every year. It causes — it causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”

    This is untrue. The Infectious Disease Society of America points out that there have been “no deaths related to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in healthy individuals”. This is amid two measles deaths in unvaccinated people in the US, the first such deaths since 2003. There are estimates that the measles vaccine prevented 94 million deaths globally between 1974 to 2024.

    The US National Institute for Health, one of the world’s biggest funders of health research, announced on March 10 2025 that it was axing research that aimed to understand and address vaccine hesitancy.

    This goes alongside the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) apparently planning a large study into potential associations between vaccines and autism, despite dozens of studies indicating there being no such link.

    This volatility coming from the US and elsewhere matters for Europe. Trump and the US have political supporters in Europe, so their messaging carries weight and could do harm. Anti-vaccine sentiment promoted on Facebook from within the US resulted in comments on the posts from multiple countries. The use of social media has been observed to spread misinformation internationally, for example, within Europe. Russian trolls are also involved in creating arguments about vaccines.

    There is an urgent need for outbreaks to be brought back under control and for accurate information about vaccines to be the key message in public discussions. As Dr Kluge highlights: “The measles virus never rests – and neither can we.”

    Michael Head has previously received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Research England and the UK Department for International Development, and currently receives funding from the UK Medical Research Foundation.

    – ref. Europe had worst measles outbreak since 1997 – new data – https://theconversation.com/europe-had-worst-measles-outbreak-since-1997-new-data-252327

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Bug drugs: bacteria-based cancer therapies are finally overcoming barriers

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

    Lightspring/Shutterstock

    Imagine a world where bacteria, typically feared for causing disease, are turned into powerful weapons against cancer. That’s exactly what some scientists are working on. And they are beginning to unravel the mechanisms for doing so, using genetically engineered bacteria to target and destroy cancer cells.

    Using bacteria to fight cancer dates back to the 1860s when William B. Coley, often called the father of immunotherapy, injected bacteria called streptococci into a young patient with inoperable bone cancer. Surprisingly, this unconventional approach led to the tumour shrinking, marking one of the first examples of immunotherapy.

    William Coley (centre), a pioneer of bug drugs.
    Wikimedia Commons

    Over the next few decades, as head of the Bone Tumour Service at Memorial Hospital in New York, Coley injected over 1,000 cancer patients with bacteria or bacterial products. These products became known as Coley’s toxins.

    Despite this early promise, progress in bacteria-based cancer therapies has been slow. The development of radiation therapy and chemotherapy overshadowed Coley’s work, and his approach faced scepticism from the medical community.

    However, modern immunology has vindicated many of Coley’s principles, showing that some cancers are indeed very sensitive to an enhanced immune system, an approach we can often capture to treat patients.

    How bacteria-based cancer therapies work

    These therapies take advantage of the unique ability of certain bacteria to proliferate inside tumours. The low oxygen, acidic and dead tissue in the area around the cancer – the tumour “microenvironment” (an area I am especially interested in) – create an ideal niche for some bacteria to thrive. Once there, bacteria can, in theory, directly kill tumour cells or activate the body’s immune responses against the cancer. However, several difficulties have hindered the widespread adoption of this approach.

    Safety concerns are paramount because introducing live bacteria into a patient’s body can cause harm. Researchers have had to carefully attenuate (weaken) bacterial strains to ensure they don’t damage healthy tissue. Additionally, controlling the bacteria’s behaviour within the tumour and preventing them from spreading to other parts of the body has been difficult.

    Bacteria live inside us, known as the microbiome, and treatments, disease and, of course, new bacteria that are introduced can interfere with this natural environment. Another significant hurdle has been our incomplete understanding of how bacteria interact with the complex tumour microenvironment and the immune system.

    Questions remain about how to optimise bacterial strains for maximum anti-tumour effects while minimising side-effects. We’re also not sure of the dose – and some approaches give one bacteria and others entire colonies and multiple bug species together.

    Recent advances

    Despite these challenges, recent advances in scientific fields, such as synthetic biology and genetic engineering, have breathed new life into the field. Scientists can now program bacteria with sophisticated functions, such as producing and delivering specific anti-cancer agents directly within tumours.

    This targeted approach could overcome some limitations of traditional cancer treatments, including side-effects and the inability to reach deeper tumour tissues.

    Emerging research suggests that bacteria-based therapies could be particularly promising for certain types of cancer. Solid tumours, especially those that have a poor blood supply and are resistant to conventional therapies, might benefit most from this approach.

    Colon cancer, ovarian cancer and metastatic breast cancer are among the high-mortality cancers that researchers are targeting with these innovative therapies.
    One area we have the best evidence for is that “bug drugs” may help the body fight cancer by interacting with routinely used immunotherapy drugs.

    Recent studies have shown encouraging results. For instance, researchers have engineered strains of E coli bacteria to deliver small tumour protein fragments to immune cells, effectively training them to recognise and attack cancer cells. In lab animals, this approach has led to tumour shrinkage and, sometimes, complete elimination.

    E coli have been used to deliver cancer tumour fragments to immune cells.
    Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

    By exploiting these mechanisms, bacterial therapies can selectively colonise tumours while largely sparing healthy tissues, potentially overcoming limitations of conventional cancer treatments.

    Ultimately, we need human trials to give us the answer about whether this works, by controlling or eradicating cancer and, of course, if there are side-effects, its toxicity.

    In one study I worked on, we showed that part of a bacterial cell wall, when injected into patients, could safely help control melanoma – the most deadly form of skin cancer.

    While we’re still in the early stages, the potential of bacteria-based cancer therapies is becoming increasingly clear. As our understanding of tumour biology and bacterial engineering improves, we may be on the cusp of a new era in cancer treatment.

    Bacterial-based cancer therapies take advantage of several unique mechanisms to specifically target tumour cells. As a result, these therapies could offer a powerful new tool in our arsenal against cancer, working in synergy with existing treatments like immunotherapy and chemotherapy. And, as we look to the future, bacteria-based cancer therapies represent a fascinating convergence of historical insight and groundbreaking science.

    While challenges remain, the progress in this field offers hope for more effective, targeted treatments that could significantly improve outcomes for cancer patients.

    Justin Stebbing 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.

    – ref. Bug drugs: bacteria-based cancer therapies are finally overcoming barriers – https://theconversation.com/bug-drugs-bacteria-based-cancer-therapies-are-finally-overcoming-barriers-251278

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Changes to speech and language can help detect Alzheimer’s early – here are five things to look out for

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Curtis, Doctoral Candidate, Language use in Down Syndrome and Alzheimer’s Disease, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University

    More people than ever are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease New Africa/Shutterstock

    Ten million people are diagnosed with dementia worldwide each year – that’s more than ever. According to the Alzheimer’s Society approximately one million people in the UK are currently living with the disease. Studies predict this figure will rise to 1.6 million people by 2050.

    Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia and leads to a decline in memory and thinking skills. This is a physical illness that causes the brain to stop working properly and gets worse over time. Identifying the onset of Alzheimer’s early can help patients and caregivers find the right support and medical care.

    One way to detect Alzheimer’s early is by spotting changes to people’s use of language. This is because new speech problems are one of the first signs of a mental decline that could indicate the onset of this disease.

    Here are five early, speech-related signs of Alzheimer’s disease to look out for:

    1. Pauses, hesitations and vagueness

    One of the most recognisable symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease is trouble remembering specific words, which can often lead to frequent or long pauses and hesitations. When a person with Alzheimer’s is struggling to remember a word, they may talk vaguely such as saying “thing”, or describing and talking around a word. For example, if someone is having trouble remembering the word dog, they may say something like “people have them as pets … they bark … I used to have one when I was a child”.

    2. Using words with the wrong meaning

    Trouble remembering the right word can be an early feature of Alzheimer’s. People with Alzheimer’s might replace a word they are trying to say with something related to it. For example, instead of saying “dog”, they might use an animal from the same category, saying “cat” for instance. In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, however, these changes are more likely to be related to a broader or more general category such as saying “animal” instead of “cat”.

    3. Talking about a task rather than doing it

    Someone with Alzheimer’s may struggle with completing tasks. Instead of performing a task, they may talk about their feelings toward the task, express doubts, or mention past abilities. They might say, “I’m not sure I can do this” or “I used to be good at this”, rather than discussing the task directly.

    4. Less word variety

    A more subtle indicator of Alzheimer’s disease is the tendency to use simpler language, relying on common words. People with Alzheimer’s often repeat the same verbs, nouns and adjectives instead of using a broader vocabulary. They can also use “the”, “and” or “but” frequently to connect sentences.

    5. Difficulty finding the right words

    People with Alzheimer’s can have trouble thinking of words, objects or things that belong in a group. This is sometimes used as a cognitive test for the disease. For example, those with Alzheimer’s may struggle to name things in a specific category, such as different foods, different parts of the body or words that start with the same letter. This gets harder as the disease progresses, making these tasks increasingly challenging.

    Age is the biggest risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s – the chance of developing the disease doubles every five years after the age of 65. However, one in 20 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are under the age of 65. This is referred to as younger – or early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

    While forgetting words now and then is normal, persistent and worsening problems remembering words, speaking fluently, or using a variety of words could be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Identifying these signs early can be particularly important for people at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease as they age, such as people with Down Syndrome.

    Sarah Curtis 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.

    – ref. Changes to speech and language can help detect Alzheimer’s early – here are five things to look out for – https://theconversation.com/changes-to-speech-and-language-can-help-detect-alzheimers-early-here-are-five-things-to-look-out-for-252251

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Europe faces worst measles outbreak since 1997 – new data

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton

    SamaraHeisz5/Shutterstock

    Europe has had the highest number of measles cases since 1997, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO). There were 127,350 cases in 2024 – about double the number from 2023.

    “Measles is back, and it’s a wake-up call,” says Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe. “Without high vaccination rates, there is no health security.” Last year, there were 38 deaths from measles.

    Transmission is similar to COVID, with respiratory droplets and aerosols (airborne transmission) spreading the virus between people. The infection produces a rash and fever in mild cases, and encephalitis (brain swelling), pneumonia and blindness in severe cases.

    Hospitalisation and deaths are overwhelmingly in unvaccinated people, with mortality rates in developed countries around one in 1,000 to one in 5,000 measles cases.

    Each person infected with measles will, on average, spread the virus to between 12 and 18 other people. This is more infectious than COVID. For example, someone with the omicron variant would spread the virus to around eight others.

    In 2022 the WHO had described measles as an “imminent threat in every region of the world”. The widespread impact of COVID made it harder for people to access healthcare, reducing the ability of regular health services, like vaccinations, to function properly.

    These new stark figures from WHO Europe are an inevitable consequence of lower vaccination rates. Measles is almost entirely vaccine-preventable, with two doses providing greater than 99% protection against infection. The vaccine has an excellent safety record, with severe harm being extremely rare.

    The proportion of the population that needs to be vaccinated to keep local transmission low and prevent outbreaks (so-called “herd immunity”) is around 95%.

    WHO Europe highlighted some examples of where there are clear gaps in vaccine coverage. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania, fewer than 80% of eligible children were vaccinated in 2023, with rates below 50% for the past five or more years. Romania had the highest number of measles cases in Europe in 2024 – an estimated 30,692 cases.

    Misinformation is the driver

    Misinformation is an important factor that reduces vaccine uptake. For example, in the UK, former physician Andrew Wakefield presented falsified data in 2002 claiming the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused autism. He somehow got these claims published in The Lancet – although the paper was later retracted.

    This fake scare received sustained media coverage, which resulted in lower uptake in young children at the time and was then a key factor a large measles outbreak among teenagers in England in 2012.

    The claims have spread internationally. In 2020, a US population survey found that “18% of our respondents mistakenly state that it is very or somewhat accurate to say that vaccines cause autism”.

    Sadly, misinformation about health can even be found at the highest levels of government. US President Donald Trump repeatedly made false claims during the COVID pandemic, including the suggestion that injecting disinfectant might cure COVID. In 2025, he appointed Robert F. Kennedy as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has long espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints, including being required to apologise in 2015 for comparing vaccination programmes to the Holocaust.

    RFK Jr. was made to apologise for comparing vaccination programmes with the Holocaust.
    Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock

    In a recent interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Kennedy said of the MMR vaccine: “It does cause deaths every year. It causes — it causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”

    This is untrue. The Infectious Disease Society of America points out that there have been “no deaths related to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in healthy individuals”. This is amid two measles deaths in unvaccinated people in the US, the first such deaths since 2003. There are estimates that the measles vaccine prevented 94 million deaths globally between 1974 to 2024.

    The US National Institute for Health, one of the world’s biggest funders of health research, announced on March 10 2025 that it was axing research that aimed to understand and address vaccine hesitancy.

    This goes alongside the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) apparently planning a large study into potential associations between vaccines and autism, despite dozens of studies indicating there being no such link.

    This volatility coming from the US and elsewhere matters for Europe. Trump and the US have political supporters in Europe, so their messaging carries weight and could do harm. Anti-vaccine sentiment promoted on Facebook from within the US resulted in comments on the posts from multiple countries. The use of social media has been observed to spread misinformation internationally, for example, within Europe. Russian trolls are also involved in creating arguments about vaccines.

    There is an urgent need for outbreaks to be brought back under control and for accurate information about vaccines to be the key message in public discussions. As Dr Kluge highlights: “The measles virus never rests – and neither can we.”

    Michael Head has previously received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Research England and the UK Department for International Development, and currently receives funding from the UK Medical Research Foundation.

    – ref. Europe faces worst measles outbreak since 1997 – new data – https://theconversation.com/europe-faces-worst-measles-outbreak-since-1997-new-data-252327

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Christian nationalism in the U.S. is eerily reminiscent of ‘dominionist’ reformers in history

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Gary K. Waite, Professor Emeritus, Early Modern European History, University of New Brunswick

    In this etching from Dutch theologian Lambertus Hortensius’ 1614 book ‘Van den oproer der weder-dooperen,’ Anabaptists warn the residents of Amsterdam of the coming vengeance of Christ in 1535. (Lambertus Hortensius)

    Far-right politics and Christian nationalism are on the rise in North America and Europe, leading to growing concerns about what it means for human rights and democracy.

    As an historian of the demonizing language of the 16th century, I have been watching current events, around QAnon and Christian nationalist support for United States President Donald Trump with considerable trepidation.

    Why? Because we’ve seen before what happens when religious groups use government to force their beliefs and morality upon society.

    Religion scholar Bradley Onishi writes that the Christian nationalist movement known as the “New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is one of the most influential and dangerous Christian nationalist movements in the United States” and has become “a global phenomenon.”



    Read more:
    New Apostolic Reformation evangelicals see Trump as God’s warrior in their battle to win America from satanic forces and Christianize it

    This movement has reshaped its theology in ways eerily reminiscent of the prophets of the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster of the 1530s in present-day Germany. As my scholarship has examined, those religious dissenters faced polemical demonizing by religious authorities and faced violent oppression, via torture and execution.

    Today’s Christian nationalists, however, have faced no such maltreatment. Yet, like persecuted dissenters of the 1530s, they claim divine authority to remake society.

    The Anabaptists of Münster

    A portrait of Jan van Leiden, a leader of the Münster Anabaptists, by Dutch artist Jan Muller circa 1615.
    (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    The 16th-century Reformation had originally broken down the religious state of medieval Europe. However, Protestant leaders like Martin Luther and John Calvin quickly saw the advantage of having civic governments force conformity to their reforms, and punish dissent.

    Among those targeted were the small groups of dissenters whose Biblical interpretation, congruent with the life and teaching of Jesus, led them to follow the Gospel’s command to preach and baptize “on confession of faith” and a person’s commitment to discipleship.“ By contrast, reformers, and the church they sought to reform, “practised and required infant baptism for the entire population (usually required by law).”

    Derisively called Anabaptists, the small group of dissenters also refused to participate in government. For these practices they were persecuted, with hundreds horrifically tortured and executed.

    Driven to desperation, some Anabaptists in northwestern Europe and northern Germany looked for hope to the Westphalian city of Münster in present-day Germany.

    Here the city’s major preacher, Bernhard Rothmann, was moving the city into the Reformed Protestant camp, rather than that of their Lutheran neighbours. When large numbers of Anabaptist refugees arrived in 1533, they won the civic election and Münster became an Anabaptist city.

    The Catholic bishop of Münster had other ideas. Hiring Catholic and Lutheran troops, he laid siege to the city and things became desperate. Enraged by persecution, the Münsterite Anabaptists changed their image of Jesus from the peacemaker of the Gospels to the apocalyptic Jesus of Revelation.

    The Jesus of Anabaptist Münster

    Rothmann’s original theology was like what Calvin would develop for Geneva. What made the two cities distinct was the charismatic leadership of the Dutch Anabaptist prophet Jan Matthijs, who predicted that Christ would return on Easter Day, 1534, adding both urgency and confidence in applying God’s directives.

    Now besieged, Matthijs and Rothmann took their reform movement in a more “dominionist” direction, meaning they believed their movement should take moral, spiritual and religious control over society. They expelled anyone who refused to co-operate.

    When Christ did not return on Easter 1534 and Matthijs was killed by the besiegers, his successor, Jan van Leiden, simply postponed Christ’s return to the following Easter and declared himself a semi-divine king.

    He also abandoned the message of the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount in favour of the vengeful Jesus of the Book of Revelation. Rothmann justified this in a tract which I translated as:

    “It was … the intention of our hearts in our baptism, that we would suffer for Christ, whatever men did to us. But it has pleased the Lord … that now we and all Christians at this time may not only ward off the violence of the godless with the sword, but also, that he has put the sword into our hands to avenge all injustice and evil over the entire world.”

    King van Leiden sent people out to spread this revolutionary message and take over other cities. This led to several militant episodes, including in Amsterdam, where in February 1535, 11 Anabaptists paraded naked through the streets proclaiming the “naked truth” of God’s anger.

    Others delivered the message while waving swords. Finally, in May, 1535 about 40 Anabaptists captured Amsterdam’s city hall. All were arrested and executed. These were the actions of desperate people inspired by their prophets’ assurances of divine authority. When, however, Münster fell at the end of June 1535, the result was massive disillusionment, a return to non-violence and increased persecution.

    This etching (circa 1629-1652) by Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch depicts Anabaptists walking naked through the streets of Amsterdam after being inspired to remove and burn their clothes in February 1535.
    (Rijksmuseum)

    Divine authority to remake society?

    This transformation of the Münster Anabaptists into vengeful militants reminds me of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). As Matthew D. Taylor has revealed, this movement sees itself as fighting a “spiritual battle” against the demonic forces opposing Trump; some participated (non-violently) in the Jan. 6, 2020 riot.

    Taylor concludes with a warning that the NAR act as “spiritual warmongers, constantly expanding the arena of spiritual warfare, mapping it onto geographical territory and divisive politics in a deeply destabilizing and antidemocratic manner.” It is as if we are listening to Rothmann’s fiery sermons again.

    One difference, of course, is that the NAR folk are not under persecution, despite what they might claim. Taylor describes this as “the Evangelical Persecution Neurosis.”

    Three of the NAR’s principle components are:

    1. A charismatic approach to Christian life that affirms God speaks directly to them. They see themselves as biblical prophets who speak God’s commands which must be implemented regardless of social impact.

    2. The Evangelical Christian belief of living in the end-times on the eve of Jesus Christ’s return for judgment. NAR preachers proclaim that while Jesus in the Gospels taught to “turn the other cheek,” they now follow the judgmental Jesus of the apocalyptical Book of Revelation and mobilize a struggle with Satan to rely on scapegoat ideology.

    3. Derived from a group of Reformed or Calvinist theologians called “Christian Reconstructionists,” and building on Calvin’s theology of the “godly city,” they pursue a broader “dominionist” rationale to take over all of society for Christ. Believing one is living in the end-times means that society must be taken over and cleansed immediately, adding to urgency.



    Read more:
    I went to CPAC as an anthropologist to see how Trump supporters are feeling − for them, a ‘golden age’ has begun

    Believers, drawing on these three beliefs, derive an assurance they speak with God’s voice. This was the case for the Münster Anabaptists, and now similarly, for the NAR. As the example of the Münster Anabaptists suggests, we’ve seen this many times before throughout history, and it doesn’t end well.

    A 1685 engraving by Dutch poet and engraver Jan Luyken depicting the 1571 burning of Anabaptist woman Anneken Hendriks from Thieleman van Braght’s 1660 book ‘The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror.’
    (Allard Pierson Museum)

    There have been many more recent episodes of Christian groups claiming divine authority to remake society. Like Jan van Leiden, those in the NAR or who concur with its theology have recast the Jesus of the Gospels, and U.S. President Donald Trump, in apocalyptic terms.

    U.S. congresswoman Lauren Boebert, for example, who has been described as a Christian nationalist and is a strong gun advocate, is among those who say God anointed Trump to the presidency.

    This gives a gloss of divine approval for Trump’s autocratic goals. As authoritarianism and Christian nationalism rises, the fusion of charismatic authority with Reformed Protestant certitude and end-times fervour continues to attract followers.

    Gary K. Waite has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. Christian nationalism in the U.S. is eerily reminiscent of ‘dominionist’ reformers in history – https://theconversation.com/christian-nationalism-in-the-u-s-is-eerily-reminiscent-of-dominionist-reformers-in-history-250600

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Fungi are among the planet’s most important organisms — yet they continue to be overlooked in conservation strategies

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jonathan Cazabonne, Doctorant en mycologie et écologie des vieilles forêts, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)

    Fungi are among the most important organisms on Earth. Even though most of the world’s described 157,000 fungal species are only visible with a microscope, these organisms are essential to our ecosystems, our societies and economies.

    They break down organic matter and interact with all groups of organisms — including other fungi. They’re key actors in forest carbon storage, nutrient cycling, as well as plant growth and resistance to environmental stress.

    Fungi are also important to human cultures — including as a source of food, medicine and art. Economically, fungi also support a growing economy centred around mycotourism — with a growing number of travellers visiting Canada and Spain each year to forage for wild mushrooms.



    Read more:
    Rural communities in Québec are embracing ‘mushroom tourism’ to boost local economies

    All the benefits fungi provide to humans are estimated to be worth the equivalent of US$54.57 trillion. This is why it’s an understatement to say that the world’s ecosystems and human societies are shaped by fungi.

    And yet fungi continue to be an important but overlooked element of conservation strategies.

    Why fungi are forgotten

    Conservation efforts have long focused on protecting well-studied animals and plants. This is reflected in the number of species that have been assigned a conservation status by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

    Around 84 per cent of known species of vertebrates have received an IUCN conservation status. But just 0.5 per cent of all described fungi — 818 fungal species — are currently present on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Considering scientists estimate that there could be around 2.5 million fungal species in the world — of which we currently only know about six per cent of them — this means just 0.03 per cent of all fungi have been assigned a conservation status.

    Several factors explain this alarming reality.

    Fungi are difficult to study in both nature and under experimental conditions. This is because of many species’ microscopic size, their short lifespan and the hidden habitats they call home — such as soils, the tissues of other organisms and dung deposits.

    Many species of fungi are difficult to study because of their microscopic size.
    (Shutterstock)

    Fungi are also considered “uncharismatic” — meaning they don’t have the level of human appeal that some other species have. Much of their diversity is cryptic, as well. This means that while many fungi were once considered to be a single species, in reality they’re made up of multiple species that may look similar but are genetically distinct from one another. Because of this, conservation projects for fungi are poorly funded and do not easily capture public interest.

    Protecting the unknown

    In recent years, there’s been momentum within the scientific community to recognise fungi as a distinct kingdom within conservation strategies — one that’s on equal footing with animals and plants.

    A significant milestone in this movement has been the adoption of the term “funga,” which mirrors “fauna” and “flora”. This designates the fungal diversity within a given environment or habitat.

    Another important advancement was the recent pledge for fungal conservation that was presented at the 2024 Conference of Parties (COP16) in Colombia. This pledge urged parties to make fungal conservation a priority given fungi are central to achieving the biodiversity targets set out by the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework.

    More local initiatives are also emerging. In Québec, over 70 mycologists and biologists signed an opinion letter encouraging the government to integrate fungi into its legislative framework.

    Such progress is not trivial and may help correct misconceptions about fungi that continue to be present among the public, economic sectors and policymakers. For example, the misconception that fungi are plants is something that still persists to this day. Allowing this misconception to continue being perpetuated is harmful to the field of mycology, and may be preventing it from becoming a standalone discipline that deserves dedicated funding and specialists.

    Still, there’s much we don’t know about these unique, important organisms. And in order for us to be able to protect and preserve the planet’s fungi, we need to begin by formally identifying areas where knowledge is lacking and close these gaps.

    Last year, researchers used Laboulbeniomycetes — a class of poorly understood microfungi — as a case study to understand what biodiversity and conservation shortfalls continue to affect funga. This group of fungi includes species that rely on arthropods to disperse their spores or act as hosts for them. Many of these fungi live as minute parasites on the surface of insects such as cockroaches and ladybirds.

    The case study uncovered four major biodiversity shortfalls that are undermining the conservation of funga. These include knowledge gaps in species diversity, distribution, conservation assessments and species persistence.

    Part of conservation

    Failing to protect fungi means, by extension, failing to protect the roles they play in our ecosystems and daily lives.

    This is especially timely, as fungi, like animals and plants, are also facing numerous threats. Habitat degradation, pollution, invasive species and climate change may all increase their risks of extinction.

    And, as recently exemplified in vertebrates, many undescribed species of fungi may be even more at peril than we might know. This is because they’re most likely to be found in remote geographical regions — such as tropical rainforests — and thus heavily susceptible to human-induced changes.

    A key priority to better integrate fungi into conservation biology is to accumulate data on species diversity. But in order to accumulate data and understand how we can better protect fungal species worldwide, we need to fund research on fungi and make mycology a more attractive field for young scientists.

    One thing remains certain: the more we explore, the more we realise just how little we know.

    Jonathan Cazabonne is financially supported by a B2X doctoral research fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).

    Danny Haelewaters receives funding from the Czech Academy of Sciences (Lumina Quaeruntur Fellowship LQ200962501).

    – ref. Fungi are among the planet’s most important organisms — yet they continue to be overlooked in conservation strategies – https://theconversation.com/fungi-are-among-the-planets-most-important-organisms-yet-they-continue-to-be-overlooked-in-conservation-strategies-250483

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Youth are charting new freshwater futures by learning from the water on the water

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Andrea Reid, Assistant Professor, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia

    The future of freshwater is increasingly in jeopardy across Canada and around the world.

    Lakes, rivers and wetlands face numerous threats, from climate change to a range of harmful pollutants. Today, one-quarter of freshwater fauna are at risk of extinction.

    As climate change and other stressors worsen, ecological grief is increasingly recognized as a legitimate response to the losses of valued species and ecosystems.

    This grief poses a serious threat to mental health and well-being for many, with young people often feeling an outsized burden. While young people have contributed little to these challenges over their lifetimes, they face bearing the brunt of intensifying climate change impacts.

    Similarly, this existential angst is reportedly heightened among marginalized groups. This is often true for Indigenous Peoples, who are frequently the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet yet face higher climate risk or vulnerability to the direct consequences of climate change.

    What we need are adaptive approaches that address this grief and reconnect people with the natural world at this time of profound disconnection. Research about ecological grief points to approaches that centre social support, deep listening and sensitivity, as well as valuing an ethic of care as key elements. This is ultimately about fostering community and interconnectedness in relationships.

    As freshwater scientists, we are committed to contributing toward a better future for fresh waters. This is what led us to create a registered charity, Riparia, where we work to unite these concerns and approaches by facilitating free land-based learning programs for young people, especially Indigenous young women.

    These programs are geared towards facing this climate-uncertain future together and the profound need for improved stewardship of freshwater ecosystems.

    Why land-based learning

    Land-based learning is, by definition, experiential and rooted in local culture and history. It is a mode of education that arises from connecting learners with the land, by spending time on the land, in ways that engage minds, bodies, hearts and spirits.

    This approach has always been at the core of Indigenous learning. While conventional classrooms are often a far cry from these lived experiences, there is growing interest in breaking out of these confines and engaging in active land-based learning across the continent.

    In our time contributing towards land-based learning initiatives over the last decade, we have observed numerous benefits. There’s a saying that numbers numb and stories stick; we find that the voices of youth who participated in land-based learning best convey its meaning and impact.

    Among other benefits, land-based learning has fostered a heightened sense of connection to the land and water, spurred a deep drive to steward and care for these systems and built a community of practice to achieve that. In the words of youth aged 13-18 who participated in Riparia programs between 2019-2024:

    “I could feel my point of view of the world changing. In every way. I felt as though I had become closer to the land.”

    “This experience changed my view on how we should be more active in the environment and protect our water.”

    “Being with these girls reassured me that our environment’s future isn’t something we have to take on alone and it will be much easier if we do it together.”

    Together, our experiences with Riparia and the growing body of literature highlighting beneficial outcomes of land-based learning, tell us that these approaches can play an important role in fostering the community of care required to chart new freshwater futures.

    Learning that centres Indigenous perspectives

    Throughout the history of outdoor education — as an organized approach to learning in western systems — harmful stereotypes have been reproduced and Indigenous knowledge systems have been appropriated.

    How many recall attending youth camps bearing the names of Indigenous Peoples or places? Were they involved in any way? Was there regard for whose land this is?

    How many have participated in journey “wilderness”-based experiences? Many such experiences have often perpetuated western ideas of a “pristine” or “wild” “nature,” free from human influence. This point of view is in line with the doctrines of terra nullius (Latin for “nobody’s land”) and aqua nullius (“nobody’s water”) used to justify European colonization of Indigenous lands and waters.



    Read more:
    Terra nullius has been overturned. Now we must reverse aqua nullius and return water rights to First Nations people

    What we need is learning that recognizes that Indigenous Peoples, languages and cultures are alive and evolve in close relationship with the land.

    We also need learning to be accessible so it can play a foundational role building the community of care that humans and fresh waters now require.

    Little programming — from youth outdoor education through university — is built with Indigenous learners in mind. Few initiatives are offered at no cost to participating youth and their families. Women remain underrepresented in existing outdoor education initiatives because of cultural and social inequalities.

    What we can do

    As scientists supporting youth engagement through Riparia, we join the growing movement to break down these specific barriers to access.

    You can also contribute to this movement by helping connect young people in your life to existing youth engagement programs and offering support through relevant local ways or donations.

    But youth are not the only ones who need connection to land and water. We all deal with eco-grief. We all need water. And we all need to work together to chart new futures. Spending time in and on the water together is an important step in this direction. This video offers an opportunity to dive into what land-based learning with, in, and for fresh waters can look like and feel like.

    As a 15-year-old Kanien’kehá:ka participant in a Riparia 2019 program shared with us: “Water is the most important thing, it’s the thing we all have in common.”

    Dr. Andrea Reid co-directs Riparia from her role as an Assistant Professor at The University of British Columbia. She is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Indigenous Fisheries Science.

    Dr. Dalal Hanna co-directs Riparia from her position as an assistant professor at Carleton University, where she leads the Watershed Stewardship Research Collaborative.

    – ref. Youth are charting new freshwater futures by learning from the water on the water – https://theconversation.com/youth-are-charting-new-freshwater-futures-by-learning-from-the-water-on-the-water-250987

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Canada’s local food system faces major roadblocks without urgent policy changes

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Rosie Kerr, Research Associate, Sustainable Food Systems Lab, Lakehead University

    As Canada’s trade conflict with the United States escalates, governments are encouraging Canadians to buy local to support the country’s economic, social and environmental stability and independence.

    But while enthusiasm in purchasing locally made food is growing, actually identifying Canadian products in grocery stores is often confusing. Decades of free trade have deeply integrated Canada’s food supply chains with the U.S., making it difficult to determine what is actually local.



    Read more:
    Trump tariffs have sparked a ‘Buy Canadian’ surge, but keeping the trend alive faces hurdles

    Even for Canadian-owned companies, most food products are enmeshed in global supply chains and often contain a mix of Canadian and foreign ingredients.

    Canada’s beef industry is a striking example of this. Two multinational corporations — American-owned Cargill and Brazilian-owned JBS — process more than 95 per cent of beef produced in Canada. This means that even if some of the food consumers purchase is labelled as Canadian-owned, the economic benefit may be flowing outside the country

    As food systems researchers and practitioners who have explored ways for Canadians to feed themselves in equitable and sustainable ways, it has become clear that local food systems lack the infrastructure and supply to meet increasing demand.

    What’s holding local food systems back?

    In collaboration with Sustain, an Ontario-wide network that promotes healthy, just and sustainable food and farming, we conducted a study to understand the policy priorities of organizations and businesses working to build local food economies in regions across the province.

    Ontario already has a vibrant network of farmers, organizations and food entrepreneurs ready to meet local food demand. However, systemic challenges continue to hinder their ability to scale up production and distribution.

    To better understand how to support Ontario’s food system, we surveyed over 90 organizations working in different food-related sectors.

    Through this research, we developed a series of policy reports focused on supporting aspiring farmers, protecting land for food production and strengthening local food systems.

    Our findings show that regulatory changes to support small- and medium-sized enterprises and key investments could remove barriers and allow local food economies to flourish.

    Smaller farms struggling to survive

    Our study identified several barriers holding back Ontario’s local food economy. The first set of barriers are on the supply side. A strong local food system depends on a strong network of farmers. However, many small- and medium-sized farms that supply local markets face disproportionate barriers that threaten their survival.

    Many current government policies favour large-scale food production, making it difficult for smaller farmers to flourish.

    Compounding the issue is Canada’s looming farm succession crisis. More than 40 per cent of farmers in Canada are expected to retire by 2033, yet many aspiring farmers cannot afford to purchase farms or access start-up capital. When farmers can’t afford land, it’s often sold for non-agriculture uses.

    To tackle these barriers, our study calls for provincially supported low-interest loan programs to finance down-payments, construction and equipment. Strengthening policies to protect farmland from urban sprawl, among other strategies, is also essential, as is expanding access to public land for local, ecological food production.

    Processing, distribution bottlenecks

    The second set of barriers we identified affect the farm-to-plate process. Small- and medium- sized farmers need better access to retail opportunities to sell fresh produce, along with the infrastructure to process raw foods into products like flour, packaged meats, jams, sauces and pickles.

    This is especially evident in Ontario’s meat-processing sector, where a shortage of local abattoirs has led to long wait times.

    To address these issues, our study recommends increased investment in regional food hubs. Food hubs are shared-use facilities that manage the aggregation, processing and distribution of food products from local and regional producers, giving them better access to markets.

    These hubs are essential to meeting the growing demand coming for sustainable, local food from businesses, public institutions and school food programs. But they are only part of the picture.

    We also identified funding opportunities that could bolster local food economies. These include expanding Ontario’s Fair Finance Fund to provide more financing options for regional food enterprises and supporting new abattoirs through the expansion of the Meat Processors Capacity Improvement Initiative.

    A co-ordinated strategy is needed

    Ontario manufacturers, retailers and farmers have all shown a willingness to expand local food production, but they need better support from policymakers to make it viable. There must be policies in place to support local food production and processing, remove key barriers and prioritize much-needed investments.

    Across Canada, other provinces and territories face similar challenges in building strong local food networks. Most of the recommendations we heard are similarly outlined across different regions.

    With consumer interest in local food on the rise, this is a critical moment for governments at all levels to improve avenues for new farmers, invest in processing and storage facilities and build local distribution networks — all essential to building a robust local food system.

    Moe Garahan, a board member of Sustain Ontario, co-authored this article.

    Rosie Kerr receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    Charles Z. Levkoe receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Ontario.

    Leigh Potvin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Council for Articulation and Transfer, the Government of Nova Scotia, and the University of the Arctic.

    – ref. Canada’s local food system faces major roadblocks without urgent policy changes – https://theconversation.com/canadas-local-food-system-faces-major-roadblocks-without-urgent-policy-changes-251578

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The threat of indifference to poverty, environmental damage and disease – and what it will take to reinvent international solidarity

    Source: The Conversation – France – By Pierre Micheletti, Responsable du diplôme «Santé — Solidarité — Précarité» à la Faculté de médecine de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)

    The collapse of western funding for international aid–for both emergency humanitarian operations and official development assistance (ODA)–is a major blow. The dramatic consequences for the neglected populations are the result of the structural weaknesses–evident for years [1]–of an economic model of international aid and development whose obsolescence is now plain for all to see. What is particularly dramatic, however, is the abrupt, non-negotiated manner in which the procedures and targets of the withdrawals have been determined.

    The “four temptations” inherent to the financial system in force to date [2]–and now unashamedly embraced by the new US administration–are obvious: the “western-centrism” of the donor countries; the “neo-liberal approach” to international aid where each contributing state chooses which countries to help; the “security concerns” about payments which are governed by strict control procedures to prevent such payments falling into the hands of the enemies of donor countries in conflict areas; and the “temptation to withdraw” funding whenever donor countries experience a major upheaval (Covid-19, economic crises, the rise of nationalism and isolationism, etc.). These trends converge to generate a volumetric insufficiency and suspicions of political soft power in the countries contributing to the annual budgets [3].

    Of course, this is a disaster for international aid and development actors themselves, both in terms of feeling responsible for abandoning the activities developed in the field, and in terms of the redundancy plans that have already hit some of the organisations. Some of these organisations will clearly not survive the current events: even those with little or no reliance on USAID (the US development agency whose aid was ordered frozen for 90 days) will potentially be affected by the knock-on effects of the withdrawal of the leading donor country.

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    Scaling back aid in an interdependent world

    Even before the United States announced its cuts, other countries had begun to scale back their international aid and development budgets. These include France [4], the UK, Germany and Belgium, to name a few we already know of.

    Organisations for which the “generosity of the public” (which accounts for around 20% of annual humanitarian aid funding) [5] is a major component of their resource structure will not escape the consequences either.

    The economic rebalancing and political tensions resulting from some of the Trump administration’s decisions are indeed likely to have industrial and social repercussions in all the countries that were once privileged partners of the United States, particularly among the members of the European Union. Experience shows the effects that the erosion of certain national parameters can have on the donation processes of the individual donors who support non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Individual donors will have to prioritise a wide range of crises that are now being neglected by government funding, and compassion will then be a matter of personal choice.

    The tension looming everywhere as a result of increasing trade restrictions may have economic and social repercussions, which in turn may lead to higher expectations among the general public and redirect donations toward local, national or family forms of aid and development.

    Some political groups are starting to question the legitimacy and validity of ODA, which recently prompted the director of the Agence française de développement (AFD) to speak out specifically in defence of the actions of the organisation [6].

    The richest countries are gradually developing a dynamic that shows an insane indifference to poverty, environmental degradation and the zoonoses that can result from the abuse of our primary forests. Yet no border can act as an illusory and impenetrable Maginot line to curb the worldwide dangers that define the interdependencies of today’s globalised world [7].

    We cannot be indifferent–neither in Europe nor in North America–to all the forms of abuse inflicted on our planet (and soon to be compounded by the revival of a mutilating and predatory extractive industry), nor to the survival strategies underlying current and future massive population movements, nor to the conflicts that these different mechanisms can generate.

    The danger of losing interest in equality of opportunity

    Two figures immediately reveal the huge gap that already exists in terms of global inequality. The global ODA envelope, provided by OECD countries, amounted to $230 billion in 2023, when “migratory remittances”–sums transferred by migrants to their countries of origin–stood at $830 billion, of which $650 billion were sent to low- and middle-income countries [8]. These sums are a lifeline for the poorest populations. They reflect the inseparable balance of survival between here and there.

    Yet we are being encouraged to accept the idea that, despite these border-free interdependencies, we, in the richest countries, could lose interest in the various mechanisms that are destroying equality of opportunity throughout the world; that an unabashed reaffirmation of “everyone for themselves”, in terms of both consumption and global solidarity, could henceforth serve as a new, unabashed political mantra; and that this would have no long-term consequences for lasting peace…

    Therefore, in a world where, by 2100, the population of Africa could represent 40% of humankind, we risk major turmoil if we turn our backs on the reality that is unfolding [9]. On that continent (and in other places where major vulnerabilities exist), we cannot shy away from showing concern for others–out of a sense of realism if not generosity.

    Together, we must resist the strategy of every man for himself and the law of the strongest promoted by the new leaders of the United States and their affiliates. We must also strive to invent a new model free of the four founding temptations of the existing system, which grew out of the Second World War and the process of decolonisation. This implies creating the conditions for a significant increase in the number of contributing countries for government funds, as well as a diversification of sources for private funds. A new distribution of creative and decision-making power within the governance of a system in need of rebuilding is thus essential. In the aftermath of the current crisis, new battles are emerging to radically overhaul the strategies and methods of international solidarity.

    A version of this article originally appeared under a different headline in Alternatives Humanitaires. It was translated by Derek Scoins for that publication.

    Pierre Micheletti ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

    – ref. The threat of indifference to poverty, environmental damage and disease – and what it will take to reinvent international solidarity – https://theconversation.com/the-threat-of-indifference-to-poverty-environmental-damage-and-disease-and-what-it-will-take-to-reinvent-international-solidarity-252321

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Washington Post’s turnaround on its opinion pages is returning journalism to its partisan roots − but without the principles

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Joseph Jones, Assistant Professor of Media Ethics and Law at Reed College of Media, West Virginia University

    Owner Jeff Bezos has made big changes to The Washington Post’s editorial pages. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest person and owner of The Washington Post, announced in February 2025 significant changes to the editorial pages of his Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper.

    The editorial section, also called the opinion section, is where editors and contributors with a deep and broad understanding of the latest news offer their analysis of the day’s issues. This content is distinct from the fact-based news reporting of the outlet’s everyday journalists.

    Both kinds of content serve the public interest. Journalists report news to inform the public, while editors and opinion writers analyze and explain news, putting facts into a larger context to aid understanding.

    At the Post, instead of news editors making independent decisions on what to write and the perspectives they should take, Bezos tweeted, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

    Opinion and analysis in the Post was thus going to limit itself to one particular viewpoint.

    As a journalism historian, I analyze how journalism has changed over time. Over the years, the purpose, practices and forms of journalism have evolved.

    Bezos’ decision harks back to an earlier time when editors and owners were the same person, and newspapers offered a specific interpretation of the world, not just a neutral report.

    Informed opinions and analysis

    While editorial writers and opinion columnists offer their opinions, these views are still expected to be grounded in journalistic principles, building from verifiable facts and comprehensively considering context to offer well-reasoned analysis.

    Many of today’s news editors and journalists stake their professional reputations on their obligation to truth, independent of special interests or particular ideologies. They pride themselves on reporting and explaining the news without fear or favor.

    After Bezos’ announcement, editorial page editor and veteran journalist David Shipley resigned from his position. Shipley told his staff he was stepping down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession that I love.”

    Journalists and media critics from across the political spectrum read Bezos’ editorial policy change as going against the tradition of a paper that long prided itself on editorial independence in the name of public service. Historically, the newspaper’s opinion section offered a range of views on a variety of issues.

    Limiting the newspaper’s opinion section to a single viewpoint, critics argue, doesn’t seem to align with the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as it stifles public discussion and purposefully turns off some of the lights.

    Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told the Guardian, “If you’re trying to advance the cause of democracy, then you allow for public debate, which is what democracy is all about.”

    Putting all of this in historical context can help illuminate Bezos’ decision as well as the current state of American media.

    A facsimile of a 1765 edition of The Pennsylvania Journal, focused on The Stamp Act, in which the British government imposed direct taxation upon the American Colonies.
    The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

    Opinionated early American journalism

    At the nation’s founding, the very first newspapers were highly partisan, supporting and receiving much of their funding from particular political parties and government subsidies. Newspapers were small operations where editors, owners, writers and typesetters were usually all the same person.

    As the country and its political direction were just forming, these editor-owners felt a public obligation and duty to stake out a clear political position. There were no standards of journalistic neutrality; editor-owners framed news reports, wrote columns and published other people’s opinions based on their own particular viewpoints.

    Editors wrote passionately, using language that suggested the fate of the nation was at stake. They were also principled and willing to criticize their own parties if they thought it warranted. And because they were transparent about their views, readers responded by gravitating to their preferred newspapers. Consequently, the number of newspapers in the U.S. increased from 35 in 1783 to 1,200 by 1833. Historians have thus argued that the early United States was a “nation of newspaper readers.”

    Unlike modern notions of journalistic impartiality, if a newspaper didn’t support a political party or remained neutral, it was dismissed by readers as either lacking morals or being too stupid to form an opinion.

    As newspapers of the early republic developed from reporting recycled news from other sources to guiding public discussion, the editorial thus emerged as a short opinion essay separate from reports on local speeches or foreign news.

    Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post.
    Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

    Fact-based journalism and informed analysis

    For various reasons, the partisan press gave way to a journalism that attempted wider appeal. By 1900, many news outlets aimed for impartiality and neutrality.

    By the 1920s, most journalists embraced the ideals of objectivity, the notion that journalists should only report facts.

    Interestingly, this led to a growth in editorials, opinion columns and news analysis.

    Opinion columns written by journalists provided interpretive frameworks for readers to understand the meaning of news events. One such journalist-commentator was Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), a political analyst who wrote a number of influential columns, including a piece infamously viewed as a catalyst for Japanese internment during World War II.

    Such content provided journalists a means to show their independence from the powerful. Journalists could commit themselves to truth and verifiable facts while still asserting their independent role to contextualize news, explain its implications and guide the conversations necessary for democracy.

    Research has shown that such opinion-based news content can influence what citizens and media outlets prioritize as important, as well as how policymakers approach certain issues.

    Today, especially with the increase in partisan television, radio and internet outlets, there is no shortage of opinion-based news and analysis.

    As long as people stay empathetic and open to others with different experiences, this is not inherently bad for democracy. Problems arise, however, when opinionated news outweighs fact-based reporting and people begin to mistrust all reporting they do not agree with, a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

    In today’s digital world, everyone can broadcast or publish their opinion, whereas fact-based reporting takes time and resources. While news analysis and thoughtful opinion can generate important social conversations and help citizens understand news, too much opinion that isn’t grounded in facts can also lead to a general atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. This spells trouble for the good-faith understanding, open dialogue and mutual trust so vital to democracy.

    Profiting from polarization

    Polling data suggests Americans are more divided than ever.

    Perhaps Washington Post owner Bezos is simply responding to the public’s documented preference for partisanship over truth or to the profitability of partisan news.

    But as a matter of context, there is a difference between the principled partisans of the early republic, the professional analysts of the 20th century, and an owner who demands his media outlet’s opinions should be limited to his preferences.

    When he purchased The Washington Post in 2013, Bezos said the newspaper would not change and that “the paper’s duty will remain to its reader and not to the private interests of its owners.”

    In this latest move, he has signaled that his private interest is a priority, at least for the editorial section. This limits the perspectives the Post-reading public can encounter and restricts the free marketplace of ideas. So when a Post journalist of 40 years wrote a column opposing Bezos’ editorial decision, her bosses refused to publish it.

    Apparently, light criticism was not a “personal liberty” afforded a longtime employee. With her beloved employer not even willing to discuss the column – discussion being the cornerstone of deliberative democracy – the veteran journalist resigned.

    In the current media environment, organizations and people who don’t participate in news production or share its values can purchase journalistic outlets and alter their standards and practices. As a result, principled journalists may decide to leave rather than compromise their mission of public service.

    Ultimately, Bezos is being transparent. It is thus up to the American people to decide on the kind of journalism and pursuit of truth they desire. It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of canceled subscriptions have already begun to make that decision clear.

    Joseph Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Washington Post’s turnaround on its opinion pages is returning journalism to its partisan roots − but without the principles – https://theconversation.com/washington-posts-turnaround-on-its-opinion-pages-is-returning-journalism-to-its-partisan-roots-but-without-the-principles-251189

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

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

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

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

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

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

    What is a disk galaxy?

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

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

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

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

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

    A giant surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Unusually crowded part of space

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

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

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

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

    A fortunate finding

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

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

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

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

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



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

    Themiya Nanayakkara receives funding from Australian Research Council.

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

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Fewer deaths, new substances and evolving treatments in Philly’s opioid epidemic − 4 essential reads

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kate Kilpatrick, Philadelphia Editor

    Opioid overdose deaths in Philly dropped in 2023. Data for 2024 has not yet been released. Jeff Fusco/The Conversation U.S., CC BY-NC-SA

    In Philadelphia, fatal overdoses are the No. 3 cause of death after heart disease and cancer. That’s been the case each year since 2016, except in 2020 and 2021 when COVID-19 deaths outpaced overdose deaths. The vast majority of fatal overdoses in Philly involve the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

    Data on overdose deaths in Philly in 2024 is not yet available. However, new research shows that drug deaths are dropping in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

    Still, opioid overdose deaths in Philadelphia remain what public health researchers call a “wicked problem.” These are complex, multifaceted challenges that are constantly changing and have no clear solution.

    The Conversation U.S. published several articles over the past year that sought to untangle various threads of this wicked problem in Philadelphia. Here are four essential reads.

    1. Overdose deaths down – but still high

    Philadelphia’s 7% drop in fatal overdoses in 2023 is notable. Still, opioid use disorder claimed the lives of over 1,100 residents that year – more than three times as many lives as 10 years earlier.

    Ben Cocchiaro, assistant clinical professor of family medicine and community health at Drexel University, explains one likely reason why overdoses in Philly spiked in the first place: the unpredictable potency of the city’s street fentanyl supply.

    “Local drug-testing efforts found as much as a fiftyfold difference in potency between bags of fentanyl that appear identical,” Cocchiaro writes. “It’s like cracking a beer and not knowing whether drinking it will get you mildly buzzed or send you to the graveyard.



    Read more:
    How opioid deaths tripled in Philly over a decade − and what may be behind a recent downturn

    2. ‘Tranq’ wounds proliferate

    Forensic testing has revealed that over 90% of street heroin and fentanyl samples in Philly now contain xylazine, an animal tranquilizer with no FDA-approved use in humans.

    Rachel McFadden is an emergency room nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and also works at a walk-in clinic in North Philadelphia that serves people who use drugs. Before xylazine, she says, most of the wounds she saw were minor skin infections that she treated with antibiotics.

    But that changed in late 2019.

    “Participants at the wound care clinic started to come in with a different kind of wound. They were filled with black and yellow dead tissue and tunneled deep into the skin. They were not wounds from infection but rather from tissue death or necrosis,” McFadden writes.

    McFadden explains the protocol for treating these serious wounds, which involves removing the dead tissue, administering antimicrobials and antibiotics for the inflammation and infection, and keeping the wound moist and dressed. She says it’s also important that people’s other basic needs, including food, shelter and a place to shower, are met so they can properly heal.



    Read more:
    How opioid deaths tripled in Philly over a decade − and what may be behind a recent downturn

    3. A new treatment for withdrawal

    The combination of fentanyl and xylazine in Philly street opioids has made withdrawal symptoms far more excruciating than those experienced by heroin users in the past.

    That’s according to Kory London, an emergency room doctor and associate professor of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. London says these withdrawal symptoms lead many patients who are addicted to opioids to discharge themselves from the hospital before their treatment is complete.

    “Patients with opioid use disorder will often do whatever they can to stay out of the hospital due to fear of withdrawal,” he writes. “Asking how withdrawal symptoms are managed, therefore, is often their first priority when hospitalized. We see this even when they have conditions that require complicated and time-sensitive treatments.

    Beginning in 2022, London and colleagues began experimenting with new approaches to treating “tranq” dope withdrawal in Philly. The new protocols reduced the likelihood of these patients leaving early by more than half – from 10% to just under 4%.



    Read more:
    Philly hospitals test new strategy for ‘tranq dope’ withdrawal – and it keeps patients from walking out before their treatment is done

    4. Industrial chemical BTMPS has unknown risks

    Philadelpha’s public health department has issued health alerts about xylazine and medetomidine becoming more prevalent in the city’s street opioid supply.

    Researchers Karli Hochstatter and Fernando Montero at Columbia University are part of a team that tests fentanyl samples collected in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia each month. Those tests have turned up a new adulterant: an industrial chemical known as BTMPS that is used in making plastics.

    “We first detected BTMPS in Philadelphia in June 2024. We found it in two of the eight samples – 25% – that we collected that month. By November 2024, 12 of 22 samples – or 55% – contained BTMPS,” Hochstatter and Montero write. “What’s more, the amount, or concentration, of this industrial chemical in the drug samples often exceeded the amount of fentanyl.”

    BTMPS has not been studied in humans, but rat studies reveal exposure – at far lower levels than what is found in the Philly fentanyl samples – can cause heart defects, serious eye damage and death.



    Read more:
    Philly’s street fentanyl contains an industrial chemical called BTMPS that’s an ingredient in plastic

    This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

    Read more of our stories about Philadelphia.

    – ref. Fewer deaths, new substances and evolving treatments in Philly’s opioid epidemic − 4 essential reads – https://theconversation.com/fewer-deaths-new-substances-and-evolving-treatments-in-phillys-opioid-epidemic-4-essential-reads-251969

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Thirty years ago Ukraine got rid of its nuclear arsenal – now the people regret that decision

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Mathers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University

    Around 73% of Ukrainians now want their country to “restore” its nuclear weapons, according to a recent opinion poll. A majority of Ukrainians (58%) were in favour of Ukraine owning nuclear weapons, even if this meant losing western allies.

    This suggests an underlying regret that Ukraine agreed to relinquish the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal as part of the Budapest Memorandum around 30 years ago. This agreement, signed in December 1994, provided security guarantees for Ukraine from the US, the UK and Russia in return for giving up the weapons. Ukraine also agreed it would not acquire nuclear weapons in the future.

    The focus on nuclear weapons is intensifying all over Europe. This week the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, called on the US to station its nuclear weapons in his country to deter Russian attacks. He cited Moscow’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons just across the border in Belarus during 2023 as part of his reasoning.

    Trump’s apparent weakening commitment to Nato has also prompted the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to suggest that France could extend protection of its own nuclear weapons to its allies.

    It’s clear that some Ukrainians now believe that their country would have been less likely to have experienced a Russian invasion if it had held on to its nuclear capacity. Ukrainians now question how much they can rely on other states after the failure of security guarantees that were central to the 1994 agreement.

    The pledges by the US, UK and Russia to protect the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine were put to the test in 2014 when Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea and began providing financial and military backing for militia leaders in eastern Ukraine who claimed to lead pro-Russian separatist movements.



    Read more:
    Are Ukrainians ready for ceasefire and concessions? Here’s what the polls say

    The US and UK imposed economic sanctions against Russia and provided training, equipment and non-lethal weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces. But these measures fell well short of ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and were insufficient to help Ukraine retake its territory.

    Similarly, US and UK support for Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, although valuable and much appreciated by the Ukrainians, has not been enough to allow Kyiv to completely expel Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

    What was the Budapest Memorandum?

    What if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?

    But what if Ukraine had never given up its nuclear weapons? The logic of deterrence suggests that Putin would have not have invaded and attacked a nuclear-armed Ukraine. But the argument that Ukraine should not have surrendered the Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory overlooks the specific circumstances. For while physical components of a nuclear weapons capability – delivery vehicles and nuclear warheads – were within Ukraine’s grasp, the launch codes remained in Moscow, and Russian leaders showed no willingness to relinquish them.

    So, Kyiv would have had no control over whether, when or against whom those weapons might have been used. The risk to Ukraine of becoming the target of another state’s nuclear strike would have been considerable, and the Kyiv government would have been unable to do anything to reduce that risk. Retaining nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet period would have probably made Ukrainians less rather than more secure.



    Read more:
    What is the value of US security guarantees? Here’s what history shows

    Ukraine also lacked the economic resources to maintain the nuclear weapons on its territory, or develop them into a credible deterrent force. In exchange for giving up nuclear weapons, Ukraine received much-needed economic assistance from the west.

    In the 1990s Ukrainian views were shaped by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This had a devastating and lasting impact on the land and the people in that part of Ukraine, highlighting the risks of the nuclear sector. In 1994, when the Budapest Memorandum was being negotiated, only 30% of Ukrainians were in favour of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons.

    What now?

    Ukraine would face considerable technical challenges in developing nuclear weapons today, both in creating the necessary quantities of fissile material for warheads and manufacturing delivery vehicles.

    Kyiv would also need to pay for an expensive nuclear weapons development programme at a time when the Ukrainian economy is struggling to supply its soldiers with conventional weapons and meet the needs of civilians.

    And unless Ukraine’s international supporters were on board, Kyiv might face the withdrawal of economic and military aid at a crucial juncture. If Moscow detected any move on Ukraine’s part to develop nuclear weapons, there would be a strong motive for a preemptive Russian strike to put an end to that plan.

    But even though it may not be feasible for Ukraine to develop an independent nuclear deterrent in the short term, Kyiv may feel compelled to pursue a nuclear weapons programme unless Ukraine is provided with serious and reliable security guarantees. With the Trump administration apparently ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine, the onus is on the country’s international supporters to come up with an alternative unless they want to see further nuclear proliferation in Europe.

    Jennifer Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Thirty years ago Ukraine got rid of its nuclear arsenal – now the people regret that decision – https://theconversation.com/thirty-years-ago-ukraine-got-rid-of-its-nuclear-arsenal-now-the-people-regret-that-decision-251733

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Mona Lisa is a vampire

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

    Louvre Museum/Canva, CC BY-SA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Beyond the canon

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

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

    Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;

    A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek;

    Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies

    Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest

    Of cruelty that waits and does not seek

    For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast

    Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:

    Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies

    Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;

    Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest

    For those vicissitudes by which men die.

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

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

    Frankie Dytor receives funding from The British Academy.

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

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

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

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

    panuwat phimpha / Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Living Mountain: why a second world war meditation on nature’s fragility and wonder is still relevant today

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Illingworth, Professor of Creative Pedagogies, Edinburgh Napier University

    Cairngorms national park, Scotland. Nat Nat Nat/Shutterstock

    Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is not a book about conquering peaks or mapping uncharted terrain. It is instead a deeply felt, poetic encounter with the Cairngorms.

    This vast mountain range in north-east Scotland has been shaped by ancient glaciers and known for its high plateaus, deep corries and shifting light. These mountains, some of the highest in the UK, are rugged, remote, and often treacherous. Yet, they hold a stark, indifferent beauty.

    First written towards the end of the second world war, The Living Mountain remained unpublished in a drawer until 1977, its quiet brilliance only gradually recognised. Now, with publisher Scribner bringing out its first US edition, a new audience will discover this landmark of nature writing.

    Shepherd, a Scottish writer, educator, and poet, had an unparalleled relationship with the mountains. The best way to describe it is a word she herself used: feyness. There is a deep, almost mystical sensitivity in the way she moves through the landscape. She does not seek to master it, but to know it intimately – its ice, its rock, its light.

    Each chapter of The Living Mountain focuses on an element of this vast range: the plateau, the recesses, the plants, and, most strikingly for me, the water. Her description of Loch Etchachan made me want to go there immediately, but such is the clarity of her prose that I felt as if I already had. Its pristine waters shimmering in the shifting light, the stillness broken only by the wind and the sheer presence of the place evoked so vividly that it felt less like reading and more like remembering.

    Shepherd’s writing reminds me of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig – though where MacCaig wrote often of Assynt in the far north-western corner of Scotland, Shepherd’s domain was the Cairngorms. Both share an awe, a humility and a sense of reverence towards their subject.

    There is a poetic tenderness throughout Shepherd’s writing, in the cadence of her sentences, in the careful weight of each word. At around 30,000 words, it is a short book, yet every phrase feels hewn from the page, as enduring as the granite she describes.

    A line I return to often is one that Shepherd uses to describe the water at the height of these peaks: “It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.” This is the essence of Shepherd’s philosophy. The mountains do not exist for our amusement or our conquest. They simply are.

    This is a book not about “Munro bagging” – the practice of ticking off Scotland’s 282 mountains over 3,000 feet – but about being with the land, walking it slowly, attentively, over a lifetime.

    A fragile land

    Yet, The Living Mountain is also a stark reminder of the fragility of that world. Shepherd notes, as early as 1934, that summer snow is disappearing: “Antiquity has gone from our snow.” Was this, unwittingly, one of the earliest literary observations of climate change? Around the same time, British engineer Guy Callendar had begun linking rising global temperatures to CO₂ emissions, though his findings were dismissed. Almost a century on, Shepherd’s words feel prophetic.

    For US readers encountering The Living Mountain for the first time, they may wonder what a remote range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland offers them. But these mountains contain, in their own way, the spirit of the Santa Cruz mountains, the Appalachians, the Rockies. In their solitude and permanence, they offer the same humility, the same respect, the same quiet self-reflection that comes with encountering something so vast and indifferent to human life.

    With a framing introduction by Robert Macfarlane, a British writer known for his books on landscape and nature, and an afterword by Jenny Odell, an American artist and educator, this edition gives The Living Mountain the platform it deserves. This is not just a book about place – it is a book that is place. It remains as vital as the mountains themselves, urging us to look more closely. To listen more deeply. To move through the world with the same quiet reverence that Shepherd once did.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Sam Illingworth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The Living Mountain: why a second world war meditation on nature’s fragility and wonder is still relevant today – https://theconversation.com/the-living-mountain-why-a-second-world-war-meditation-on-natures-fragility-and-wonder-is-still-relevant-today-246725

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

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

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

    shutterstock Frame Studio/Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What we found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Collection managers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    All the small things

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

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

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

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

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

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

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What was the first thing scientists discovered? A historian makes the case for Babylonian astronomy

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By James Byrne, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society, University of Colorado Boulder

    Ancient Babylonians looked to the skies to predict what would happen. mikroman6/Moment via Getty Images

    Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

    What was the first thing scientists discovered? – Jacob, age 9, Santiago, Panama

    All societies have had ways of understanding nature based on their experiences of it. For example, farmers need to understand the seasons and weather to know when to plant and harvest their crops. Hunters need to understand the lives of animals to know how to hunt them.

    This kind of understanding of the natural world isn’t quite the same as science though. Science typically refers to knowledge that’s more organized and formal than that. It’s not just an explanation, but a system that uses observations and experiments to build theories that are recorded, passed on to others and built on.

    With that idea in mind, as a historian of science, my best answer to the question of what the first scientists discovered is Babylonian astronomy.

    The Babylonians lived from about 2,500 to 4,000 years ago in the area that’s now Iraq. What makes Babylonian astronomy stand out as being especially scientific is the careful, organized way in which Babylonian scribes – their keepers of knowledge – observed, recorded and eventually mathematically predicted the ways that the Sun, Moon, stars and planets move in the skies.

    Babylonian astronomy was uniquely scientific

    Before clocks, observing the sky was how people knew the time. During the day you can see the Sun, and at night you can see the stars. Many calendars are based on the skies too. A month is about how long it takes the Moon to go through its phases. A year is one full revolution of the Earth around the Sun.

    But keeping track of time wasn’t the only way the Babylonians used astronomy. Like today’s world, Babylonia could be both predictable and chaotic. The weather changed with the seasons; crops were planted and harvested; festivals were celebrated; people were born, aged and died, all predictably. But a bad harvest might cause high prices for grains and starvation; a king might die young, causing political upheaval; a disease might kill thousands, all unpredictably.

    The stars and planets can seem like that, too. The stars are always in the same places in relation to one another, so you can identify constellations, and those constellations rise and set at regular times over the course of a year. But the planets move around – they’re not always in the same places, and sometimes they even seem to stop and move backward in their paths. Sometimes even more spectacular events occur, such as eclipses.

    An eclipse might have seemed like a powerful omen of something that would happen next.
    Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

    For the Babylonians, those ideas were linked. They saw changes in the motions of the planets or rare events such as eclipses as signs – omens – about what was going to happen on Earth. For example, they might think the shadow of the Earth moving over the Moon in a certain way during a lunar eclipse meant that a flood would also happen.

    The scribes kept a book called Enūma Anu Enlil listing omens and their meanings. So if the seemingly changing motions of the heavens could be predicted, maybe earthly events could be, too. This led the scribes to study astronomy.

    How Babylonian astronomy worked

    The foundation of Babylonian astronomy was kept in a book called MUL.APIN, meaning “The Plough Star,” the name of a constellation. It recorded the positions of the stars, when in the year they would first be visible, the paths of the Sun and Moon, the periods when the planets would be visible in the night sky, and other fundamental astronomical knowledge.

    Later, Babylonian scribes began to keep their Astronomical Diaries, which contained detailed records of the positions of the Moon and planets along with events on Earth such as the weather and the price of grain. In other words, they recorded their observations of both astronomical omens and the events they might have predicted.

    Babylonian scribes used cuneiform to write down records of all kinds.
    mikroman6/Moment via Getty Images

    This kind of careful observation and record-keeping is a major part of science. The Astronomical Diaries were kept for over 700 years, making them maybe the longest-running scientific project ever.

    The records in the Astronomical Diaries helped Babylonian scribes take another scientific step: predicting astronomical events. One part of this was computing what the Babylonians called goal-years: the number of years it took for a planet to return to the same place on the same day. For example, they computed that the period for Venus was eight Babylonian years. So if Venus was somewhere on a particular day, it would be in the same place on the same day eight years later.

    By around the fourth century B.C.E., the scribes developed this knowledge into a system of mathematically predicting astronomical events. They made tables called ephemerides that showed when these events would happen in the future. So Babylonian scribes succeeded in their project: They made the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets predictable.

    Babylonian astronomy and you

    MUL.APIN, the Astronomical Diaries, the ephemerides and all of Babylonian astronomy had a major impact on later astronomers, one that continues to today. Greek astronomers used Babylonian observations to make geometric models of planetary motions, part of the long path toward modern astronomy. The ephemerides were the ancestors of astronomical tables, which still exist. For example, NASA has a table of eclipses online that goes to the year 3000.

    We tell time using the Babylonian system.
    Catherine McQueen/Moment via Getty Images

    But the most familiar thing that comes from Babylonian astronomy is how we tell time. The Babylonians didn’t use a decimal system with units of 10 like we do. Instead, they used a sexagesimal system, with units of 60. Babylonian observations were so important that later people kept Babylonian units for astronomy, even though they used a base 10 system for other things.

    So if you’ve ever wondered why an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds, it’s because we’ve kept that way of measuring from Babylonian astronomy. Whenever you tell the time, you’re using some of the very oldest science.

    Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

    And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

    James Byrne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. What was the first thing scientists discovered? A historian makes the case for Babylonian astronomy – https://theconversation.com/what-was-the-first-thing-scientists-discovered-a-historian-makes-the-case-for-babylonian-astronomy-244463

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump’s first term polarized teens’ views on racism and inequality

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Laura Wray-Lake, Professor of Social Welfare, University of California, Los Angeles

    Teens who supported President Trump in 2016 became less aware of societal inequalities after the election. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

    When asked about reactions to Donald Trump being president, a 16-year-old Black girl said, “I feel unsafe and not protected. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free but is really the land of racism.”

    In contrast, a 16-year-old white girl said, “I think it’s OK … I do feel bad for minorities … I’m white however and come from a somewhat similar background so I will be alright.”

    These two teenagers responded very differently to the racial climate created by Trump – during his first presidency. Research on adolescents during Trump’s first term takes on new relevance now that he is back in office.

    As a scholar of adolescent development, I have studied U.S. teenagers for over two decades. When Trump took office in 2016, I was in the midst of leading a five-year study to understand how young people become civically engaged. My colleagues and I were tracking adolescents’ beliefs and behaviors over time, which gave us a unique opportunity to document changes after Trump was elected.

    Focusing on 1,400 ninth through 12th graders, I hypothesized that adolescents would become more divided during Trump’s presidency, given the political divisions evident among adults in 2016. And, like other social scientists, my team and I did identify diverging worldviews about racism and inequalities among teenagers and increased discrimination.

    Decades of research shows that adolescents are influenced in lasting ways by societal events and political shifts, such as the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and changing presidential administrations. Likewise, the short-term impacts of Trump’s presidency identified by research may portend long-lasting effects for this generation of young people.

    Diverging worldviews

    In our study, young Trump supporters were more likely to be white and male and to have politically conservative parents, and less likely to be immigrants. Teenagers in our study who disapproved of Trump were more likely to be female and Latino, Black or Asian, to have politically liberal parents, and to have parents or grandparents who were immigrants. These groups were not just different demographically; they diverged in their worldviews about race and inequality over time.

    Across Trump’s first year in office, young Trump supporters decreased their race consciousness – that is, their support for racial equity and inclusion declined. We measured race consciousness by whether high schoolers agreed with statements like “I show support for equal rights for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds” and “I express concern about discrimination faced by racial and ethnic groups.”

    Young Trump supporters also grew less aware of inequalities in society during this time frame, becoming less likely to endorse statements like “In America, certain groups have fewer chances to get ahead.”

    Conversely, young Trump detractors increased their race consciousness and awareness of societal inequalities during this time. Another study that interviewed youth of color during Trump’s first presidency similarly found that adolescents critical of Trump developed deeper capacities to understand societal inequalities in response to Trump’s policies.

    Did these divergent beliefs translate into different behaviors?

    Interestingly, only young Trump supporters in our study became more likely to vote after Trump’s first election. This heightened interest in voting among young Trump supporters aligns with 2024’s election results. Although people ages 18-29 were more likely to support Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, the majority of white youth (54%) and young men (56%) who voted turned out to support Trump. The adolescents we surveyed in 2016 and 2017 are among this cohort of young voters in 2024.

    Dozens of incidents of swastikas and other racist graffiti were reported in schools in Revere, Mass., between May and November 2018.
    Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

    Increased discrimination

    The divergent beliefs of Trump supporters and detractors may have implications for other behaviors in addition to voting.

    After Trump’s first election, 28% of K-12 teachers reported witnessing increases in students’ derogatory remarks toward minority groups, especially in predominantly white schools. Students were emboldened to make bigoted statements about immigrants, Muslims and other groups. Researchers documented incidents of anti-Black racism and anti-transgender discrimination in schools.

    Our study found that Latino youth experienced more discrimination after Trump was elected. Latino adolescents also expressed fears and anxieties due to Trump’s hostile immigration policies and rhetoric, and they attributed Trump’s stance to racism. Four psychologists who systematically reviewed the available research concluded that the first Trump presidency harmed Latino adolescents’ mental health.

    These studies did not definitively attribute increased discrimination to actions of young Trump supporters. But young Trump supporters did become less concerned about discrimination and racial equity. And adult Trump supporters did endorse more racist and anti-immigrant attitudes and the use of political violence compared with other adults.

    What about now?

    Trump’s executive orders in 2025 have expanded the detention and deportation of immigrants, declared that gender is binary, and that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are illegal.

    Based on how people responded in the early days of Trump’s first term, these orders may directly harm adolescents and embolden discrimination again. For example, immediately after the 2024 election, crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth increased by 200%, and harassing texts were sent to Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ adolescents across 20 states.

    The executive order to eliminate teaching on racial and gender equity from schools, if upheld, would limit adolescents’ opportunities to learn about racism, sexism and inequalities faced by different groups.

    Adolescents’ awareness of and concerns about inequalities diverged during Trump’s first presidency based on their political views. Given the policy focus of Trump’s second term, I anticipate similar or greater divisions in young people’s racial attitudes and actions than my research revealed over the course of his first term.

    Laura Wray-Lake received funding for research reported herein from the National Science Foundation and John Templeton Foundation. She is a registered Democrat.

    – ref. Trump’s first term polarized teens’ views on racism and inequality – https://theconversation.com/trumps-first-term-polarized-teens-views-on-racism-and-inequality-249911

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Global crises have hit education hard: 24 years of research offers a way forward for southern Africa

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Emmanuel Ojo, Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand

    Global crises have shaped our world over the past two decades, affecting education systems everywhere. Higher education researcher Emmanuel Ojo has studied the impact of these disruptions on educational opportunities, particularly in southern Africa.

    He looked at 5,511 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2024 to explore what the research suggests about making education systems more resilient. Here, he answers some questions about his review.

    What are the global crises that have undermined education?

    In my review I drew up a table documenting how multiple crises have disrupted education systems worldwide.

    The cycle began with the 2000-2002 dot-com bubble collapse, which reduced education funding and slowed technological integration. This was followed by the 2001 terrorist attacks, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak (2002-2004), Iraq War (2003-2011), Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), and Hurricane Katrina (2005). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2000, global food crisis (2007-2008), financial crisis (2007-2008), and European debt crisis (2010-2012) continued this pattern of disruption.

    More recently, the Ebola epidemic, COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia-Ukraine war have destabilised education systems. Meanwhile, the ongoing climate crisis creates challenges, particularly in southern Africa where environmental vulnerability is high.

    Who suffers most, and in what ways?

    Education has consistently been among the hardest-hit sectors globally. According to Unesco, the COVID pandemic alone affected more than 1.6 billion students worldwide.

    But the impact is not distributed equally.

    My research shows crises have put vulnerable populations at a further disadvantage through school closures, funding diversions, infrastructure destruction and student displacement. Quality and access decline most sharply for marginalised communities. Costs rise and mobility is restricted. Food insecurity during crises reduces attendance among the poorest students.

    In southern Africa, the Covid-19 disruption highlighted existing divides. Privileged students continued learning online. Those in rural and informal settlements were completely cut off from education.

    Climate change compounds these inequalities. Unicef highlights that climate disasters have a disproportionate impact on schooling for millions in low-income countries, where adaptive infrastructure is limited.

    What’s at stake for southern Africa is the region’s development potential and social cohesion. The widening of educational divides threatens to create a generation with unequal opportunities and capabilities.

    What makes southern African education systems fragile?

    My review focused on the 16 countries of the Southern African Development Community, revealing what makes them vulnerable to crisis impacts.

    Southern Africa’s geographic exposure to climate disasters combines with pre-existing economic inequalities. The region’s digital divide became starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some students were excluded from learning by limited connectivity and unreliable electricity.

    The region’s systems also rely on external funding. The Trump administration’s sudden foreign aid freeze was a shock to South Africa’s higher education sector. It has affected public health initiatives and university research programmes.

    Research representation itself is unequal. Within the region, South African researchers dominate and other nations make only limited contributions. This creates blind spots in understanding context-specific challenges and solutions.

    Each successive crisis deepens educational divides, making recovery increasingly difficult and costly. Weaker education systems make the region less able to respond to other development challenges, too.

    How can southern Africa build education systems to withstand crises?

    One striking finding from my review was the surge in educational research after the Covid-19 pandemic began – from 229 studies in 2019 to nearly double that in 2020, with continued rapid growth thereafter. This indicates growing recognition that education systems must be redesigned to withstand future disruptions, not merely recover from current ones.

    Research points to a number of ways to do this:

    • Strategic investment in educational infrastructure, particularly digital technologies, to ensure learning continuity.

    • Equipping educators with skills to adapt teaching methods during emergencies.

    • Innovative, context-appropriate teaching approaches that empower communities.

    • Integration of indigenous knowledge systems into curricula, enhancing relevance, adaptability and community ownership.

    • Interdisciplinary and cross-national research collaborations.

    • Protection of education budgets, recognising education’s role in crisis recovery and long-term stability.

    • Community engagement in education, ensuring interventions are culturally appropriate and widely accepted.

    In my view, African philanthropists have a duty to provide the independent financial base that education systems need to withstand external funding fluctuations.

    What’s the cost of doing nothing?

    The economic and social costs of failing to build resilient education systems are profound and long-lasting. Each educational disruption creates negative effects that extend far beyond the crisis period.

    When students miss critical learning periods, it reduces their chances in life. The World Bank estimates that learning losses from the Covid-19 pandemic alone could result in up to US$17 trillion in lost lifetime earnings for affected students globally.

    Social costs are equally severe. Educational disruptions increase dropout rates, child marriage, early pregnancy, and youth unemployment. These outcomes create broader societal challenges that require costly interventions across multiple sectors.

    Spending on educational resilience avoids those costs.

    The question isn’t whether southern African nations can afford to invest in educational resilience, but whether they can afford not to.

    The choices made today will determine whether education systems merely survive crises or make society better. Evidence-based policies and regional cooperation are essential for building education systems that can fulfil Southern Africa’s human potential.

    Emmanuel Ojo receives funding from National Research Foundation (NRF).

    – ref. Global crises have hit education hard: 24 years of research offers a way forward for southern Africa – https://theconversation.com/global-crises-have-hit-education-hard-24-years-of-research-offers-a-way-forward-for-southern-africa-251833

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Rescuing Nigeria: how to break the cycle of decline and bring progress

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Omano Edigheji, Associate Professor of Practice, University of Johannesburg

    Nigeria has abundant human and natural resources but remains mired in underdevelopment. There are high levels of poverty, corruption, unemployment and inequality. The country is currently witnessing a rise in ethnic militias and terrorism, adding to the threats posed by armed herdsmen’s deadly clashes with rural communities over land.

    The nation suffers from poor economic management and a political leadership that has failed to promote structural transformation of the economy and politics.

    I am a political scientist with research specialisation in the political economy of development. In my view, Nigeria’s social, economic and political crises stem from the absence of a grouping of people who put the country’s interests first. I call this grouping a developmentalist coalition.

    I argue that for Nigeria to realise its potential and forge a prosperous shared future, like-minded individuals motivated by the ideology of development nationalism must come together in a coalition.

    Development nationalism refers to the commitment to advancing one’s country and ensuring its prosperity. This includes enhancing the capabilities of its people so they can reach their potential and contribute to national progress. Individuals like this put loyalty to their country above other identities or considerations.

    This coalition must focus on enhancing the nation’s productive capacity and uplifting the well-being of its citizens. Together, they can break the cycle of underdevelopment and achieve lasting progress.

    And this can be measured through the creation of a predictable governance structure characterised by the rule of law and the provision of essential public goods to citizens.



    Read more:
    Book review: Nigeria has democracy but not development. How to fix it

    Developmental nationalism

    Developmentalist coalitions shape political and economic affairs in most developed nations. In China, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Korea, Singapore and other countries that have tried to catch up with advanced nations, developmental nationalism has played a significant role.

    In some cases, a developmentalist elite creates its own political party. An example of this is the People’s Action Party founded by Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and his colleagues. The Labour Party in Norway, a coalition mostly of workers and farmers, is another example.

    In other instances, members of this elite join different political parties. When developmentalists are the dominant political elite, any party in power ensures that it upholds standards that reflect the core principles upon which the country is founded.

    Developmental elites articulate values that define and bind their nations. They provide moral and political leadership, as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa.

    Most of these elites want to have inclusive economic and political institutions that help them achieve their development objectives.



    Read more:
    Calls to restructure Nigeria’s federal system are missing the point: the country needs good governance, not reform

    Why Nigeria needs developmentalist coalitions

    Since Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960, most of those who have overseen the country’s political and economic landscape have not acted in a nationalistic or patriotic manner.

    Instead, they have followed their self-interest and exploited the Nigerian state for personal gain.

    As a result, the economy remains undiversified, with a small and declining manufacturing sector, thereby missing out on the potential for job creation.

    Successive administrations in the last 26 years have allocated less funding to the education sector than the 26% of the national budget recommended by Unesco.

    The political elite have not built an economy that will create decent jobs for the youth. Also, they have fostered an education system that produces graduates who do not have the skills to start enterprises.

    Most young Nigerians are engaged in the informal sector, with its associated problems: unstable jobs, hazardous working conditions, and a lack of decent wages. Most youths are underemployed and in low value-added economic activities. This means Nigeria is missing out on the potential benefits of its youthful population.

    About 70% of Nigeria’s population of over 200 million are under 30 years old, and 41% are younger than 15.

    Political leaders have failed to create an environment that allows them to achieve their full potential.

    In Nigeria, the issue is not the lack of individuals focused on development. These people exist across all segments of the Nigerian society, including government. The real problem is that they haven’t formed a coalition.

    As a result, they cannot act collectively and cohesively to invest in Nigeria’s greatest asset: its people; and to promote industrialisation.

    Now is the time to form the developmentalist coalition to change the governance and development trajectory of the country.



    Read more:
    Is Nigeria in danger of a coup? What the country should do to avoid one – political analyst

    What to do

    In Nigeria, a broad-based coalition of developmentalist elites needs to be led by individuals with a clear vision for development and national cohesion.

    Members of this coalition could establish a political party to contest elections, gain political power, and use their positions in government to develop the nation.

    Party members must be disciplined and subordinate their personal ambitions to those of the party and the national interests. The party must not become an empire of powerful individuals: instead, its organs must be allowed to function.

    Establishing this coalition is the way to end Nigeria’s endemic corruption and build a robust manufacturing sector and a thriving digital economy.

    It also needs to promote agro-allied industry, investment in infrastructure, job creation and poverty reduction.

    This coalition should aim to transform Nigeria’s democracy into a system where political parties and elected representatives genuinely serve the people.

    Omano Edigheji receives funding from organisation

    Research Grant from The Ford Foundation

    – ref. Rescuing Nigeria: how to break the cycle of decline and bring progress – https://theconversation.com/rescuing-nigeria-how-to-break-the-cycle-of-decline-and-bring-progress-251639

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: From pulpits to protest, the surprising history of the phrase ‘pride and prejudice’

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Margie Burns, Lecturer of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

    Despite the phrase’s rich history, the fame of Jane Austen’s novel ended up drowning out all other associations. Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels

    Most readers hear “pride and prejudice” and immediately think of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, that salty-sweet confection of romance and irony with a fairy-tale ending.

    Few people, however, know the history of the phrase “pride and prejudice,” which I explore in my new book, “Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

    Like most Austen fans and scholars, I had read and loved her novels for years without learning much about the history of the title, which Austen chose after scrapping the original one, “First Impressions.”

    By the 20th century, “pride and prejudice” became solely associated with Austen’s 1813 novel.

    The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born. From Britain it traveled to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.

    Fighting words for religious factions

    While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.

    If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.

    While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it: “Pride and prejudice” appears in the writings of Nonconformists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Dissenters and other representatives of “Schism, Faction and Sedition,” as one anonymous writer called them.

    One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism.

    The unnamed minister himself complained that, owing to “the Pride and Prejudice of mens Spirits, the prevailing Interests of some Factions and Parties, the greatest part of the Nation are miserably wanting in their Duty.”

    At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness.

    “When all Pride and Prejudice, all Interests and Designs, being submitted to the Honour of God, and the Discharge of our Duty,” an anonymous clergyman wrote in 1734, “the Holy Scriptures shall again triumph over the vain Traditions of Men; and Religion no longer take its Denomination from little Sects and Factions.”

    From politics to prose

    In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.

    One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine.

    In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.”

    Others included Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe.” In his 1708 essay “Review of the State of the British Nation,” Defoe satirically exhorted the public to vote Tory rather than electing men of sense, to “dispell the Poisons” that “Sloth, Envy, Pride and Prejudice may have contracted, and bring the Blood of the Party into a true circulation.”

    After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”

    Among them was Frances Burney. Scholars have often attributed Austen’s famous title to Burney, who used the phrase “pride and prejudice” in her novel “Cecilia.”

    But Burney was not alone. Female novelists who used the expression before Austen included Charlotte Lennox, sisters Harriet and Sophia Lee, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mrs. Colpoys, Anne Seymour Damer and mother and daughter Susannah and Elizabeth Gunning, who jointly authored their novel “The Heir Apparent.”

    An abolitionist rallying cry

    As the critique embodied in the phrase progressed beyond religious and partisan conflict, it became increasingly used in the context of ethics and social reform.

    My most striking discovery in this research is the long-standing association of the phrase “pride and prejudice” with abolitionism, the movement to eradicate enslavement and the slave trade.

    The leaders of transnational antislavery organizations used it at their conventions and in the books and periodicals they published. In 1843, 30 years after the publication of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” British Quaker Thomas Clarkson wrote to the General Antislavery Convention, which was meeting in London.

    He exhorted the faithful to repudiate slavery “at once and forever” if there were any among them “whose eyes may be so far blinded, or their consciences so far seared by interest or ignorance, pride or prejudice, as still to sanction or uphold this unjust and sinful system.”

    He even used the phrase twice. Acknowledging that some violent abolitionists had aroused reaction, he warned his audience that “this state of feeling arises as much from pride and prejudice on the one hand, as from indiscretion or impropriety on the other.”

    At the funeral for abolitionist John Brown, the minister prayed over his body, “Oh, God, cause the oppressed to go free; break any yoke, and prostrate the pride and prejudice that dare to lift themselves up.”

    The prayer uttered at John Brown’s burial.
    Library of Congress

    Use of the phrase did not end with Emancipation or the end of the U.S. Civil War.

    In fact, it was one of Frederick Douglass’ favorite phrases. On Oct. 22, 1883, in his “Address at Lincoln Hall,” Douglass excoriated the Supreme Court’s decision rendering the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.

    As was typical of Douglass, the speech ranged beyond racial inequities: “Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman.”

    Austen’s independent women

    Early on in “Pride and Prejudice,” the conceited Caroline Bingley snipes that Elizabeth Bennet shows “an abominable sort of conceited independence.” Later, the snobbish Lady Catherine accuses Bennet of being “headstrong.” But near the ending, Mr. Darcy tells Bennet that he loves her for “the liveliness” of her “mind.”

    In this respect, Bennet reflects a quality that all of Austen’s heroines possess. While they try to adhere to standards of courtesy and respect, none are guilty of saying only what the leading man wants to hear.

    Jane Austen.
    Stock Montage/Getty Images

    Given that Austen chose her title to honor the phrase and its history, it is ironic that her own fame ended up drowning out the abolitionist associations of “pride and prejudice” after the Civil War.

    If there is any work of fiction that successfully makes self-sufficiency, independent thinking and open-mindedness look good – and makes sycophants, rigidity and hysterical devotion to rank and status look bad – it is “Pride and Prejudice.”

    Yet the lasting popularity of Austen’s novel demonstrates that the ethics contained in the phrase continue to resonate today, even if its context has been lost.

    Margie Burns does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. From pulpits to protest, the surprising history of the phrase ‘pride and prejudice’ – https://theconversation.com/from-pulpits-to-protest-the-surprising-history-of-the-phrase-pride-and-prejudice-249836

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –