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Category: Reportage

  • MIL-OSI Global: The biggest barrier to AI adoption in the business world isn’t tech – it’s user confidence

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Greg Edwards, Adjunct Lecturer, Missouri University of Science and Technology

    Believe in your own decision-making. Feodora Chiosea/Getty Images Plus

    The Little Engine That Could wasn’t the most powerful train, but she believed in herself. The story goes that, as she set off to climb a steep mountain, she repeated: “I think I can, I think I can.”

    That simple phrase from a children’s story still holds a lesson for today’s business world – especially when it comes to artificial intelligence.

    AI is no longer a distant promise out of science fiction. It’s here and already beginning to transform industries. But despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on developing AI models and platforms, adoption remains slow for many employees, with a recent Pew Research Center survey finding that 63% of U.S. workers use AI minimally or not at all in their jobs.

    The reason? It can often come down to what researchers call technological self-efficacy, or, put simply, a person’s belief in their ability to use technology effectively.

    In my research on this topic, I found that many people who avoid using new technology aren’t truly against it – instead, they just don’t feel equipped to use it in their specific jobs. So rather than risk getting it wrong, they choose to keep their distance.

    And that’s where many organizations derail. They focus on building the engine, but don’t fully fuel the confidence that workers need to get it moving.

    What self-efficacy has to do with AI

    Albert Bandura, the psychologist who developed the theory of self-efficacy, noted that skill alone doesn’t determine people’s behavior. What matters more is a person’s belief in their ability to use that skill effectively.

    In my study of teachers in 1:1 technology environments – classrooms where each student is equipped with a digital device like a laptop or tablet – this was clear. I found that even teachers with access to powerful digital tools don’t always feel confident using them. And when they lack confidence, they may avoid the technology or use it in limited, superficial ways.

    The same holds true in today’s AI-equipped workplace. Leaders may be quick to roll out new tools and want fast results. But employees may hesitate, wondering how it applies to their roles, whether they’ll use it correctly, or if they’ll appear less competent – or even unethical – for relying on it.

    Beneath that hesitation may also be the all-too-familiar fear of one day being replaced by technology.

    Going back to train analogies, think of John Henry, the 19th-century folk hero. As the story goes, Henry was a railroad worker who was famous for his strength. When a steam-powered machine threatened to replace him, he raced it – and won. But the victory came at a cost: He collapsed and died shortly afterward.

    Henry’s story is a lesson in how resisting new technology through sheer willpower can be self-defeating. Rather than leaving some employees feeling like they have to outmuscle or outperform AI, organizations should invest in helping them understand how to work with it – so they don’t feel like they need to work against it.

    Relevant and role-specific training

    Many organizations do offer training related to using AI. But these programs are often too broad, covering topics like how to log into different programs, what the interfaces look like, or what AI “generally” can do.

    In 2025, with the number of AI tools at our disposal, ranging from conversational chatbots and content creation platforms to advanced data analytics and workflow automation programs, that’s not enough.

    In my study, participants consistently said they benefited most from training that was “district-specific,” meaning tailored to the devices, software and situations they faced daily with their specific subject areas and grade levels.

    Translation for the corporate world? Training needs to be job-specific and user-centered – not one-size-fits-all.

    The generational divide

    It’s not exactly shocking: Younger workers tend to feel more confident using technology than older ones. Gen Z and millennials are digital natives – they’ve grown up with digital technologies as part of their daily lives.

    Gen X and boomers, on the other hand, often had to adapt to using digital technologies mid-career. As a result, they may feel less capable and be more likely to dismiss AI and its possibilities. And if their few forays into AI are frustrating or lead to mistakes, that first impression is likely to stick.

    When generative AI tools were first launched commercially, they were more likely to hallucinate and confidently spit out incorrect information. Remember when Google demoed its Bard AI tool in 2023 and its factual error led to its parent company losing US$100 billion in market value? Or when an attorney made headlines for citing fabricated cases courtesy of ChatGPT?

    Moments like those likely reinforced skepticism – especially among workers already unsure about AI’s reliability. But the technology has already come a long way in a relatively short period of time.

    The solution to getting those who may be slower to embrace AI isn’t to push them harder, but to coach them and consider their backgrounds.

    What effective AI training looks like

    Bandura identified four key sources that shape a person’s belief in their ability to succeed:

    1. Mastery experiences, or personal success

    2. Vicarious experiences, or seeing others in similar positions succeed

    3. Verbal persuasion, or positive feedback

    4. Physiological and emotional states, or someone’s mood, energy, anxiety and so forth.

    In my research on educators, I saw how these concepts made a difference, and the same approach can apply to AI in the corporate world – or in virtually any environment in which a person needs to build self-efficacy.

    In the workplace, this could be accomplished with cohort-based trainings that include feedback loops – regular communication between leaders and employees about growth, improvement and more – along with content that can be customized to employees’ needs and roles. Organizations can also experiment with engaging formats like PricewaterhouseCoopers’ prompting parties, which provide low-stakes opportunities for employees to build confidence and try new AI programs.

    In “Pokemon Go!,” it’s possible to level up by stacking lots of small, low-stakes wins and gaining experience points along the way. Workplaces could approach AI training the same way, giving employees frequent, simple opportunities tied to their actual work to steadily build confidence and skill.

    The curriculum doesn’t have to be revolutionary. It just needs to follow these principles and not fall victim to death by PowerPoint, or end up being generic training that isn’t applicable to specific roles in the workplace.

    As organizations continue to invest heavily in developing and accessing AI technologies, it’s also essential that they invest in the people who will use them. AI might change what the workforce looks like, but there’s still going to be a workforce. And when people are well trained, AI can make both them and the outfits they work for significantly more effective.

    Greg Edwards 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. The biggest barrier to AI adoption in the business world isn’t tech – it’s user confidence – https://theconversation.com/the-biggest-barrier-to-ai-adoption-in-the-business-world-isnt-tech-its-user-confidence-257308

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Solar arrays help boost Colorado grassland productivity in dry years

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Matthew Sturchio, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University; Faculty Afffiliate in Ecology, Colorado State University

    Solar panels on grasslands can generate electricity and useful forage or wildlife habitat. Matthew Sturchio, CC BY-ND

    Grasses growing in the shade of a solar array were only a little less productive than those growing nearby in open grassland during years of average and above-average rainfall – but in a dry year, the shaded plants grew much better than those growing in full sun. That’s the result of a four-year study we conducted in a semi-arid grassland of northern Colorado.

    When choosing a location for generating solar power, consistent sunlight and interconnection to the electric grid are key criteria. In Colorado the combination of new electrical transmission infrastructure, abundant sunlight and short vegetation that is easy to maintain have made grasslands a prime target for solar development.

    Grasslands, like those that dominate the eastern plains of Colorado, provide important habitat for wildlife and serve as a critical food source for livestock. Although these grasslands have long been productive despite their normally arid environment, a warmer climate has increased the potential for more frequent and severe drought. For instance, a recent global study found that previous research likely underestimated the threat of extreme drought in grasslands.

    Semi-arid grassland near the Colorado-Wyoming border.
    Matthew Sturchio, CC BY-ND
    Semi-arid grassland near Cheyenne, Wyo., with close-ups of flowers of some of the plants that grow there.
    Matthew Sturchio, CC BY-ND

    At Colorado State University, biology professor Alan Knapp and I started the ecovoltaics research group to study the effects of solar development in grasslands. Our primary goal is to ensure an ecologically informed solar energy future.

    Solar panels create microclimates

    Strings of solar panels redirect rain to the edge of panels. Because of this, small rain events can provide biologically relevant amounts of water instead of evaporating quickly.

    Simultaneously, solar panels shade plants growing beneath them. Some arrays, including the ones used in our study, move the panels to follow the path of the Sun across the sky.

    This results in a combination of sun and shade that is very different from the uninterrupted sunlight beating down on plants in a grassland without solar panels. In turn, patterns of plant stress and water loss also differ in grasses under solar arrays.

    A time-lapse video shows how a single-axis tracking solar array at Jack’s Solar Garden modifies patterns of sunlight availability.

    How grasses respond to a solar panel canopy

    To get a handle on how these different conditions affect grasses, we measured plant physiological response during the early stages of our study. More specifically, we tracked leaf carbon and water exchange throughout daylight hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., over 16 weeks in summer 2022 at Jack’s Solar Garden, a solar array over grassland in Longmont, Colorado.

    In general, plants that are adapted to full sun conditions, including most grasses, might not be expected to grow as well in partial shade. But we suspected that growth benefits from reduced water stress could outweigh potential reductions in growth from shading. We call this the “aridity mitigation potential” hypothesis.

    Sure enough, we found evidence of aridity mitigation across multiple years, with the most pronounced effect during the driest year.

    When water is scarce, increases in grassland productivity are more valuable because there isn’t as much around. Therefore, increasing grassland production in dry years could provide more available food for grazing animals and help offset some of the economic harm of drought in rangelands.

    Informing sustainable solar development in grasslands

    So far, our research has been limited to a grassland dominated by a cool season grass: smooth brome. Although it is a perennial commonly planted for hay, fields dominated by smooth brome lack the diversity of life found in native grasslands.

    Future work in native shortgrass prairies would provide new information about how solar panels affect plant water use, soils and grazing management in an ecosystem with 30% less precipitation than Jack’s Solar Garden. We’re beginning that work now at the shortgrass ecovoltaic research facility near Nunn, Colorado. This facility, which will be fully operational later in 2025, was constructed with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the wider SCAPES project.

    Testing the effects of solar panels over grasslands in a native ecosystem with even greater aridity will help us develop a clearer picture of ways solar energy can be developed in concert with grassland health.

    Matthew Sturchio works for Cornell University and serves as a Faculty Affiliate at Colorado State University. Funding for this work came from US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture Sustainable Agricultural Systems project entitled “Sustainably Co-locating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems,” led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Grant Number: 2021-68012-35898, 2021–2025.

    – ref. Solar arrays help boost Colorado grassland productivity in dry years – https://theconversation.com/solar-arrays-help-boost-colorado-grassland-productivity-in-dry-years-257082

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Hurricane season is here, but FEMA’s policy change could leave low-income areas less protected

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ivis García, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University

    Hurricane Harvey inundated the Cottage Grove neighborhood of Houston in 2018. Scott Olson/Getty Images

    When powerful storms hit your city, which neighborhoods are most likely to flood? In many cities, they’re typically low-income areas. They may have poor drainage, or they lack protections such as seawalls.

    New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, where hundreds of people died when Hurricane Katrina broke a levee in 2005, and Houston’s Kashmere Gardens, flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, are just two among many examples.

    With those disasters in mind, the Federal Emergency Management Agency made a big change to its Local Mitigation Planning Policy Guide in 2023. The agency began encouraging cities, towns and counties to address equity in their hazard mitigation plans, which outline how they will reduce disaster risk.

    Local governments have an incentive to follow those federal guidelines: Those that want to receive FEMA hazard mitigation assistance – money which can be used to repair aging infrastructure like roads, bridges and flood barriers – or funding from other programs such as dam rehabilitation have to develop local mitigation plans and update them every five years.

    Hurricane Irma flooded Immokalee, Fla., in 2017. The community, home to many farmworkers, had infrastructure problems before the storm, and recovery was slow.
    AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

    The new guidance required cities to both consider social vulnerability among neighborhoods in their disaster mitigation planning and involve socially vulnerable communities in those discussions in ways they hadn’t before.

    However, as the U.S. heads into what forecasters predict will be an active 2025 hurricane season, that guidance has changed again. The Trump administration’s new FEMA Local Mitigation Planning Policy Guide 2025 talks about public involvement in planning but strips any mention of equity, income or social vulnerability. It mentions using “projections for the future” to plan but removes references to climate change.

    Who is most at risk in hurricanes, and why

    Hurricanes and other storms that cause flooding don’t affect everyone in the same way.

    A legacy of redlining and discrimination in many U.S. cities left poor and minority families living in often risky areas. These neighborhoods also tend to have poorer infrastructure.

    In the past, local mitigation plans just focused on fixing roads or protecting property in general from storm damage, without recognizing that socially vulnerable groups, such as low-income or elderly populations, were more likely to be hardest hit and take much longer to recover.

    Low-income neighborhoods in Puerto Rico have been slow to recover from 2017’s Hurricane Maria.
    Ivis Garcia

    The FEMA 2023 guidance encouraged communities to consider both the highest risks and which neighborhoods would be least able to respond in a disaster and address their needs.

    The equity requirement was designed to ensure that local plans didn’t just protect those with the most wealth or political influence but considered who needs the help most. That might mean providing information in multiple languages in emergency alerts or investing in flood prevention in neighborhoods with aging infrastructure like roads, bridges and flood barriers.

    How New York City’s 2024 plan helped

    New York City’s 2024 Hazard Mitigation Plan, for example, included a thorough social vulnerability assessment to identify neighborhoods with high percentages of people who were living in poverty or were older, disabled or weren’t fluent in English.

    Knowing where disaster risk and social vulnerability overlapped allowed the city to boost investments in flood protection, emergency communication and cooling centers during summer heat in neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and East Harlem. These neighborhoods historically faced some of the greatest risks from disasters but saw little investment.

    The NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice mapped the risk of storm surge flooding in the 2020s (purple) and 2080s (dark blue), and neighborhoods that fall under the city’s ‘disadvantaged communities’ criteria. A 1% risk means a 1% of chance of flooding in any given year, also referred to as a 100-year flood risk.
    NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice

    Further, New York’s plan calls for expanding outreach and early warning systems in multiple languages and enhancing infrastructure in areas with high concentrations of Spanish speakers. These kinds of changes help ensure that vulnerable residents are more likely to be better protected when disaster strikes.

    Why is FEMA dropping that emphasis now?

    FEMA’s reasoning for the guidance change in 2025: make it quicker and easier to get plans approved and unlock federal funding for projects like flood barriers, storm shelters and buyouts in areas at high risk of damage.

    It’s a pragmatic move, but one that raises big questions about whether residents who are least able to help themselves will be overlooked again when the next disaster strikes.

    And FEMA isn’t alone — other agencies, like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and its Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery program, have made similar changes to their own disaster planning rules. Community Development Block Grant funds for disaster recovery are flexible and can be used for things like rebuilding homes and businesses, restoring infrastructure and helping local economies recover.

    What this means for low-income areas

    Some experts worry that the changes might mean low-income and other at-risk communities will be ignored again when cities develop their next five-year mitigation plans. Research from the Government Accountability Office shows that when something is required by law, it gets done. When it’s just a suggestion, it’s easy to skip, especially in places with fewer resources or less political will to help.

    But the short-lived rules may have already helped in one important way: They made cities and states pay attention to social vulnerability, climate change and the needs of all their residents.

    Many local leaders have learned the value of using data to understand where socially vulnerable residents face high disaster risks. And they have a model now for involving communities in decision-making. Even if those steps are no longer required, the hope is that these good habits will stick.

    Where and how communities invest in disaster protection affects who stays safe and who faces higher risks from flooding, hurricanes and other disasters. When government policy shifts, it’s not just about paperwork – it’s about real people.

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

    – ref. Hurricane season is here, but FEMA’s policy change could leave low-income areas less protected – https://theconversation.com/hurricane-season-is-here-but-femas-policy-change-could-leave-low-income-areas-less-protected-256985

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Millions of US children have parents with substance use disorder, and the consequences are staggering − new research

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ty Schepis, Professor of Psychology, Texas State University

    Alcohol is the most common substance misused by parents. igorr1/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    About 1 in 4 U.S. children – nearly 19 million – have at least one parent with substance use disorder. This includes parents who misuse alcohol, marijuana, prescription opioids or illegal drugs. Our estimate reflects an increase of over 2 million children since 2020 and an increase of 10 million from an earlier estimate using data from 2009 to 2014.

    Those are the key findings from a new study my colleagues and I published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

    To arrive at this estimate, our team used data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2023, the most recently released year of data. Nearly 57,000 people ages 12 and up responded.

    Why it matters

    As a researcher who studies substance use in adolescents and young adults, I know these children are at considerable risk for the disorder, and other mental health issues, such as behavioral problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression.

    Substance use disorder is a psychiatric condition marked by frequent and heavy substance use. The disorder is characterized by numerous symptoms, including behaviors such as driving while intoxicated and fights with family and friends over substance use.

    This disorder also affects a parent’s ability to be an attentive and loving caregiver. Children of these parents are more likely to be exposed to violence, initiate substance use at a younger age, be less prepared for school and enter the child welfare system. They are also more likely to have mental health problems both as children and as adults, and they have a much higher chance of developing a substance use disorder in adulthood.

    Despite the new study’s findings, mental health programs for children at risk could be cut.

    Of the 19 million children, our study found about 3.5 million live with a parent who has multiple substance use disorders. More than 6 million have a parent with both a substance use disorder and significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or both. Alcohol is by far the most common substance used, with 12.5 million children affected.

    Our 19 million estimate is significantly larger than an earlier estimate based on older data. That study, which reviewed data from 2009 to 2014, indicated that 8.7 million U.S. children – or roughly 1 in 8 – lived with a parent, or parents, with substance use disorder. That’s a difference of about 10 million children.

    This happened primarily because between the time of the two studies – from 2014 to 2023 – the criteria for diagnosing someone with substance use disorder became broader and more inclusive. That change alone accounted for more than an 80% jump in the estimate of children affected by parental substance use disorder. There was also a further increase of 2 million in the number of affected children since 2020, which reflects the rising number of parents with a substance use disorder.

    What’s next

    There is a critical need to better identify parents with substance use disorder and the children who are affected by it. In my experience, many pediatric clinicians screen children for substance use, but they are much less likely to screen accompanying parents. So the first step is to make such screenings common and expected for both children and their adult caregivers.

    But that is not the case now. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an expert panel that recommends screening and prevention best practices for clinicians, does not yet recommend such a screening for children, although that could help direct those in need to treatment and prevent the worst outcomes from substance use disorder.

    Additional intervention, which requires funding, is needed from federal, state and local government. This may seem fanciful in an age of scrutinized government budgets. But the alternative is a bill that comes due later: millions of adults exposed to this disorder at an early age, only to struggle decades later with their own substance use and mental health problems.

    The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

    Ty Schepis receives funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Any views expressed are those of Dr. Schepis and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIH/NIDA, the FDA, or SAMHSA. These funders had no role in any articles, and there was no editorial direction or censorship from the funders.

    – ref. Millions of US children have parents with substance use disorder, and the consequences are staggering − new research – https://theconversation.com/millions-of-us-children-have-parents-with-substance-use-disorder-and-the-consequences-are-staggering-new-research-256979

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Detroit’s population grew in 2023, 2024 − a strategy to welcome immigrants helps explain the turnaround from decades of population decline

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul N. McDaniel, Associate Professor of Geography, Kennesaw State University

    The Mexican-American community in southwest Detroit held a rally in March 2025, asking ICE to leave the immigrant community alone. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Detroit’s population grew in 2024 for the second year in a row. This is a remarkable comeback after decades of population decline in the Motor City.

    What explains the turnaround? One factor may be Detroit’s efforts to attract and settle immigrants.

    These efforts continue despite a dramatic national shift in tone toward new arrivals. This includes executive orders from the second Trump administration targeting immigrant communities, international students and their universities, and cities in which immigrants live.

    We study urban geography and immigrant integration. Despite these federal policy shifts, our own research and that of others has found that local leaders in cities across the U.S. are actively working to bring immigrants in and help them become part of local communities, generally for economic reasons.

    Our recent publications on immigrant integration and immigrant community engagement show how and why cities adapt to changes in their population and economies.

    Detroit and other former immigrant gateway metro areas such as Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and St. Louis, Missouri experienced significant immigration in the early 20th century. These population booms were followed by a period of decline in immigration numbers.

    Now these cities are using branding strategies to construct inclusive identities designed to attract and retain immigrants. It may be surprising to think of a city branding itself, but local governments often work with private nonprofits to shape and manage their city’s image. They try to build a unique and desirable identity for the city, differentiate it from competitors, and attract new businesses, residents and tourists this way.

    Here are three reasons why Detroit and other cities want to welcome immigrants:

    1. Encouraging economic growth and attracting talent

    Immigration has a positive impact on the economy, research shows.

    Local leaders in Detroit recognize that in a global economy, a thriving industrial sector and robust labor market are linked to the contributions of immigrant communities. They also understand that the growth of these communities brings positive economic ripple effects.

    Immigrants are more likely than the general population to own their own businesses. Organizations such as Global Detroit encourage entrepreneurship through programs such as the Global Talent Retention Initiative, Global Talent Accelerator and Global Entrepreneur in Residence and provide resources for small businesses.

    Immigrants also fill labor needs, from high-tech fields such as engineering and research to manual labor sectors such as construction and food service.

    The City of Detroit Office of Immigrant Affairs promotes economic development and immigrant integration through education, English as a second language programs, economic empowerment and community resources.

    These efforts are paying off by attracting immigrants to the city.

    This economic impact extends to tourism as well. The region’s marketing campaigns embracing diversity shape how visitors perceive the region. The Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau spotlights the unique experiences the city’s diverse neighborhoods offer to tourists.

    2. Enhancing community and regional resilience

    Regional resilience describes a region’s ability to withstand and adapt to challenges such as economic shocks and natural disasters. Cities like Detroit that are still trying to bounce back from deindustrialization know from experience how critical this is.

    Immigration contributes to regional resilience, research shows. In addition to supporting local economies and strengthening the labor force, the arrival of immigrants in Detroit has helped offset native-born population decline, stabilizing the overall population and bolstering local tax bases.

    According to our analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metro area grew by 1.2%, from a total population of 4,291,843 in 2010 to 4,342,304 in 2023.

    According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the Detroit metro area’s native-born population decreased by 58,693 people during that 13-year period, while the foreign-born population increased by 109,154. The top five countries of origin for immigrants in the metro area are India, Iraq, Mexico, Yemen and Lebanon.

    From 2023 to 2024, the metro area’s population gained 40,347 immigrants and lost 11,626 native born residents – resulting in a population gain of 28,721.

    Efforts to welcome immigrants in Detroit and its surrounding communities contributed to this trend of immigrant population growth offsetting overall population decline.

    3. Promoting social cohesion and enhanced civic engagement

    Successful place brands are rooted in inclusion and a strong civil society. Detroit’s rich tapestry of cultures in areas such as Dearborn and Hamtramck creates a vibrant regional identity.

    Organizations such as Global Detroit’s Welcoming Michigan actively support local grassroots efforts to build mutual respect and ensure that immigrants are able to participate fully in the social, civic and economic fabric of their hometowns.

    Examples include Global Detroit’s Social Cohesion Initiative, Common Bond and Opportunity Neighborhoods. These initiatives help bring neighborhood residents of various backgrounds together to share their cultures, support each other’s small businesses and socialize. Such programs strengthen the region’s democratic foundations and enhance its appeal as a welcoming and inclusive place to live.

    Forging a way forward

    Detroit has found that welcoming immigrants and integrating them into the life of the city is one way to navigate the economic, political and cultural challenges it faces.

    And it is not alone in embracing this strategy. Other cities practicing similar strategies include Baltimore; Boise, Idaho; Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas; Dayton, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans; Pittsburgh; Roanoke, Virginia; and Salt Lake City.

    Although not all cities choose to pursue such strategies, in those that do, local leaders signal a region ready for a globalized future.

    Paul N. McDaniel previously received funding from the National Geographic Society, served on the Content Advisory Board for the Welcoming Standard and on the Steering Committee for Welcoming America’s One Region Initiative, and is a member of the American Association of Geographers.

    Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez was co-PI on funding received from the National Geographic Society and served on the national pilot program with Welcoming America One Region Initiative’s Steering Committee and Program Evaluation Team.

    – ref. Detroit’s population grew in 2023, 2024 − a strategy to welcome immigrants helps explain the turnaround from decades of population decline – https://theconversation.com/detroits-population-grew-in-2023-2024-a-strategy-to-welcome-immigrants-helps-explain-the-turnaround-from-decades-of-population-decline-255557

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Elay Shech, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University

    How do you recreate a species whose genome is largely unknown? sunxsand/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Biotech company Colossal Biosciences made headlines in April 2025 after claiming it had “successfully restored … the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” Three wolf pups – Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi – were born through this de-extinction project.

    But behind the scenes lies a more complicated reality.

    What Colossal actually did was edit a small number of gray wolf genes, aiming to create physical traits that resemble those of the extinct dire wolf. The edited embryos were implanted into surrogate domestic dogs.

    Many scientists and reporters expressed skepticism about the claim that this amounts to restoring the dire wolf. Experts pointed out that tweaking a handful of genes does not replicate the full biological reality of a long-extinct species. Most of the dire wolf’s genetic makeup remains unknown and unreplicated.

    Is resembling a dire wolf enough for something to be a dire wolf?
    James St. John/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    This gap between appearance and biological identity raises a deeper question: What exactly is a species, and how do you decide whether something belongs to one species rather than another?

    Biologists call the answer a species concept – a theory about what a species is and how researchers sort organisms into different groups. As a philosopher of science who studies what defines a species, I can say this: Whether de-extinction projects succeed depends on which species concept you think is right – and the truth is, even scientists don’t agree.

    How scientists define a species

    When scientists talk about biodiversity – the variety of life-forms found in nature – species are the basic building blocks. A species is supposed to reflect a real division between distinct groups of organisms in the natural world, not just a convenient label.

    In classifying living things into species, scientists are trying to “carve nature at its joints” to reflect real patterns shaped by evolution. Even so, deciding what counts as a species turns out to be surprisingly difficult and highly controversial. Scientists have proposed dozens of distinct species concepts – some scholars have counted over 32 ways to define a species – and each draws the lines a little differently. These definitions don’t always agree on whether an organism is part of one species rather than another.

    Two of the most influential species concepts highlight the challenge. The biological species concept defines a species as a group of organisms that can naturally breed with each other and produce fertile offspring. Under this view, African forest elephants and African savanna elephants were once classified as the same species because they could mate and have young together, even though they lived in different habitats and looked different.

    Another approach, the phylogenetic species concept, emphasizes ancestry instead of breeding. A species, in this view, is a group that shares a unique evolutionary history, forming its own distinct branch on the tree of life. By this standard, researchers found that forest and savanna elephants had been genetically evolving separately for millions of years, long enough to be considered different species even if they could still interbreed.

    African savanna elephants, left, and African forest elephants are considered two distinct species.
    Charles J. Sharp, Thomas Breuer/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    Understanding these different species concepts is crucial for evaluating claims about de-extinction. If Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi could naturally mate with historical dire wolves and produce fertile offspring, then they would be considered true dire wolves under the biological species concept.

    But for definitions of species that emphasize evolutionary history, such as the phylogenetic species concept, the lab-created wolves would not qualify as real dire wolves – even if they were indistinguishable from the originals – because they did not descend from historical dire wolves.

    Despite differences on how best to define species, there is a surprising degree of consensus among scientists and philosophers on one big idea: What makes something part of a species is not an internal feature, such as a specific set of genes, but a relationship to something else – to its environment, to other organisms, or to a shared evolutionary history.

    By this way of thinking – what is often called relationalism – there is no special “lemon gene” that makes a lemon and no hidden genetic marker that automatically makes an animal a dire wolf. Commonly shared across all these theories is the notion that belonging to a particular species depends on connections and context, not on anything inside the organism itself.

    But what if that consensus is wrong?

    On warblers and mitochondria

    At first glance, the standard ways of defining a species seem to work well. But every now and then, nature throws a curveball – and even the most trusted definitions don’t quite fit.

    Take the case of the blue-winged and golden-winged warblers. These two songbirds look and sound different. They wear different plumage, sing different songs and prefer different habitats. Birders and organizations such as the American Ornithological Society have always classified them as separate species.

    Yet under two of the most common scientific definitions of species, the biological and phylogenetic species concepts, blue-winged and golden-winged warblers are considered the same species. These birds regularly mate and produce young together. They’ve been swapping genes for thousands of years. And when scientists looked at their nuclear DNA – the genetic material tucked inside the nucleus of each cell – they found the two birds are 99.97% identical. This finding suggests that even careful, widely accepted species definitions can miss something important.

    The golden-winged warbler, left, and blue-winged warbler are considered two distinct species, but according to many species concepts they would count as the same.
    Wildreturn, Ken Janes/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    So what if, instead, the key to being part of a species lies deep inside the organism, in the way its basic systems of life fit together?

    Recent work in biology and philosophy suggests another way of thinking about species that focuses on a hidden but vital system inside cells: the partnership between two sets of genetic material. I and my colleague Kyle B. Heine explore this idea by drawing on research in mitonuclear ecology – the study of how different parts of an organism’s genetic material adapt and work together to produce energy.

    Virtually every cell contains two kinds of DNA. One set, stored in the nucleus, acts like an instruction manual that guides most of the cell’s activities. The other, found in structures called mitochondria – the cell’s energy centers – contains its own much smaller set of instructions geared toward supporting its unique role in keeping the cell running.

    Producing energy depends on precise teamwork between nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, like two musicians playing in perfect harmony. Over millions of years, the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of each species have evolved together to form a unique, finely tuned system.

    This insight has led to a new way of thinking about species, called the mitonuclear compatibility species concept. According to this idea, an organism belongs to a species if its two sets of genes – those in the nucleus and those in the mitochondria – are optimized to work together to generate life-sustaining energy. If the cellular partnership between these two genetic systems is mismatched, the organism may struggle to produce the energy it needs to survive, grow and reproduce.

    By this standard, different species aren’t just defined by how they look or behave, but by whether their nuclear and mitochondrial genes form a uniquely coadapted team. For example, even though blue-winged and golden-winged warblers are nearly identical in their nuclear DNA, they differ by about 3% in their mitochondrial DNA – a clue that their energy systems are distinct. And that’s exactly what the mitonuclear compatibility species concept predicts: They really are two separate species.

    Nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA evolve together for cells – and species – to thrive.
    National Human Genome Research Institute

    Rethinking the meaning of de-extinction

    Bringing back a species like the dire wolf isn’t just a matter of getting the fur right or tweaking a few visible traits. According to my preferred species concept, even if a recreated animal looks the part, it won’t truly be a dire wolf unless its inner genetic systems – the ones that power its cells – are finely tuned to work together, just as they were in the original species.

    That’s a tall order. And without restoring the full inner machinery of the original species, any lab-grown look-alike would fall short.

    Understanding how scientists define species – and how those definitions shape the possibilities of de-extinction – offers more than just a lesson in biological bookkeeping. It shows that classification is not just about names or lineages, but about recognizing the deep biological patterns that sustain life, offering a deeper appreciation of what it really means to bring back the past.

    Reviving an extinct species isn’t like assembling a model from spare parts. It means recreating a living, breathing system – one whose parts must work in concert, not just look the part.

    And that’s why philosophy and science both matter here: To understand what we’re bringing back, we must first understand what was truly lost.

    Elay Shech 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. If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question – https://theconversation.com/if-it-looks-like-a-dire-wolf-is-it-a-dire-wolf-how-to-define-a-species-is-a-scientific-and-philosophical-question-255375

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, have fascinated for centuries − now technology is revolutionizing the search for them

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeremiah Bartz, Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of North Dakota

    Prime numbers are numbers that are not products of smaller whole numbers. Jeremiah Bartz

    A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented prime numbers. Similarly, a clay tablet from 1800 B.C.E. inscribed with Babylonian numbers describes a number system built on prime numbers.

    As the Ishango bone, the Plimpton 322 tablet and other artifacts throughout history display, prime numbers have fascinated and captivated people throughout history. Today, prime numbers and their properties are studied in number theory, a branch of mathematics and active area of research today.

    A history of prime numbers

    Some scientists guess that the markings on the Ishango bone represent prime numbers.
    Joeykentin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    Informally, a positive counting number larger than one is prime if that number of dots can be arranged only into a rectangular array with one column or one row. For example, 11 is a prime number since 11 dots form only rectangular arrays of sizes 1 by 11 and 11 by 1. Conversely, 12 is not prime since you can use 12 dots to make an array of 3 by 4 dots, with multiple rows and multiple columns. Math textbooks define a prime number as a whole number greater than one whose only positive divisors are only 1 and itself.

    Math historian Peter S. Rudman suggests that Greek mathematicians were likely the first to understand the concept of prime numbers, around 500 B.C.E.

    Around 300 B.C.E., the Greek mathematician and logician Euler proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euler began by assuming that there is a finite number of primes. Then he came up with a prime that was not on the original list to create a contradiction. Since a fundamental principle of mathematics is being logically consistent with no contradictions, Euler then concluded that his original assumption must be false. So, there are infinitely many primes.

    The argument established the existence of infinitely many primes, however it was not particularly constructive. Euler had no efficient method to list all the primes in an ascending list.

    Prime numbers, when expressed as that number of dots, can be arranged only in a single row or column, rather than a square or rectangle.
    David Eppstein/Wikimedia Commons

    In the middle ages, Arab mathematicians advanced the Greeks’ theory of prime numbers, referred to as hasam numbers during this time. The Persian mathematician Kamal al-Din al-Farisi formulated the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that any positive integer larger than one can be expressed uniquely as a product of primes.

    From this view, prime numbers are the basic building blocks for constructing any positive whole number using multiplication – akin to atoms combining to make molecules in chemistry.

    Prime numbers can be sorted into different types. In 1202, Leonardo Fibonacci introduced in his book “Liber Abaci: Book of Calculation” prime numbers of the form (2p – 1) where p is also prime.

    Today, primes in this form are called Mersenne primes after the French monk Marin Mersenne. Many of the largest known primes follow this format.

    Several early mathematicians believed that a number of the form (2p – 1) is prime whenever p is prime. But in 1536, mathematician Hudalricus Regius noticed that 11 is prime but not (211 – 1), which equals 2047. The number 2047 can be expressed as 11 times 89, disproving the conjecture.

    While not always true, number theorists realized that the (2p – 1) shortcut often produces primes and gives a systematic way to search for large primes.

    The search for large primes

    The number (2p – 1) is much larger relative to the value of p and provides opportunities to identify large primes.

    When the number (2p – 1) becomes sufficiently large, it is much harder to check whether (2p – 1) is prime – that is, if (2p – 1) dots can be arranged only into a rectangular array with one column or one row.

    Fortunately, Édouard Lucas developed a prime number test in 1878, later proved by Derrick Henry Lehmer in 1930. Their work resulted in an efficient algorithm for evaluating potential Mersenne primes. Using this algorithm with hand computations on paper, Lucas showed in 1876 that the 39-digit number (2127 – 1) equals 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727, and that value is prime.

    Also known as M127, this number remains the largest prime verified by hand computations. It held the record for largest known prime for 75 years.

    Researchers began using computers in the 1950s, and the pace of discovering new large primes increased. In 1952, Raphael M. Robinson identified five new Mersenne primes using a Standard Western Automatic Computer to carry out the Lucas-Lehmer prime number tests.

    As computers improved, the list of Mersenne primes grew, especially with the Cray supercomputer’s arrival in 1964. Although there are infinitely many primes, researchers are unsure how many fit the type (2p – 1) and are Mersenne primes.

    By the early 1980s, researchers had accumulated enough data to confidently believe that infinitely many Mersenne primes exist. They could even guess how often these prime numbers appear, on average. Mathematicians have not found proof so far, but new data continues to support these guesses.

    George Woltman, a computer scientist, founded the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, in 1996. Through this collaborative program, anyone can download freely available software from the GIMPS website to search for Mersenne prime numbers on their personal computers. The website contains specific instructions on how to participate.

    GIMPS has now identified 18 Mersenne primes, primarily on personal computers using Intel chips. The program averages a new discovery about every one to two years.

    The largest known prime

    Luke Durant, a retired programmer, discovered the current record for the largest known prime, (2136,279,841 – 1), in October 2024.

    Referred to as M136279841, this 41,024,320-digit number was the 52nd Mersenne prime identified and was found by running GIMPS on a publicly available cloud-based computing network.

    This network used Nvidia chips and ran across 17 countries and 24 data centers. These advanced chips provide faster computing by handling thousands of calculations simultaneously. The result is shorter run times for algorithms such as prime number testing.

    New and increasingly powerful computer chips have allowed prime-number hunters to find increasingly larger primes.
    Fritzchens Fritz/Flickr

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil liberty group that offers cash prizes for identifying large primes. It awarded prizes in 2000 and 2009 for the first verified 1 million-digit and 10 million-digit prime numbers.

    Large prime number enthusiasts’ next two challenges are to identify the first 100 million-digit and 1 billion-digit primes. EFF prizes of US$150,000 and $250,000, respectively, await the first successful individual or group.

    Eight of the 10 largest known prime numbers are Mersenne primes, so GIMPS and cloud computing are poised to play a prominent role in the search for record-breaking large prime numbers.

    Large prime numbers have a vital role in many encryption methods in cybersecurity, so every internet user stands to benefit from the search for large prime numbers. These searches help keep digital communications and sensitive information safe.

    Jeremiah Bartz owns shares in Nvidia.

    – ref. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, have fascinated for centuries − now technology is revolutionizing the search for them – https://theconversation.com/prime-numbers-the-building-blocks-of-mathematics-have-fascinated-for-centuries-now-technology-is-revolutionizing-the-search-for-them-249223

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Supreme Court’s gender ruling has implications for the workplace. Here’s what employees can expect

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Lord, Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Employment Law, University of Salford

    studiocho/Shutterstock

    In April 2025, the UK’s Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers, offering long-awaited clarification on how “sex” should be interpreted under the Equality Act 2010. The court ruled that, for the purposes of this legislation, “woman” refers to biological sex, not gender identity.

    The decision sparked intense debate across political, legal, and social spheres. But beyond the controversy, one crucial question remains: what does this mean for employers and employees?

    For managers, the implications are significant. Legal obligations must now be understood within a clarified framework that distinguishes between biological sex and gender reassignment.

    Employers face legal risks such as unlimited compensation at an employment tribunal. There’s also the potential fallout in terms of their reputation, as well as internal tensions as staff navigate issues of identity, belief and inclusion.

    The Supreme Court case centred on whether Scottish legislation could expand the definition of “woman” to include transgender women with a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The court ruled it could not, reaffirming that the Equality Act defines “woman” and “man” by reference to biological sex. While the Act separately protects people with the characteristic of gender reassignment, the two are not interchangeable in law.

    This ruling has wide-reaching implications for how single-sex services – such as women-only refuges, sports or changing facilities – can be structured. Under Schedule 3 of the Equality Act, providers may offer single-sex services where it is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. The judgement affirms that such services must now be assessed strictly through the lens of biological sex.

    For employers, this means they are required to navigate a more tightly defined legal landscape. The Equality Act 2010 recognises both sex and gender reassignment as protected characteristics. While single-sex spaces are lawful in limited, justifiable contexts, the legal bar for exclusion remains high.

    In practical terms, employers must ensure that provision of single-sex facilities – such as toilets, showers and changing rooms – complies with the Act.

    Any such policies must be rooted in demonstrable need, such as privacy, dignity or safety concerns, and must not cause undue harm to trans employees. Providing gender-neutral or private alternatives is increasingly seen as good practice to minimise legal and reputational risk.

    There is a real risk of legal claims on either side. Cisgender women may bring claims where their rights to single-sex spaces are perceived to be undermined. Meanwhile, trans individuals may claim indirect discrimination if reasonable adjustments such as updating internal systems (email or ID badges, for example) or offering a uniform to reflect the employee’s identity are not made.

    Employers must ensure that decisions on workplace design or service provision are evidence-based, proportionate and reviewed regularly.

    What employers should be offering

    Navigating this complex issue demands more than legal compliance. At its core, this is about people – and creating a respectful and inclusive workplace culture that values all employees.

    Employers should review and reinforce workplace values through:

    • clear dignity and respect policies that ensure staff are aware of lawful protections for both sex-based and gender identity rights

    • voluntary and inclusive communication practices, such as the optional use of pronouns in email signatures or profiles

    • training for managers and staff on both the legal framework and the lived realities of trans and gender-critical perspectives

    • robust mechanisms for resolving disputes that treat all complaints sensitively and without bias.

    Such steps will not only mitigate legal risk, they can also foster trust, morale and retention in a diverse workforce.

    Employee handbooks and HR policies should be checked and updated if necessary so that all staff know what they are entitled to.
    Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock

    Employers must review whether their facilities and HR policies comply with the clarified legal interpretation.

    In terms of facilities, where single-sex provisions exist, employers should ensure that they serve a clear and proportionate aim. This might be a female-only changing room in a fitness centre or healthcare setting where staff or service users are required to undress. Or it could be a women-only toilet or shower facility in a refuge for survivors of domestic abuse.

    At the same time, gender-neutral or private alternatives should be considered to meet the needs of trans and non-binary employees.

    And when it comes to HR and equality policies, employee handbooks, inclusion strategies and grievance procedures should be updated in line with the ruling. Employers should carry out impact assessments to determine whether any group is indirectly disadvantaged. They should then clearly document any steps for mitigation.

    One of the most sensitive implications of the ruling is how employers manage conflicting beliefs. Some employees may have gender-critical views, while others consider gender identity as central to inclusion.

    Following the decision in the Forstater v CGD Europe case, these views – if expressed respectfully – are protected under the Equality Act’s provisions on religion or belief. Employers must walk a careful line: upholding lawful freedom of belief while enforcing respectful conduct.

    Best practice includes things like promoting freedom of expression without tolerating harassment or abuse, avoiding compelled speech (for example, forced pronoun use) while encouraging inclusive language, and offering mediation where tensions arise between staff.

    The key is balance. It should be possible to protect all employees’ rights while ensuring that no one feels unsafe or undermined. Some gender-critical employees may feel legally vindicated in expressing sex-based views. Others, particularly trans and non-binary staff, may feel their identities are being questioned or their inclusion diminished.

    Workplace dignity policies must ensure that everyone is treated respectfully and fairly. As such, employers must carefully manage interpersonal dynamics and provide clear channels for raising concerns.

    The Supreme Court ruling does not strip rights – it clarifies the legal terrain. For employers, the priority should be legal clarity, respectful inclusion and thoughtful leadership. This is not a time for reactive or ideological responses. Rather, it calls for policies that are lawful, proportionate and based on the principles of fairness and dignity.

    By updating facilities, reviewing policies, training staff and managing conflict with integrity, employers can ensure that their workplaces uphold the law while building a culture of trust and mutual respect. The law has spoken, and now it’s time for employers to lead.

    Jonathan Lord 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 Supreme Court’s gender ruling has implications for the workplace. Here’s what employees can expect – https://theconversation.com/the-supreme-courts-gender-ruling-has-implications-for-the-workplace-heres-what-employees-can-expect-257677

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How trafficked American guns fuel Mexico’s cartel violence – podcast

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

    More than two thirds of guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes originate in the U.S. For decades, Mexico has struggled with staggering levels of gun violence fueled in large part by weapons trafficked across its northern border.

    Now an investigation published by The Conversation has arrived at a new estimate of the scale of this illicit gun trade between the U.S. and Mexico in 2022: 135,000 guns.

    Investigative journalist Sean Campbell and Topher McDougal, a professor of economic development at the University of San Diego, spent a year combing through multiple databases and court documents and conducting interviews to understand how the flow of guns works.

    Their investigation reveals where in the U.S. the guns are coming from, what impact these American guns are having in Mexico, and how difficult it is for American law enforcement agencies to prosecute those trafficking guns across the border.

    Listen to Campbell and McDougal talk about their investigation on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

    You can read the full investigation here.

    This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

    Newsclips in this episode from PBS News, CGTN, France24, ABC 7 and NewsNation.

    Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

    Sean Campbell and Topher McDougal 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.

    – ref. How trafficked American guns fuel Mexico’s cartel violence – podcast – https://theconversation.com/how-trafficked-american-guns-fuel-mexicos-cartel-violence-podcast-256746

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: From working class pubs to sold-out stadiums: how darts has become a major international sport

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Joshua McLeod, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

    Few sports have witnessed a transformation as dramatic as darts in recent years.

    From its origins as a pub game stereotypically played with cigarette and beer in hand, darts is now serious business.

    With surging television ratings and huge demand for live events, the growth of darts continues to leave many sports looking on in envy.

    There has been a combination of factors at play – not least one exceptionally prodigious teenager. Before discussing those factors, it’s worth taking a closer look at the numbers.

    Becoming big business

    Darts sits alongside a select few sports to have achieved significant commercial growth over the past decade.

    While not at the scale of sports such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Formula 1, the rise of darts has been prolific.

    In the United Kingdom, a record-breaking peak of 3.7 million viewers watched the 2024 Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) World Championship final. It was Sky Sports’ highest-ever non-soccer broadcast.

    In addition to the PDC World Championship – the sport’s premier knockout event – viewership records were also broken across the 2024 Premier League Darts season, a league-format competition featuring weekly fixtures between top-ranked players.

    On the UK’s Sky Sports, the 15 most-watched nights in the competition’s history all occurred that year.

    The PDC World Championship and Premier League Darts sit alongside the World Matchplay as the “Triple Crown” of most important darts events.

    Outside the UK, darts viewership also continues to grow.

    The Netherlands remains a strong and expanding heartland, while in Germany, viewership for the World Championship final has increased eightfold since 2008.

    In Australia, precise viewing figures are not widely available, but the Foxtel Group’s landmark four-year deal with the PDC in 2023 suggests rising demand.

    Surging audiences are translating into significantly larger broadcast deals.

    In 2025, Sky Sports reportedly outbid Netflix to secure a new £125 million (A$260.3 million) deal for exclusive UK coverage of the PDC for 2026–30. That was double the size of the previous deal.

    In contrast, many other sports face stagnation or even sharp declines in media rights value.

    For instance, the UK Super League rugby’s rights on Sky Sports fell from £40 million (A$83.3 million) per season in 2021 to £21.5 million (A$44.5 million) in 2024.

    Similarly, in soccer, the French Ligue 1’s TV deal with DAZN collapsed due to underwhelming subscriber numbers. Meanwhile, ESPN walked away from its long-standing agreement with Major League Baseball after unsuccessfully trying to cut its US$550 million (A$848 million) annual payment down to $200 million (A$309 million).

    Prize money in darts has also exploded.

    Next year, the winner of the two-week long World Championship will bank £1 million (A$2.08 million) – doubling this year’s purse.

    The prize money was £60,000 (A$124,960) in 2005, representing a 1,567% increase over 20 years.

    Tickets are also hot property. Premier League and World Championship sessions often sell out within minutes worldwide: the UK, Bahrain, New York and even Wollongong have become key stops in darts’ international calendar.

    The recipe for success

    Like Formula 1 and the UFC, darts benefits from being privately operated.

    Without the typical bureaucracy and conflicting interests seen in many traditional sport governing bodies, the PDC can respond more quickly to audience preferences and market opportunities.

    This streamlined, commercially driven approach has been key to darts’ growth.

    The sport has been expertly tailored to modern audiences.

    One of darts’ best-known selling points is the live event experience. The entertainment-first approach is known for loud music, the showmanship of player walk-ons, fancy dress from the crowd and yes, often plenty of alcohol.

    The lines are blurred between sport and party and fans love it.

    Culturally, darts is seen by many as fun, relatable, and rooted in working-class culture. After all, its heritage is in the pub.

    Darts is ideally suited to modern sport media consumption habits: PLD matches last only 20–30 minutes and the up-close TV product works perfectly for social media highlight clips.

    It is also one of the few sports where women compete directly against men.

    This adds another layer of interest for fans and has helped elevate stars such as Fallon Sherrock, who made headlines in 2019 by becoming the first woman to win a match at the PDC World Championship, eventually reaching the final 32.

    A prodigy emerges

    The so-called “Littler Effect” has given darts’ profile a significant boost.

    The emergence of talented teenager Luke Littler has broken new ground for the sport and drawn global interest.

    The English prodigy, who has quickly risen to fame, is by far the sport’s biggest star, but it would be unfair to say darts is a one-man band.

    Luke Humphries and Michael van Gerwen enjoy significant profiles while Phil Taylor is regarded as the sport’s greatest player. Australia’s Simon “The Wizard” Whitlock also forged a successful career.

    There is also colourful two-time world champion Peter Wright.

    Where to from here?

    The success of darts reveals much about modern sports audiences and their preferences.

    Darts does not rely on traditional ideas of athletic excellence, nor does it fit the Olympic ideal.

    Yet, darts is thriving while many traditional sports are stagnating.

    Darts’ success stems from remaining authentic to its working-class roots while evolving into an engaging commercial product suited for television, short-form content and digital media.

    For darts to fully achieve its global potential, the next step has to be continued international growth. Although it has grown steadily in markets like Australia and throughout Asia, the UK remains darts’ dominant base.

    As the global sports marketplace becomes more fragmented and competitive, darts is well positioned to continue growing.

    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. From working class pubs to sold-out stadiums: how darts has become a major international sport – https://theconversation.com/from-working-class-pubs-to-sold-out-stadiums-how-darts-has-become-a-major-international-sport-254807

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Young men on South Africa’s urban margins: new book follows their lives over 10 years

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Hannah J. Dawson, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg

    South Africa’s young people, aged 15 to 34, who make up more than 50% of the country’s working age population, bear a disproportionate burden of unemployment. They have done so for more than a decade. Of this group, those aged 15-24 face the highest barriers to the job market, according to data from Statistics South Africa. The majority of these young people live in the townships and informal settlements.

    A new book, Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins, examines how young people in Zandspruit, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg, make a life. Anthropologist Hannah Dawson explains why she chose Zandspruit for her research and shares her findings about the sociopolitical landscape of urban settlements.

    Why the choice of Zandspruit for your research?

    It started with my arrival there in 2011 to study a wave of political protests during local elections. This sparked a much longer research journey spanning more than a decade, which this book traces.

    The settlement was established in the early 1990s and has grown into a densely populated area of around 50,000 people, across 14 pieces of land.

    The expansion of Zandspruit reflects broader trends in post-apartheid South Africa: rapid urbanisation, inadequate urban housing, rising unemployment and underemployment — including a shift from permanent to casual work, and from formal to informal employment.

    What sets Zandspruit apart is its location. It is near post-apartheid economic hubs such as Kya Sands, with its light industries and business parks, and Lanseria Airport, a growing freight and logistics hub earmarked for expansion under the Greater Lanseria Masterplan. It also borders affluent suburbs and golf estates. This makes it distinct from older, more isolated settlements in Johannesburg’s south. Its proximity to shopping malls, townhouse complexes, warehouses and commercial zones makes it a destination of choice for migrants. They include people seeking a foothold in the urban market from rural areas of South Africa as well as people from other parts of the African continent.

    This proximity makes Zandspruit a case study for understanding how residents access urban job markets, and the connections between wage and non-wage economic activities.

    What do your findings tell us about the lives of young people?

    The book draws on research primarily with young men, whose work and lives I followed over ten years. It shows how young men on the urban margins navigate structural unemployment and inequality by forging social ties, asserting belonging, and pursuing alternative livelihoods within what I call Zandspruit’s “redistributive economy”. I use the phrase “making a life” to move beyond survival or income generation. A life is not only about securing food and shelter. It involves the pursuit of social connection, identity, place and dignity.

    For many of the young men I came to know, this often involved turning down demeaning jobs in favour of self-initiated income strategies that offered greater autonomy. These included renting out shacks, running internet cafes or car washes, or operating as mashonisas (unregistered loan sharks). Such efforts reflect more than personal resilience – they reveal how men’s social position and connections within the settlement shape access to the more lucrative niches of the local economy.

    These dynamics point to a broader condition facing young people in South Africa: deep and persistent material insecurity. Yet, they also show the ways in which young people, especially young men, are actively building lives in the face of profound uncertainty. They are crafting meaning and striving for something more in a context marked by chronic unemployment and inequality.

    What did you learn about urban inequality and living on the urban margins?

    The residents of Zandspruit are not equally poor or marginalised. A focus of the book is the division between “insiders” – long-term residents with access to property who earn rental income – and “outsiders” – new arrivals and immigrants who, as tenants, are more dependent on low-paid jobs. These distinctions shape access to land, housing, livelihoods and local recognition.

    Most immigrants form a precarious tenant class, while landlords tend to be established residents with long-standing ties to the settlement. Zandspruit is a deeply stratified space where social connections, property access and local citizenship determine who belongs and who benefits. By tracing men’s positions as insiders or outsiders, the book shows how these inequalities shape their economic strategies and capacity to build a life on the urban margins.

    What do you recommend in terms of public policy?

    The book doesn’t make policy recommendations. However, it speaks to key public and policy debates. Media and policy narratives often portray unemployed youth as idle and disconnected from society, ignoring the complex, often invisible, economic activities and arrangements that structure their lives. While informal and unstable, these pursuits reflect resourcefulness, local knowledge, and a conscious rejection of degrading labour.

    It challenges the idea that informal entrepreneurship can solve youth unemployment. Most enterprises are too precarious to lift young people out of poverty. It also questions the notion that informal settlements are simply ghettos of exclusion and poverty. Instead, it highlights the inequalities within the settlement and calls for greater attention to be paid to the local economies and social orders being forged within these spaces. Understanding these dynamics is crucial to rethinking how we respond to unemployment, the urban housing crisis and inequality in South Africa.

    Hannah J. Dawson received funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the National Research Foundation.

    – ref. Young men on South Africa’s urban margins: new book follows their lives over 10 years – https://theconversation.com/young-men-on-south-africas-urban-margins-new-book-follows-their-lives-over-10-years-257026

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Will elections for judges make Mexico the ‘most democratic country in the world’? Critics fear the opposite

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Luis Gómez Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong

    On Sunday, Mexico will hold an unprecedented election, becoming the first country in the world to allow voters to elect judges at every level.

    Voters will elect approximately half the judges in the country on June 1 – from the nine members of the Supreme Court down to 850 federal judges and thousands more at lower levels. In 2027, a second vote will see the rest of Mexico’s judiciary elected.

    As part of the overhaul, the country’s merit-based, career judiciary system will be abolished. Instead, all judges will serve nine-year terms, renewable by popular vote.

    The election had been championed by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and embraced by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in October.

    Sheinbaum has proclaimed Mexico will be “the most democratic country in the world” because the people will now choose all three branches of government.

    Critics are not so sure. Some are calling the process a cynical farce. Others warn it will concentrate power in Morena, the ruling party, and its political allies, dismantling the country’s system of checks and balances.

    Critics also warn that inexperienced judges could be elected, or those who could be influenced by organised crime. Some candidates themselves have been investigated for crimes, and at least two are former defence attorneys for drug cartels.

    Former president Ernesto Zedillo, currently director at the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalisation, has gone so far as to declare that democracy itself “has come to an end” in Mexico.

    Why reform the judiciary?

    During his time in office from 2018–2024, López Obrador waged a rhetorical battle with Mexico’s courts, accusing judges of serving the elites and blocking his agenda.

    In truth, what irked López Obrador was the fact the courts wielded the power to review and restrain his actions through constitutional oversight.

    Sheinbaum seems to share his hostility towards the judiciary. Arturo Zaldívar, a former Supreme Court chief justice who designed the judicial reform system and later joined Sheinbaum’s cabinet, has accused the outgoing chief justice, Norma Piña, of being “a force of opposition allied with the oligarchy”.

    In September 2024, Morena used its congressional super-majority to ram through a series of constitutional amendments to enact the judicial reform.

    In response, judges walked off the job. Court staff, lawyers and law students took to the streets in support of their strike, some carrying banners reading “justice is not a popularity contest”.

    Experts note the reform does nothing to fix Mexico’s real justice problems – the rampant corruption and abuse that plagues the system. The institutions that allow criminals to act with impunity are not the courts, but the prosecutors and police.

    Human Rights Watch reports that nearly half of Mexicans have “little or very little confidence” in the country’s justice authorities. Nine in ten Mexicans don’t even bother to report crimes.

    The perils of judicial elections

    Electing judges is an idea fraught with peril. International human rights law treats an independent judiciary as a basic human right. Article 8 of the 1978 American Convention on Human Rights – an international treaty for North, Central and South America – guarantees every person “a hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal.”

    Popular elections invite precisely the opposite. As UN experts caution, election campaigns will inevitably inject “political loyalty or alignment with party interests” into judge selection, rather than competence and impartiality.

    In addition, leading legal theorists have long warned that politicising the judiciary undermines the rule of law.

    US jurist Ronald Dworkin argued judges must decide according to principles – not political winds. Italian jurist Luigi Ferrajoli’s notion of a “guarantee-based” democracy – which is hugely influential in Latin America – likewise insists judges be insulated from party bargaining.

    Even in the United States, where some states hold judicial elections, scholars lament their corrosive effects.

    As one study notes:

    Wealthy people and corporations can pump lots of money […] to elect and reelect judges who decide cases the way they want.

    Opponents of billionaire Elon Musk critiqued his decision this year to pour US$21 million (A$33 million) into the campaign of a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In a comment he posted on X, Musk said he didn’t expect to win but “there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.”

    Bolivia offers another cautionary tale. Beginning in 2011, Bolivia has held elections for the judges on its top courts in an effort to “decolonise” the justice system and fight corruption.

    In practice, though, only judges pre-approved by the ruling party’s congressional majority make the ballot. Voters, too, know little about the candidates. Turnout is very low.

    Courts increasingly under attack

    Mexico’s justice system, indeed, needs reform. But its multiple problems will not be solved with the wholesale politicisation of the courts.

    As Argentine scholar Roberto Gargarella bluntly observes, electing judges in this way is “one of the greatest institutional tragedies of our time.”

    Mexico’s reform effort threatens to turn the courts into just another party apparatus. In that sense, Mexico joins a disturbing global trend. From Washington to Brasília, populist leaders are increasingly attacking the courts as the enemies of the people.

    With courts in Mexico potentially beholden to the government or influenced by organised crime, neutral judges may become much harder to find. If history teaches anything, it’s that the night of authoritarianism grows darker when the last judges are gone.

    Luis Gómez Romero 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. Will elections for judges make Mexico the ‘most democratic country in the world’? Critics fear the opposite – https://theconversation.com/will-elections-for-judges-make-mexico-the-most-democratic-country-in-the-world-critics-fear-the-opposite-257730

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump’s global trade plans are in disarray, amid legal appeals to a US court ruling on ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Susan Stone, Credit Union SA Chair of Economics, University of South Australia

    Earlier this week, a US court blocked the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs that US President Donald Trump imposed on imported goods from around 90 nations.

    On Wednesday (US time), the Court of International Trade ruled the emergency authority Trump used to impose the tariffs could not override the role of Congress, which has the right to regulate commerce with other countries.

    The following day, however, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington paused the trade court’s ruling, temporarily reinstating Trump’s tariffs. The earlier court ruling, and the fresh uncertainty prompted by the appeal have left the implementation of Trump’s trade policy in disarray.

    Even though it has been paused, the trade court’s ruling calls into question trade negotiations underway with more than 18 different nations, which are trying to lower these tariffs. Do these countries continue to negotiate or do they wait for the judicial process to play out?

    The Trump administration still has other mechanisms through which it can impose tariffs, but these have limits on the amount that can be imposed, or entail processes which can take months or years. This undermines Trump’s preferred method of negotiation: throwing out large threats and backing down once a concession is reached.

    Emergency powers were a step too far

    The lawsuits were filed by US importers of foreign products and some US states, challenging Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

    The lawsuits argued the national emergencies cited in imposing the tariffs – the trade deficit and the fentanyl crisis – were not an emergency and not directly addressed by the tariff remedy. The court agreed, and said by imposing tariffs Trump had overstepped his authority.

    The ruling said the executive orders used were “declared to be invalid as contrary to law”.

    The act states the president is entitled to take economic action in the face of “an unusual and extraordinary threat”. It’s mainly been used to impose sanctions on terrorist groups or freeze assets from Russia. There’s nothing in the act that refers to tariffs.

    The decision means all the reciprocal tariffs – including the 10% tariffs on most countries, the 50% tariffs Trump was talking about putting on the EU, and some of the Chinese tariffs – are ruled by the court to be illegal.

    The ruling was based on two separate lawsuits. One was brought by a group of small businesses that argued tariffs materially hurt their business. The other was brought by 12 individual states, arguing the tariffs would materially impact their ability to provide public goods.

    Some industry tariffs will remain in place

    The ruling does not apply to tariffs applied under Section 201, known as safeguard tariffs. They are intended to protect industries from imports allegedly being sold in the US market at unfair prices or through unfair means. Tariffs on solar panels and washing machines were brought under this regulation.

    Also excluded are Section 232 tariffs, which are applied for national security reasons. Those are the steel and aluminium tariffs, the automobile and auto parts tariffs. Trump has declared all those as national security issues, so those tariffs will remain.

    Most of the tariffs against China are also excluded under Section 301. Those are put in place for unfair trade practices, such as intellectual property theft or forced technology transfer. They are meant to pressure countries to change their policies.

    Other trade investigations are still underway

    In addition, there are current investigations related to copper and the pharmaceuticals sector, which will continue. These investigations are part of a more traditional trade process and may lead to future tariffs, including on Australia.

    The Trump administration is still weighing possible sector-specific tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
    Planar/Shutterstock

    Now for the appeals

    Following the subsequent reinstatement of tariffs, we now have to wait for the appeals process to play out. This may take some time. The plaintiffs have until June 5 to respond, and the Trump administration has until June 9.

    In the meantime, there are at least five other legal challenges to tariffs pending in the courts.

    If the appeals court provides a ruling the Trump administration or opponents don’t like, they can appeal to the Supreme Court.

    Alternatively, the White House could direct customs officials to ignore the court and continue to collect tariffs.

    The Trump administration has ignored court orders in the past, particularly on immigration rulings.

    The administration is unlikely to lie down on this. In addition to its appeal process, officials complained about “unelected judges” and “judicial overreach” and may contest the whole process. The only thing that continues to be a certainty is that uncertainty will drive global markets for the foreseeable future.

    Susan Stone 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’s global trade plans are in disarray, amid legal appeals to a US court ruling on ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs – https://theconversation.com/trumps-global-trade-plans-are-in-disarray-amid-legal-appeals-to-a-us-court-ruling-on-liberation-day-tariffs-257812

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The debate over genocide claims in relation to Gaza intensifies

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor

    In the past few days, discussion around whether Israel is committing acts of genocide in Gaza has intensified. On May 28 The Guardian reported that “380 writers and groups” had signed an open letter calling Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “genocide”. The letter reads, in part:

    The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations.

    This followed news of a letter to the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, signed by more than 800 lawyers, including former supreme court justices, calling on the prime minister to impose sanctions on the Israeli government.

    “There is mounting evidence of genocide, which is either being perpetrated or at a minimum at serious risk of occurring,” the letter stated, adding that a recent statement from Israel’s finance minister Belazel Smotrich that the Israel Defense Forces would “wipe out” what remains of Palestinian Gaza was an indication of genocidal intent.

    One of the signatories was Professor Guy Goodwin-Gill, a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, who has a track record of expertise in international humanitarian law. The Conversation spoke with him to discuss the issue. He said:

    There is no doubt in my mind that war crimes have been committed and although genocide is basically an extreme form of war crime, it can be notoriously difficult to establish intent to destroy a people, in part or in whole.

    The task of proving genocide is hard enough, but [in this case] the evidence can be gathered from the facts on the ground – they speak for themselves. And intent can be inferred from what politicians and officials actually say, especially when it is not denied or qualified.

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    But he said he had “reservations about whether, at an inter-state level, a charge of genocide would be levelled against Israel by more than a few states. And if it succeeded, the legal and political consequences.”

    But individual prosecutions for war crimes and genocide are “always a distinct possibility,” he added.

    In fact, the crime of genocide has only been recognised on a handful of occasions since it was first established in 1948. James Sweeney, an expert in international law from Lancaster University has written a brief history of genocide.



    Read more:
    Why have so few atrocities ever been recognised as genocide?

    Meanwhile, in the West Bank city of Jenin, IDF forces sparked international outrage when they fired “warning shots” closer to a group of 25 diplomats on a fact-finding visit in the wake of an Israeli military offensive there.

    Andrew Forde, an expert in international humanitarian law at Dublin City University, considers that this act “crossed the Rubicon”, which is the convention, universally accepted over millennia, of the inviolability of diplomats and their staff. It’s a clear breach, he writes of article 29 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, to which Israel is a signatory, which states that the host state “shall take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on [their] person, freedom or dignity”.

    Israel responded by offering an apology, but claimed that the diplomats in question had “deviated from the approved route” by entering a restricted area”.

    The incident forced the group of diplomats to scramble for cover and hindered their work in Jenin, Forde writes. As such it is a flagrant breach of Israel’s duty of care. And it sets a dangerous precedent: “Diplomatic protections work effectively when they are reciprocal. Without trust, the system quickly unravels.”



    Read more:
    IDF firing ‘warning shots’ near diplomats sets an unacceptable precedent in international relations

    Israel’s campaign in Gaza is a factor in a hugely complex situation being played out at present in the Middle East, which is straining the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. The US president is talking up the idea of signing a new nuclear deal with Iran to replace the one he withdrew from in 2018. The Israeli prime minister is bitterly opposed to an US-Iran deal and has proposed launching strikes against Iran’s nuclear installations. The pair reportedly clashed over the issue in a phone call this week.

    But Trump recently returned from a trip to the Gulf States, none of which want the sort of regional conflagration that Israeli strikes on Iran could cause. And, as Scott Lucas of University College Dublin writes, he is also very keen to burnish his credentials as a dealmaker, especially in light of his failure to bring the Ukraine war to a close within 24 hours and the failure of the ceasefire in Gaza for which he has claimed much of the credit.

    As Lucas writes, “even as Trump does what he wants over Iran to Netanyahu’s chagrin, the Israeli prime minister is finding that Trump is not restricting what he does closer to home in Gaza”.



    Read more:
    Why are the US and Israel not on the same page over how to deal with Iran? Expert Q&A

    Ukraine: as the US falters, Germany steps up

    Volodymr Zelensky flew to Berlin this week where he met the German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said Germany would work with Ukraine to develop long-range missiles to attack targets inside Russia. It’s part of an overall plan to expand Germany’s military into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”.

    Stefan Wolff believes Germany’s decision to step up both its military capabilities and its support for Ukraine is highly significant when considered in the context of Donald Trump’s recent threats to abandon his efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

    Wolff, an expert in international security from the University of Birmingham, who has written regularly for The Conversation about the war in Ukraine, says here that “Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing.” Given the US decision to downscale its security presence in Europe, this could be of enormous consequence for Nato, he writes.



    Read more:
    Germany steps up to replace ‘unreliable’ US as guarantor of European security

    This is also an important development coming, as it does, just a few weeks before Nato’s summit in The Hague on June 24-25. As Amelia Hadfield writes, most of Nato’s members will be only too aware of Trump’s disparagement of Nato and many of its members in recent times and will be considering the potential for a future without US leadership.

    Hadfield, the head of the department of politics at the University of Surrey, notes the irony of Washington calling on the European Nato members to pay more for their own defence. Over much of the lifetime of the alliance, she writes, the US has actively discouraged European defence autonomy. Now, she says, the focus of Nato’s 31 other members must be to prepare for the likelihood that the US plans to at least significantly reduce its support for the alliance in Europe. “A clear mandate is needed, to ensure that being US-less does not render Nato itself useless,” she writes.

    This is already starting to happen, as countries join the “coalition of the willing” spearheaded by Britain and France. But Hadfield believes that boosting European capabilities within Nato is the most sensible way forward and should be the focus of next month’s summit.



    Read more:
    Nato faces a make-or-break decision about how to protect Europe and its future in next few weeks

    A lesson from history

    Donald Trump’s on again off-again relationship with Vladimir Putin is confusing enough for casual followers of world affairs. It must present a considerable headache for the foreign ministers and other diplomats tasked with calibrating their policies around the US stance on Russian aggression.

    But history suggests that the US president’s apparent willingness to allow Russia to grab Ukrainian territory in direct contravention of international law is storing up trouble for the future, writes Tim Luckhurst.

    Luckhurst is the principal of South College, Durham University, and has made a study of the way some governments were happy to allow Hitler to get away with naked aggression in the run-up to the second world war. He sees direct parallels with the way Trump and his senior officials have proposed allowing Putin to have his way with the Crimea and the four provinces of Ukraine which Russia already occupies.

    “Chamberlain’s version of appeasement failed to prevent Adolf Hitler’s aggression in the 20th century,” he writes. “Trump’s version appears equally incapable of deterring Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions in the 21st.”



    Read more:
    History shows that Donald Trump is making a serious error in appeasing Vladimir Putin

    World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get updates directly in your inbox.

    – ref. The debate over genocide claims in relation to Gaza intensifies – https://theconversation.com/the-debate-over-genocide-claims-in-relation-to-gaza-intensifies-257847

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Surge of ICE agreements with local police aim to increase deportations, but many police forces have found they undermine public safety

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By W. Carsten Andresen, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, St. Edward’s University

    A Kinney County sheriff’s deputy arrests an undocumented immigrant who was pulled over in March 2023 in Brackettville, Texas. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has been establishing a framework for deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. It’s something he has previously vowed will be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

    Part of that operation includes what’s known as the federal 287(g) program. Established in 1996, it allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose work is normally carried out by federal officials, to train state and local authorities to function as federal immigration officers.

    Under 287(g), for example, local police officers can interview people to determine their immigration status. They can also issue immigration detainers to jail people until agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement take custody.

    “Illegal immigration has wide-ranging consequences, including a troubling surge of dangerous drugs into our state,” T.K. Waters, sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, said in a February 2025 statement to explain his office’s participation in 287(g). “We remain committed to partnering with President Trump’s administration and our federal counterparts to secure our borders, protect Floridians, and establish a framework for the rest of the nation to follow.”

    Local police authorities across the country – from Jackson County, Texas, to Frederick County, Maryland – are participating in 287(g) for similar reasons.

    Since Trump began his second term in January, ICE has increased 287(g) agreements from 135 in 25 states in December 2024 to 628 in 40 states as of May 28, 2025.

    As a criminal justice scholar, I believe the surge of 287(g) agreements sets a dangerous precedent for local policing, where forging relationships and building the trust of immigrants is a proven and effective tactic in combating crime. In my view, the expansion of 287(g) will erode that trust and makes entire communities – not just immigrants – less safe.

    Past federal-local cooperation

    There is a long history of federal authorities collaborating with local police to enforce immigration laws.

    During the Great Depression, federal officials blamed Latinos for taking American jobs, and local agencies helped them deport up to 1.8 million people to Mexico. It’s estimated that 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens.

    In the early 1930s, local police participated in immigration raids in California and other states. As author Adam Goodman details in his book “The Deportation Machine,” state and local government agencies, including social workers, welfare agencies and police, acted as “de facto immigration agents.”

    Trump’s mass deportation plan mirrors President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 federal immigration initiative, which resulted in 1.3 million deportations.

    As author Natalia Molina notes in her book “How Race is Made in America,” local police often served as “immigration cops” in Eisenhower’s program because the federal government “did not have enough agents to cover such a large territory” as the U.S.

    During his two terms, President Barack Obama deported over 5 million people and used the 287(g) program to help him do that, primarily to target jailed or recently arrived undocumented people. Obama’s use of 287(g) peaked at 76 agreements during his first term but dropped to 35 during his second term.

    A Justice Department investigation launched in 2008 found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona engaged in unconstitutional law enforcement actions against Latinos. The Justice Department found that the sheriff’s office engaged in a pattern of “unlawful seizures, including unjustified stops, detentions, and arrests, of Latinos in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

    Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio looks on as inmates are moved in Phoenix, Ariz., in April 2009.
    Joshua Lott/Getty Images

    Power of local policing

    Forty states have adopted 287(g) agreements as of May 2025.

    This could have effects outside of the immigration laws.

    In the past 45 years, many law enforcement professionals in urban areas have highlighted the importance of forging relationships and building trust with immigrant communities. That’s because the police depend on the participation of all citizens to prevent crime and solve criminal investigations.

    But police departments across the U.S. have found that 287(g) partnerships erode that trust.

    In 1979, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates created Special Order 40 that prohibited local officers from enforcing immigration laws in response to community complaints alleging discrimination against Latinos. Gates issued the order “to encourage immigrants to cooperate with police and build community trust.”

    Other large police departments followed. In places such as Chicago and San Francisco, they shifted focus from helping federal immigration officials to prioritizing community relationships.

    William Bratton, who led six police departments, including in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, criticized 287(g) in a 2009 op-ed. He said that deputizing local officers to enforce immigration laws immediately “undermines their core public safety mission.”

    Conservative police scholar George Kelling, co-author of the broken windows theory, which presumes that visible signs of disorder can lead to crime, also expressed support for local police agencies prioritizing their community relationships.

    In a 1999 study, Kelling highlighted a San Diego police memo announcing its refusal to enforce federal immigration laws. The San Diego Police Department, he wrote, “thought through its values, mission, and functions and elaborated a policy that put public safety and harmony above aggressive attempts to ferret out undocumented aliens.”

    During Trump’s first administration, some police chiefs echoed Bratton and Kelling. They warned that employing local officers to enforce immigration measures could spark fear and damage public safety.

    Former Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole stated in 2016 that Seattle police officers were prohibited from “inquiring about a person’s immigration status.”

    And former Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn announced in 2016 that his department does not enforce immigration law.

    He added, “It is our opinion, our strongly held belief that our responsibility is to protect the residents of our city. To protect them, they must trust us, they must be willing to report crimes, they must be willing to be witnesses.”

    A Cameron County sheriff’s officer puts handcuffs on a suspected undocumented immigrant detained during a traffic stop in South Texas.
    Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images

    Consequences of 287(g)

    President Trump has frequently linked immigrants with higher crime rates, calling them murderers and rapists.

    But multiple studies have found that undocumented people commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens.

    Although the Trump administration is expanding the use of local police in immigration enforcement, research casts doubt on using mass deportation as a crime reduction strategy.

    A 2018 study on 287(g) from the libertarian Cato Institute found no evidence that ICE-led partnerships with local police decreased crime rates.

    And a 2014 study on the Secure Communities Program, which calls for local police agencies to share arrestee information with federal immigration officials, found that this program has “no discernible impact” on crime in medium and large municipalities.

    The Trump administration’s expansion of 287(g) ignores the shift that some big city police departments have made away from immigration enforcement in favor of community policing. And I believe it threatens to undermine the relationship between local police and the increasingly diverse communities they serve.

    W. Carsten Andresen was employed in the past (2000-2003) at The Police Institute, a Rutger’s University Think Tank run by George L. Kelling.

    – ref. Surge of ICE agreements with local police aim to increase deportations, but many police forces have found they undermine public safety – https://theconversation.com/surge-of-ice-agreements-with-local-police-aim-to-increase-deportations-but-many-police-forces-have-found-they-undermine-public-safety-255937

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Travel with intention: Here’s a guide to ‘soft adventure’ experiences across Canada this summer

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Moira A. McDonald, Associate Professor, Director, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Royal Roads University

    A growing number of Canadian travellers are embracing “soft adventure” travel. This trend blends a desire for active engagements in nature and educational and culturally relevant experiences with the chance to reset and relax.

    Low-risk outdoor activities such as wine tasting, canoeing, fishing, whale-watching and cycling are all examples of this growing trend. This shift reflects a “growing desire for peace of mind and rejuvenation” among Canadians in their travel experiences.

    A recent survey found 61 per cent of Canadians plan to focus on “soft travel” or “calm-cations” in 2025. While this trend spans all age groups, it’s particularly strong among Gen Z, with 81 per cent showing a preference for it.

    At the same time, many Canadians are searching for travel opportunities closer to home amid tensions between the two countries.

    In these times of global uncertainty, soft adventure tourism offers affordable options for Canadians and international visitors to explore and experience all that Canada has to offer. As tourism experts, we have some suggestions for destinations that provide travellers with a chance to pause, breathe and recharge.

    The West Coast

    Along the coast of Vancouver Island, orcas, humpback whales, sea lions, seals and porpoises draw visitors each summer. Tourism operators offer whale-watching tours all over the island, giving travellers a chance to experience its marine life firsthand. Just a day trip from Victoria, the Kinsol Trestle is a chance to walk or cycle through nature.

    For a closer look at the region’s wildlife, travellers can join sea kayaking tours in Port McNeill on Vancouver Island with Kingfisher Wilderness Adventures. Here, visitors might spot grizzly bears and they can hear stories from Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations guides and interpreters.

    British Columbia is home to more than 200 distinct Indigenous communities that offer tourism experiences ranging from pristine beaches to savouring cuisine in award-winning restaurants and more.

    On the mainland, Harrison Hot Springs, B.C. offers visitors the chance to relax in mineral hot springs for a nominal fee. Other soft adventure experiences include beach-front maintained trails for walking and hiking, as well as picnicking locations. Visitors can take the short drive to Rosedale, B.C., where a brief hike brings them to the base of Bridal Veil Falls Park.

    The Prairie provinces

    Alberta’s landscapes have served as the backdrop for many films and television series, including Brokeback Mountain, Game of Thrones, The Last of Us and The Revenant. For film tourism enthusiasts, the province offers no shortage of iconic film locations to explore. Some scenes of Game of Thrones’ final season were shot in Banff National Park.

    In Saskatchewan, Lake Diefenbaker is known for golfing, boating and walleye fishing. It’s the largest body of water in the southwest of the province, and it offers an opportunity to traverse a picturesque parkland while witnessing wildlife like elk, caribou, cougar and lynx.

    In Manitoba, Churchill offers sightings of both beluga whales and polar bears. Each summer, hundreds of belugas enter the Churchill River, and the town offers kayaking, boat tours and paddleboarding to see them.

    While you’re in Churchill, you can also see the northern lights up to 300 nights a year, along with numerous historic sites like the Prince of Wales Fort.

    Central Canada

    With 250,000 freshwater lakes, remote canyons, more than 1,200 canoe routes and 22 diveable historic shipwrecks, Ontario is filled with soft adventure travel opportunities. Travellers have countless ways to connect with nature and history in the province.

    In Tobermory, a harbour village on the province’s Bruce Peninsula, travellers can take guided tours to explore underwater shipwrecks, as well as visit the region’s distinctive “flowerpot” rock formations and natural grottos.

    A diver swims near the City of Cleveland shipwreck in Tobermory, Ont. The City of Cleveland was a 255 foot long wooden steamer that was built in Cleveland in 1882 and sunk in 1901 near Fitzwilliam island.
    (Shutterstock)

    Québec offers an experience that at times feels distinctly European. In Old Montréal and the Old Port, cobblestone streets and artisan vendors make it feel like you’re stepping into the past. Both locations are steeped in history and culinary excellence.

    Atlantic Canada

    In New Brunswick, Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park, nestled along the Bay of Fundy, offers guided tours for travellers. Visitors are encouraged to check the tidal wave schedule to see the rock formations known as sea stacks, which are caused by tidal erosion.

    Nova Scotia’s capital, Halifax, is a vibrant coastal city known for its lively nightlife and flourishing culinary scene. Across the harbour in Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, visitors can go bird watching or take part in a cycling adventure on the easy-to-moderate Salt Marsh Trail. A visit to Peggy’s Cove is a must.

    The province is also home to tourism initiatives that reflect the region’s diverse cultural heritage. Among these is Elevate and Explore Black Nova Scotia, which is designed to enrich the travel experience for Black people visiting or living in the province.

    Over on Prince Edward Island, visitors can explore Lucy Maud Montgomery’s birthplace, the author of beloved childhood classic Anne of Green Gables, in Cavendish. Nearby at the museum, visitors can reimagine Anne Shirley’s iconic adventures in a return to the magic of storytelling and place, before making their way to Greenwich Beach via the boardwalk through P.E.I.’s largest sand dunes.

    In Newfoundland and Labrador, Gros Morne National Park offers visitors views of “soaring fjords and moody mountains” alongside the chance to spot puffins in their natural habitat. Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park also provides opportunities for fishing.

    If closer to historical Gander, take a ferry excursion to Fogo Island, which offers bird watching and boat trips.

    The Northern Territories

    In the Yukon, travellers can engage with Indigenous tourism, arts and culture through experiences offered by the Yukon First Nation and Tourism Industry Association.

    Visitors to the Yukon can cool their feet in the cold mountain streams while trying their hand at gold panning in historic Dawson City. Once a hub of the 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush, it still features several preserved frontier-style buildings.

    In the Northwest Territories, travellers can witness the aurora borealis and take guided photography tours to see wildlife up close. Further east, Nunavut offers a range of adventure tourism opportunities, including sea kayaking, whitewater kayaking and canoeing.

    Together, these northern destinations offer travellers a chance to immerse themselves in the natural beauty, history and living cultures of Canada’s North while embracing the slower pace and meaningful experiences at the heart of soft adventure travel.

    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. Travel with intention: Here’s a guide to ‘soft adventure’ experiences across Canada this summer – https://theconversation.com/travel-with-intention-heres-a-guide-to-soft-adventure-experiences-across-canada-this-summer-257190

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump’s military parade: A ‘big big celebration’ or an authoritarian ritual?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Irene Gammel, Professor & Director, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre and Gallery, Toronto Metropolitan University

    U.S. Army soldiers march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. during U.S. President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Parade in January 2017. (Kalie Jones)

    Born on June 14, 1946, United States President Donald Trump turns 79 in 2025 — the same day that the U.S. Army, founded in 1775, marks its 250th anniversary. To mark the anniversary, Trump proclaimed that “we’re gonna have a big, big celebration.”

    Plans drawn up by the army call for 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven military bands and thousands of civilians. The parade will also reportedly include 34 horses, two mules and a dog.

    Dismissed by many as a costly vanity project by some, the parade invites a deeper question: what kind of political work does a birthday celebration like this actually do?

    Far from trivial or benign, Trump’s spectacle draws on a long history of authoritarian leaders who use ritualized celebrations to bind personal power to national identity. The most notorious example, Adolf Hitler, turned his birthdays into massive national events with military parades, mass rallies and highly estheticized scenes of domestic cheer.

    These displays blurred dominance and intimacy, fatherliness and force — an approach revived today in the digital era, where curated imagery and social media entangle leadership with affective spectacle.

    Fascist birthday culture

    I was born and raised in Germany. I’m acutely aware that Hitler’s birthday still casts a shadow and that such dates continue to carry political weight, with the rituals involved doing long-term political work.

    During the Third Reich, the Führer’s birthday — modeLled on the Kaiser’s — became a mass propaganda event, blending public spectacle with personal attachment.

    As German philosopher Theodor Adorno noted, fascist rituals portrayed the authoritarian leader as both a “superman” and an ordinary, flawed “average person.” This duality encouraged intimate identification and awe, much like the dynamic between a patriarchal father and child.

    Trump echoes this dynamic through a mix of paternal posturing, hypermasculine bluster and expansive nationalism. Whereas Hitler relied on the latest photograph and film technology, today’s spectacles are amplified by digital media’s participatory culture.

    German leader Adolf Hitler reviewing a military parade held in celebration of his 47th birthday on April 20, 1936.
    (German Federal Archives), CC BY

    Neo-Nazi groups across North America and Europe still mark Hitler’s birthday with cakes, cookies, memes and tweets; often disarmingly “cute” images overlaid with disturbing swastikas and jokes. In his 2017 paper, sociologist Christian Fuchs shows that the most retweeted neo-Nazi post in his study was “Wake and bake #HitlersBirthday #420,” blending cannabis culture with fascist nostalgia to deflect horror through humour.

    The blurred boundaries between the national and the personal feed meme culture, where, as communications scholar Limor Shifman writes, “small units of culture” spread through imitation, often cloaked in play.

    Amid mounting pressure on various institutions in the U.S. — universities, courts and public discourse — the military/birthday parade is an extravaganza that fuses esthetics and propaganda to cement authority, suppress dissent and consolidate power.

    Power aesthetics of military pageantry

    By combining a military display with a personal celebration, Trump’s birthday parade stages a grand spectacle of power. Key here is the presence of thousands of soldiers in military uniform, which creates a “persona and a powerful collective presence,” as fashion scholar Jennifer Craik writes.

    Uniforms signal discipline and belonging, but also intimidate and threaten. Fashion writer Colin McDowell calls the uniform a “spectacle” steeped in associations with power and eroticism, a garment long linked to theatricality and role-playing.

    Nowhere was this more explicit than under European fascism and colonialism. Uniforms were engineered to seduce, often fetishized: streamlined silhouettes, tight jackets and black leather boots. As Craik notes, such imagery was not incidental; it was the visual grammar of domination. As sociologist Klaus Theweleit observes, fascist power had to be seen, desired and even fantasized.

    Trump’s parade is a show of force. Its sheer scale — bands, vehicles, helicopters — performs strength and legitimacy, marking who belongs and who does not. But the birthday celebration also turns attention back to the man himself, reminding us that authoritarianism is not only about intimidation but also about the persona of the autocrat.

    Parades staged for Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday.

    Authoritarian scripts, then and now

    Autocratic regimes work hard to fashion the leader into a man of the people: familiar, relatable and someone to be admired. Think of Hitler in his motorcade, hands outstretched toward the crowd.

    My father, just 10 years old, was part of that spectacle at one of these parades on a mandatory school trip, lined up along the street. Yet as the motorcade neared, he was shoved aside in the crush. What stayed with him wasn’t Hitler — he never saw him — but the fanatical woman who pushed him to get closer.

    The point was the crowd itself, kept at a fever pitch with ever-new spectacles like Hitler’s 50th birthday on April 20, 1939, declared a national holiday. German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels staged it as what historian Ian Kershaw called “an astonishing extravaganza of the Führer cult;” a visual and military spectacle widely broadcast.

    One gift, a model of the FW 200 Condor, later became Hitler’s official plane. Trump’s new luxury Air Force One, “a gift” from Qatar, is also part of his visual narrative. The symbolism is eerie: once again, the personal cloaks itself in national power.

    The cult of MAGA

    In the end, Trump’s militarized birthday parade solicits not just admiration but political allegiance. Like past authoritarian rituals, it manipulates affect through military pageantry to elevate the leader as both a symbol and supreme commander.

    The spectacle demands emotional submission with the goal being identification with the leader. It exchanges democratic freedom for a vision of unity under a single figure. However wrapped in humour or patriotic kitsch, Trump’s parade rehearses an authoritarian script with disturbingly familiar cues.

    What appears as celebration is, in fact, a rehearsal. It signals a dangerous shift toward personal glorification and a political culture where pageantry replaces participation and adoration displaces dissent.

    As history warns, that is when democracy begins to give way.

    Irene Gammel receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. Trump’s military parade: A ‘big big celebration’ or an authoritarian ritual? – https://theconversation.com/trumps-military-parade-a-big-big-celebration-or-an-authoritarian-ritual-257536

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Before the bump: Can pre-pregnancy planning affect child development?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sabrina Faleschini, Assistant Professor, Université Laval

    Enhancing physical and psychological health months or even weeks before conception may have powerful positive effects on offspring. (Shutterstock)

    Anticipating the conception of a child can be accompanied by a lot of uncertainty about how to plan for pregnancy and parenthood. But relatively few people are aware that the things they do months or years before conceiving can influence the development of their future children.

    The preconception period is often overlooked by prospective parents, but is crucial as it sets the foundation for healthy pregnancies and, ultimately, thriving children. Optimizing the physical and mental health of both parents during this time can help create an environment that gives their offspring the best possible start in life.

    While it’s well known that exposure to adverse physical or psychological conditions during pregnancy can powerfully affect child development, emerging evidence suggests that factors occurring before conception can also have lasting effects on offspring.

    As professors of child development and perinatal psychiatry, our work is aimed at identifying which preconception factors have the potential to influence offspring outcomes, and how to intervene to reduce their effects to give all children the best chance to succeed and thrive.

    Enhancing the physical and mental health of both parents during this time can help create an optimal environment.
    (Shutterstock)

    Impact of the pregnancy planning period

    The period of pregnancy planning represents a critical opportunity for future parents to optimize the lives of their children. While some physical and mental health factors shift over time, others are relatively stable. Regardless, enhancing physical and psychological health months or even weeks before conception may have powerful positive effects on offspring.

    For example, public health authorities recommend that women of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, as this can prevent neural tube defects and enhance the long-term verbal and social skills of offspring.

    Maintaining a healthy diet (for example, eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and protein) and a healthy weight before pregnancy is also associated with a lower risk of behavioural problems, improved motor and communication skills and better academic achievement.

    Ultimately, optimizing one’s physical health has many benefits for parents and their children and paves the way for improving their mental health as well.

    Mental health and pregnancy planning

    Even though planning a pregnancy may be stressful for some, optimizing one’s mental health has benefits not only for parents, but also for their future children.

    For example, children whose mothers experience a worsening of depression from preconception to postpartum were less able to control their behaviour and attention. Furthermore, high levels of stress in mothers pre-conceptually are linked to more negative emotionality and impulsivity in children.

    As a result, increasing the focus of public health efforts on the mental health of parents could be crucial to enhancing child development as well.

    Partners are important too

    Even though the health of mothers and birthing parents can have an important impact on the development of future offspring, healthy partners can also help promote positive long-term outcomes in children.

    Healthy partners can also help promote positive long-term outcomes in children.
    (Shutterstock)

    For example, paternal mental health problems present prior to pregnancy increase the risk of pre-term delivery, which is linked to a higher likelihood of behavioural problems and academic difficulties in children later in life.

    Partners can also provide support and motivation to improve and/or maintain the healthy habits of mothers and birthing parents, which can help optimize offspring development.

    Giving future children the best start in life

    A number of practical steps can be taken by parents when planning a pregnancy to help enhance child development.

    Eating a healthy diet and engaging in regular exercise can improve your physical health.

    Optimizing mental health through exercise, nurturing relationships, building social networks, managing stress and seeking counselling and other help when needed can promote well-being during this important time.

    We’re still learning about the preconception period

    Research aimed at understanding the long-term effects of preconception conditions on later child development is still relatively new. Our work is attempting to expand this knowledge base by developing a cohort study that begins in the preconception phase and follows parents throughout pregnancy and into the postpartum period.

    So far, more than 500 women across Canada have joined the study, and we are continuing to enrol new participants until the end of August 2025. Please note that the web page is in French, but English speakers are welcome to join the study. However, since all research materials are in French, participants must be able to understand written French to take part in the study.

    Our work will examine how parents’ mental health evolves across the perinatal period. This study is intended to help us understand the transition to parenthood and how factors present before conception can influence children’s development.

    The pregnancy planning period is a time when parents can make positive changes in their lives that can benefit their health and the development of their future children. Investing in the physical and mental health of both parents is critical for preparing them to welcome a healthy child and can benefit both their family and society.

    Sabrina Faleschini receives funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

    Ryan Van Lieshout 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. Before the bump: Can pre-pregnancy planning affect child development? – https://theconversation.com/before-the-bump-can-pre-pregnancy-planning-affect-child-development-250335

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The UK government is considering mandatory chemical castration for sex offenders – it’s an ethical and legal minefield

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lisa Forsberg, Senior Research Fellow, Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford

    Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood is looking into a potential “national rollout” of chemical castration for sex offenders. This is a process of lowering testosterone levels with the intention of reducing libido.

    The proposal is one recommendation outlined in the recent independent sentencing review that was commissioned to investigate prison overcrowding and consider alternatives to imprisonment. The review found that 21% of adults serving immediate custodial sentences had been convicted of sexual offences – making them a significant proportion of the prison population. The idea appears to be that chemical castration would make offenders’ release from prison less dangerous for the public.

    A pilot scheme of voluntary chemical castration is already running and is about to be extended to 20 British prisons. But while the review emphasised that consent is a key tenet of medical law, Mahmood is reportedly investigating whether chemical castration could be made mandatory. This raises important ethical and legal questions.

    Is chemical castration ethical?

    Chemical castration is a dual-purpose intervention. It can be used both to benefit those who receive testosterone-reducing substances – sex offenders may themselves find their sexual desires to be a problem and so wish to have their intensity reduced by medical means – and to protect the public.

    One key question, therefore, is what we are aiming to achieve in a programme of chemical castration in the prison population. Chemical castration may reduce the risk of reoffending but fail to improve a sex offender’s life. It may do the opposite – improving their wellbeing without protecting the public from their actions. Which goal are we aiming for?

    This matters because the ethical permissibility of chemical castration is directly related to its purpose. Standard medical interventions are typically ethically permissible when and because they are expected to benefit recipients who validly consent.

    If the goal is not to benefit the recipient but to protect the public, this question is more complicated. We don’t normally get to consent to being incarcerated or quarantined, for example. These are situations imposed on us by the state. So do we get to bypass consent in the case of chemical castration for people who are incarcerated?

    And while some offenders may prefer to have their problematic sexual desires suppressed, chemical castration can have significant side-effects, including weight gain and mood changes.

    If chemical castration does reduce problematic desires, sex offenders may benefit from it, side-effects notwithstanding. But it is unclear exactly how this potential “benefit” should be understood. Is it beneficial for sex offenders to have their sexual desires attenuated? Does avoiding future punishment itself count as a benefit? Can it also be beneficial to offenders who do not consent to the intervention? And is it ever ethically permissible to provide chemical castration without benefit to the recipient? We need a more clearly articulated understanding of benefit, and its interaction with consent, to determine when chemical castration is ethically permissible.

    Is it legal?

    Purpose also matters for legal justification. Interventions that use medical means – as chemical castration does – are usually lawful, again, because they are expected to benefit recipients. So, again, the lack of clarity over who “benefits” and how benefit should be understood is a problem.

    My analysis of the legal framework in England and Wales shows that providing chemical castration to sex offenders may be consistent with obligations imposed on UK public authorities under the European Convention on Human Rights (via the Human Rights Act 1998). This may be the case even without recipients’ consent, especially when the purpose is public protection. But here too, it is necessary to clarify how the benefit or harm interacts with consent.

    A dilemma for doctors

    A rollout of chemical castration to sex offenders – whether voluntary or mandatory – also raises ethical and legal dilemmas for the people administering the programme.

    Forensic psychiatrist Professor Don Grubin has said that the administration of chemical castration is “about doctors treating patients, rather than doctors doing a job for criminal justice agencies, but a side effect is that reoffending is likely to be reduced”. However, it’s not clear that chemical castration should always be understood primarily as “doctors treating patients” in the way we normally expect for therapeutic interventions. The idea that doctors, in administering chemical castration, are always acting primarily to benefit the recipient, and that public protection in the form of reduced recidivism risk is a mere side-effect obscures the ethical and legal issues at play. A better approach is to clarify the different values and duties at stake and how doctors and others involved in provision should weigh them against one another.

    Chemical castration will often generate conflicting duties, which we must find ways to navigate. Can it be compatible with professional obligations to provide interventions that aren’t in recipients’ clinical interests if it benefits others? Do professional obligations vary according to an intervention’s purpose? Chemical castration exposes tensions in the ethical and legal obligations that individual and institutional providers owe to recipients and to society.

    I’m exploring these questions in research investigating how we ought to understand, evaluate, and regulate dual-purpose interventions. These are questions the government, and those involved in chemically castrating sex offenders must also confront.

    Lisa Forsberg has received funding from the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme (award pf170028), the Journal of Moral Education Trust through the British Academy /Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme (award SRG2324241695), the European Research Council (grant number 819757), and the Uehiro Foundation for Ethics and Education.

    – ref. The UK government is considering mandatory chemical castration for sex offenders – it’s an ethical and legal minefield – https://theconversation.com/the-uk-government-is-considering-mandatory-chemical-castration-for-sex-offenders-its-an-ethical-and-legal-minefield-257795

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Climate change: no reprieve from heat this decade as globally agreed 1.5°C limit looms

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, UK edition

    Temperature limits the world agreed to avoid are looming into view.

    The global temperature has been 1.5°C hotter than the pre-industrial average for almost two years now. The reason, overwhelmingly, is that greenhouse gas emissions are at record highs from the burning of fossil fuels and forests.

    In a new analysis, the World Meteorological Organization has predicted that global average warming will remain above 1.5°C for the rest of this decade. By some measure, this would place the world nearly halfway to the lower limit of the Paris agreement, which urged countries to avoid warming of 1.5°C as a 20-year average.

    Exceeding a globally agreed temperature limit is scary. Perhaps scarier is the speed at which we appear to be breaking our promises.

    This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

    Half a year of record heat

    After 2024 was confirmed as the hottest in 175 years of temperature-keeping, some climate scientists expected 2025 to be cooler. El Niño, the warm phase in a natural cycle of Earth’s climate, was subsiding and the cooler La Niña was set to kick in.

    This climate fluctuation, centred on the Pacific Ocean, slowly sloshes water and heat between ocean basins every few years and disrupts weather patterns worldwide.

    “Typically, La Niña will lower the global temperature by a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius,” explains Richard P Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading. “However, this time around, it’s apparently not enough to stop the world warming – even temporarily.”



    Read more:
    Record January heat suggests La Niña may be losing its ability to keep global warming in check

    January 2025 was the hottest on record – a whole 1.7°C hotter than an average January before the mass burning of coal, oil and gas. Allan argues that “human-driven ocean warming is increasingly overwhelming these natural climate patterns”.

    The ocean has absorbed most of the excess heat generated by our emissions, but this blue buffer between us and a hotter atmosphere shows signs of fraying. A research station that has been taking the temperature of the western English Channel for more than 120 years now reports “almost continuous marine heatwave” conditions according to oceanographer Tim Smyth of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.



    Read more:
    What a 120-year-old research station is telling us about the warming of the sea around the UK

    A record-hot Atlantic Ocean is bad news for people living in the Caribbean and the south-east of North America. In its latest forecast for the 2025 hurricane season, which begins on June 1, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted an “above average” number of cyclonic storms.

    Much of this elevated risk is due to warmer seawater at the ocean surface fuelling stronger storms. But there’s only so much that meteorologists can do to stay ahead of the warming climate, as the rapid rate of global heating stretches long-range forecasting to its breaking point.



    Read more:
    The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get

    “The rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce,” say atmospheric scientist Simon H Lee (University of St Andrews), climate scientist Hayley J Fowler and meteorologist Paul Davies (both of Newcastle University).

    “In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods or droughts,” they say. Scientists typically use weather observations gathered over 30-year periods to characterise the climate.

    “But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years – not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.”

    How hot will it get?

    Compared with its average temperature in the latter half of the 19th century, which is what scientists typically refer to as the climate’s pre-industrial baseline, Earth is on track to be 2.7°C hotter by 2100, according to an annual report by leading experts of Earth system science, published in October 2024.

    This conclusion is based on governments meeting their emissions goals (a big if) and it may already be out of date, given the unexpectedly hot first half of 2025.

    Fossil fuel emissions have yet to reach a plateau.
    Sunshine Seeds/Shutterstock

    On its own, this charitable estimate projects nearly double the level of warming attained so far. It’s unclear if civilisation could survive climate conditions like these, which are radically more hostile than anything our ancestors have experienced.

    What’s behind the accelerating rate of global warming? Here are two of the report authors, ecologists Thomas Newsome of the University of Sydney and William Ripple of Oregon State University.

    “Each year, we track 35 of the Earth’s vital signs, from sea ice extent to forests. [In 2024], 25 are now at record levels, all trending in the wrong directions,” they say.



    Read more:
    Unprecedented peril: disaster lies ahead as we track towards 2.7°C of warming this century

    While renewable energy sources like wind and solar have grown rapidly, fossil fuel use remains 14 times greater. What’s more, aerosols that are effective at reflecting the Sun’s energy back into space and cooling the Earth (soot is one example) are thought to be falling in the atmosphere.

    “Other environmental issues are now feeding into climate change,” Newsome and Ripple continue. Deforestation is shrinking the amount of carbon stored on land while rising temperatures and extreme weather are drying out and burning other carbon-rich habitats, like marshes and peatlands.

    Sea ice is melting too, ensuring the ocean absorbs yet more of the heat being trapped by an increasingly thick blanket of greenhouse gas.

    Bleak. But how much the planet warms this century is a moving target: everything we do today, and in coming years, will lower it. On this front, Sven Teske has, if not good news, then less bad news to share.



    Read more:
    Earth is heading for 2.7°C warming this century. We may avoid the worst climate scenarios – but the outlook is still dire

    “Humanity has shifted track enough to avert the worst climate future,” he says.

    “Renewables, energy efficiency and other measures have shifted the dial. The worst case scenario of expanded coal use, soaring emissions and a much hotter world is vanishingly unlikely.”

    – ref. Climate change: no reprieve from heat this decade as globally agreed 1.5°C limit looms – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-no-reprieve-from-heat-this-decade-as-globally-agreed-1-5-c-limit-looms-257263

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: A gonorrhoea vaccine will soon be available in the UK – here’s how it works to protect against the STI

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Lecturer, Biomedical Sciences, University of Exeter

    Gonorrhoea, which is caused by the bacterium _Neisseria gonorrhoeae_, is the second most common STI in the UK. Tatiana Shepeleva/ Shutterstock

    A vaccine targeting gonorrhoea will soon be rolled out on the NHS. This will make England and Wales the first two countries in the world to offer such a programme.

    This move comes amid a sharp rise in gonorrhoea cases in England and increasing concern about antibiotic resistance. In 2023 alone, there were over 85,000 gonorrhoea diagnoses in England. Compared to 2012, where 25,525 cases were reported, this represents a 234% increase over the 11-year period.

    Gonorrhoea is the second most common sexually transmitted infection in the UK. It’s caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae and is spread via unprotected sex with an infected person.

    Around 10% of men and nearly half of women who test positive for gonorrhoea exhibit no symptoms. This is why this STI is so transmissible, as people without symptoms may not seek testing or treatment – meaning they may unknowingly transmit the infection to their sexual partners.

    For those that do experience symptoms, the most common signs of a gonorrhoea infection include unusual vaginal or penile discharge (which is usually yellow or green in colour), pain when urinating as well as pain and discomfort in the lower abdomen. In severe cases, the infection can spread throughout the body. In rare cases it can also lead to sepsis.



    Read more:
    Gonorrhoea and syphilis diagnoses are at their highest in decades – here’s what you need to know about these STIs

    Untreated gonorrhoea infections can lead to many complications, including infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease (an infection in the reproductive organs) in women and epididymitis (inflammation of the testicles) in men.

    The only way to treat gonorrhoea is using antibiotics. But an increase in antibiotic resistance is making treatment difficult.

    Gonorrhoea prevention

    Currently, the only way to prevent a gonorrhoea infection is by practising safe sex, such as using condoms during intercourse and limiting the number of sexual partners.

    This new vaccine programme will offer an added layer of protection, especially for groups at high risk of acquiring the infection.

    The vaccine that will be offered on the NHS is actually an existing childhood vaccine called 4CMenB (also sold under the brand name Bexsero). This vaccine is used to protect against meningococcal group B disease, which can cause life-threatening bacterial meningitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal cord) and sepsis.

    The bacterium that causes gonorrhoea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is genetically closely related to Neisseria meningitidis – the bacterium that causes meningococcal disease. Their genome is between 80-90% similar.

    The 4CMenB vaccine contains four antigens that are deployed against Neisseria meningitidis bacteria. An antigen is usually a small molecule that the body recognises as a foreign invader. This triggers the body to mount an immune response against the antigen by producing antibodies which neutralise the bacteria and eliminate the infection.

    The vaccine protects against gonorrhoea between 32-42% of the time.
    Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

    Two of the antigens found in the 4CMenB vaccine are found on the surface of both N gonorrhoeae and N meningitidis bacteria.

    This is why using the 4CMenB vaccine for protection against gonorrhoea has progressed from theory to reality, with several studies showing it has a cross-protective effect.

    Research has shown that the 4CMenB vaccine provides some protection against an infection from the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria. On average, the vaccine is effective in preventing gonorrhoea between 32% and 42% of the time.

    So while vaccination may reduce the chance of becoming infected with gonorrhoea, it’s not an absolute protection. Nevertheless, this new vaccine programme means those who are vaccinated will have a lower risk of contracting gonorrhoea and experiencing any complications that may arise from an infection. Most importantly, it also means they are less likely to transmit the infection to others.

    Vaccine programme

    The main benefit of a vaccination programme will be a significant reduction in the number of gonorrhoea cases overall. This is especially important given the rise of antibiotic resistance is making it increasingly difficult to treat gonorrhoea infections.

    It’s also worth noting that a previous gonorrhoea infection offers no protection against future infection and reinfection. This is why the vaccine is beneficial, even if it is only moderately effective.

    Eligible recipients, which includes gay and bisexual men who have a recent history of multiple sexual partners or a sexually transmitted infection, will be offered the vaccine through local NHS services from early August 2025.

    Eligible patients will be identified via their local sexual health service, as well as through a general information campaign via the NHS. Patients will also be offered the mpox, hepitatis A and B and human papillomavirus vaccinations at the same time.

    Vaccinating those at risk of contracting gonorrhoea will be more cost-effective and beneficial in the long run compared to vaccinating only those who have been diagnosed with gonorrhoea. Analysis led by Imperial College London has suggested the 4CMenB vaccine could prevent up to 100,000 cases of gonorrhoea and save the NHS over £7.9 million over the next decade if a high uptake is achieved.

    Bharat Pankhania is affiliated with the Liberal Democrat Party. He is an elected councillor in the city of Bath and will be the Mayor of Bath on June 7 2025.

    – ref. A gonorrhoea vaccine will soon be available in the UK – here’s how it works to protect against the STI – https://theconversation.com/a-gonorrhoea-vaccine-will-soon-be-available-in-the-uk-heres-how-it-works-to-protect-against-the-sti-257283

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Five things new parents should know about their baby’s sleep

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen L. Ball, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Durham Inancy & Sleep Centre (DISC), Durham University

    Nilanka Sampath/Shutterstock

    Why won’t my baby sleep at night? It’s one of the most common – and exhausting – questions new parents ask. You’ve fed them, changed them, rocked them, cuddled them but still, they wake again. And again. And again.

    Baby humans are born utterly helpless – unable to walk, grip, or regulate their own systems. From the very beginning, they are biologically wired to stay close to a caregiver, relying on your body for warmth, safety, food and reassurance. Their sleep, feeding and waking patterns aren’t disordered – they’re designed for survival.

    My latest book tells you everything you need to know about your baby’s sleep during their first year, but here’s a brief explainer on what’s really going on with baby sleep, why “sleeping through the night” is often a myth, and how working with your baby’s natural biology – not against it – can help you both get more rest and feel less stressed.

    Let’s take a look at what science (and evolution) tells us about newborn sleep.

    1. Comfort and calm

    Unlike other baby mammals who are born able to see, hear, and call, baby humans have no muscle tone and no control over their limbs. They cannot cling to or follow you, and are completely reliant on their parents to keep them safe, warm, and fed. In fact, most babies crave being in physical contact with your body for comfort, warmth and safety. Letting them snuggle into you is a good way to calm them, and on your chest is where many newborns most want to sleep from the immediate postnatal period.

    Spending time with your baby snuggled on your chest is common in the first few weeks or months of new parenthood, and there are some important things to be aware of. Make sure you are sitting upright or leaning back in a reclined position, so your baby’s head is higher than their bottom. Do not lie flat on your back with your baby horizontal. This position can make babies work harder to breathe. Make sure their head is turned to one side and their chin is tilted upwards. This is important to keep their windpipe open – it can kink if their chin is down on their chest and the air cannot get through to their lungs.

    Be sure to hold them in place on your body – don’t assume they won’t slip off – gravity affects babies too. Lastly, but most importantly, stay awake. Do not let yourself fall asleep in this position. Young babies are very fragile and when they are lying on you, you must monitor their safety. If you think you might fall asleep, move them to somewhere safe – a clear flat safe surface, on their back, or the arms of someone who can stay awake.

    2. Safe bed-sharing

    If your baby is breastfed they will feed frequently day and night, often every two hours or so. This can be difficult to cope with if you have to get in and out of bed for every feed. Many breastfeeding mothers find that safe way to share your bed for some or all of the night helps reduce the disruption of night feeds as you can feed lying down and both you and your baby can return to sleep quickly.

    If you decide to bed-share learn how to make your bed as safe as possible for your baby. The Lullaby Trust, Unicef Baby Friendly Initiative and La Leche League all have good information on bed-sharing safety. If you are not able to do this safely (for instance if your baby was born prematurely, or you are a smoker) then a bedside bassinet is a good option.

    3. Circadian rhythm

    Newborn babies have no day-night rhythm. In the uterus they are under the influence of their mother’s circadian cycle.



    Read more:
    Babies don’t need sleep coaches – but sometimes their parents do

    After birth, their own day-night rhythm takes several months to appear, and to begin with they sleep equally across day and night. Because it responds to external triggers such as daylight, noise and activity, you can support the development of your baby’s circadian rhythm by starting daytime activities around them at a regular time (opening curtains, making noise etc) every morning. Taking babies outside in the daylight in the first half of the day also helps their body-clock to become attuned to daylight and nighttime.

    4. Sleeping for longer

    Over time all babies begin to spend a bit more time sleeping at night. This is called “consolidation of sleep into night-time”, and babies will begin sleeping for longer periods between feeds as they get older. But babies often still wake in the night well into the second half of their first year – sometimes this is because they are still night-feeding, but in other cases they just need to know you are nearby. A third of babies who were studied in a New Zealand research study had never slept through the night by the time they were 12 months old.

    5. Sleep consolidation

    As babies consolidate more of their sleep into the nighttime they will begin to sleep less during the day. You can support this process by avoiding daytime naps in silent darkened rooms, keeping sleeping babies in the daylight and in midst of household noise and activity for daytime naps, or napping on the go. This prevents babies from taking prolonged naps and keeps their sleep pressure rising until the nighttime, which also helps with sleep consolidation.



    Read more:
    What’s really going on when a child is ‘overtired’ – and how to help them go to sleep

    When you understand and work with your baby’s sleep biology it is unnecessary to try to train your baby how to sleep at night. Just be aware that throughout the first year and beyond, baby humans remain helpless baby mammals who need you for physical contact, comfort and safety. Their need to be close to you is vital for their survival.

    Helen L. Ball has received funding from NIHR, ESRC, Lullaby Trust, Scottish Government, Northern Accelerator, Durham County Council, Northumberland County Council, and Durham University. She is currently affiliated with Lullaby Trust and Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative in voluntary roles.

    – ref. Five things new parents should know about their baby’s sleep – https://theconversation.com/five-things-new-parents-should-know-about-their-babys-sleep-256282

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Waiting for Godot has been translated into Afrikaans: what took so long

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rick de Villiers, Associate professor, University of the Free State

    At last, the most infamous latecomer in all of literature has arrived – not in the flesh, but in South Africa’s Afrikaans language. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s best-known drama, Waiting for Godot, now also lives as Ons Wag vir Godot.

    Published and staged in 2024, the translation was inspired by the official centenary of Afrikaans in 2025.

    As a Beckett scholar, I think it’s worth asking why Afrikaans is so late on the scene – and why it matters.

    Godot in many tongues

    First written in French, En attendant Godot was published in 1952 and debuted on stage the next year.

    The action involves two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who have a series of absurd conversations and encounters as they wait for a man called Godot who never arrives. Beckett would self-translate the drama into English in 1954, calling it “a tragicomedy in two acts”.

    Since then, translations of the play have exploded. By 1969 – the year of Beckett’s Nobel Prize for Literature – Waiting for Godot could already be read in dozens of languages, including Albanian, Marathi, and even Icelandic.

    Samuel Beckett and South Africa

    Beckett’s connections with South Africa are surprisingly varied. As a young man, he unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship at the University of Cape Town. His 1951 novel, Molloy, was translated from French into English with the help of a South African student, Patrick Bowles. And in 1968, Beckett made a donation to the then-banned resistance party, the African National Congress, in the form of a manuscript for auction.

    This gesture was unprecedented for the Irish writer, who was wary of political causes. Yet not only did Beckett feel strongly enough about apartheid’s injustices to make this donation, he also refused to let anyone perform his plays before South Africa’s racially segregated audiences.



    Read more:
    The case of the acclaimed South African novel that ‘borrows’ from Samuel Beckett

    Already in 1963 Beckett had signed the petition Playwrights Against Apartheid. He would continue to refuse performance rights in South Africa until 1980, when the Baxter Theatre was allowed to stage Waiting for Godot with a racially integrated cast.

    Nevertheless, unauthorised Godots materialised before this. Athol Fugard, the South African playwright whose own dramas were influenced by Beckett, directed one of the earliest South African productions in 1962. Featuring an all-black cast, it testified to the play’s political charge, which Fugard emphasised:

    Vladimir and Estragon … were at Sharpeville or the first in at Auschwitz.

    It’s reasonable to think that Beckett would have supported this protest performance. But he would probably have denounced the first and unofficial Afrikaans version, Afspraak met Godot, translated by Suseth Brits and performed in 1970 at the Potchefstroom University College (now North-West University) behind closed doors.

    For different reasons, Beckett would also have frowned on the substantial “borrowings” in Afrikaans novelist Willem Anker’s 2014 novel, Buys.

    Domesticating a European classic

    Fully sanctioned by Beckett’s estate and beautifully translated (from the French and English) by now-retired professor of French at the University of the Free State Naòmi Morgan, Ons Wag vir Godot arrives at a different moment altogether.

    The translation retains the gallows humour of the original while adding local flavour. For instance, where Vladimir originally names the Eiffel Tower as a picturesque site to commit suicide, his Afrikaans counterpart nominates Van Stadensbrug, a bridge over a ravine in the Eastern Cape. The slave-like Lucky once entertained his master with European dances: “the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango”. These now become a South African mix: “volkspele, die riel, die pantsula, selfs die horrelpyp” (folk games, riel dance, pantsula dance, a hiding).

    In translation-speak, Ons Wag vir Godot is therefore fully “domesticated”: the play’s universality comes through even though – and perhaps even more so because – it’s anchored in a particular place and time.

    This struck me when I attended the play’s limited-run production, expertly directed by Dion van Niekerk, at the 2024 Vrystaat Kunstefees (Free State arts festival). Its set managed to thread together subtle South African roadside details: a toppled rubbish bin, pylons on the horizon, a (broken) picnic bench.

    In the text itself, we encounter familiar place names, sayings and cultural clues. Consider how Beckett’s abstract phrase “the essential doesn’t change” is grounded in African mythology: “Jakkals verander van hare, maar nie van streke nie” (The leopard doesn’t change its spots). Then there’s the charming touch of the dog in Vladimir’s song snatching “’n stukkie wors” (a piece of sausage particular to South Africa) rather than a measly “bone”.

    Godot and the Afrikaans canon

    Ons Wag vir Godot achieves its most profound tribute to Beckett and Afrikaans through its intertextual richness. Both the French and English originals are highly allusive texts: they invoke other works of literature to increase their range of meaning and subtlety. Morgan is attuned to this subtlety and to the parallels to be found in Afrikaans literature. There are references to works by canonical Afrikaans writers like Eugène Marais, Totius and C.J. Langenhoven, each adding its own resonance.



    Read more:
    Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review

    Yet the dilemma any translator faces is not so much in bringing in the new, but in striking a balance with the old. Consider the judicious swapping of a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley for a line from C. Louis Leipoldt.

    In the English version, Estragon looks up forlornly at the moon and half-quotes the English Romantic poet: “Pale for weariness … Of climbing heaven and staring on the likes of us.” In the Afrikaans, he gives us a fragment from the wistful poem, Die Moormansgat: “ek kyk na die lig van die volle silwermaan” (I behold the light of the full silver moon). At face value, this lacks the detached, woeful quality of Shelley’s line. But read in the context of Leipoldt’s poem, it is every bit as poignant.

    The virtue of waiting

    “Vladimir would agree,” Morgan concludes in the preface to her translation, “that a century is a decent amount of time to hone a language for the translation of one of the best-known dramas in world literature”.



    Read more:
    Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task

    And indeed, the riches of the Afrikaans language are on display in this sensitive, witty and allusive rendering of Beckett’s European classic. But it’s also true that a certain amount of political baggage had to be shaken off before such a feat could be realised – not just in the right words, but in the right spirit. Of course, if Beckett’s play teaches us anything, it’s the virtue of waiting.

    Rick de Villiers 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. Waiting for Godot has been translated into Afrikaans: what took so long – https://theconversation.com/waiting-for-godot-has-been-translated-into-afrikaans-what-took-so-long-257345

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Choosing to be an orphan: for some Kenyan families it’s a strategy for survival

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Andreana Prichard, Associate Professor of Honors and African History, University of Oklahoma

    In the world of international child development and orphan care, it’s not uncommon for children with families to declare themselves orphans. In fact, this practice can be traced back to precolonial times in Kenya.

    Andreana Prichard has done research on the practice in Kenya. We asked her to share her insights into it.

    Why do some people in Kenya assume the identity of ‘orphan’?

    We often think of “orphans” as children who have lost both parents and who lack kin networks. One might ask why someone would “opt in” to orphan status when they do not fall within the classical definition of the term.

    In my paper I look at the issue of orphanhood over the last 160 years. Case studies from Kenya I examine illustrate that the practice I define as “opting in” to orphanhood has precolonial roots. I define “opting in” as choosing to take on the label of being an orphan. This can be done by parents, relatives or even, in some instances, the child. This is because the label “orphan” has come to confer unique opportunities.

    The practice became increasingly popular in the mid-1990s, when parents in eastern and southern Africa who had contracted HIV began to die in large numbers. Activists feared many children would be left without caregivers.

    In response, the number of orphanages proliferated as humanitarian actors, churches and states inundated east Africa with orphan-focused NGOs.

    In 2020, officials in Kenya estimated that there were at least 910 residential institutions for children in the country (of which 581 were registered), housing between 26,198 and 85,733 Kenyan children.

    The predicted “orphan crisis” never materialised, partly because families and communities stepped in to care for newly parentless children. But the idea of an “orphan crisis” remained, and so did the funding and infrastructure.

    This phenomenon occurred across the continent, not just in Kenya. However, its effects were felt particularly acutely in eastern and southern Africa where HIV/Aids prevalence rates were higher and where there was more western tourism.

    Today, many African families see orphan-focused NGOs as a path to access education and improve their lives. My research shows that children themselves sometimes affiliate with an institution that provides shelter, food and schooling. Children facing abuse from caregivers may also prefer the relative anonymity and safety of an institution.

    In some cases, receiving orphan services actually raises the status of the “orphan” child above that of other children. They have access to more material resources than they might have had in their villages or at home. They might have more leisure time and less work. They may have access to better bedding, shoes and clothing. They are also likely able to attend school more consistently and have a real opportunity to attend university.

    Does ‘opting in’ have a long history?

    Yes, it does.

    In the precolonial period, most parentless or vulnerable children were cared for through lasting community support systems. Orphanhood, as it exists today as a child lacking support, protection, or care from kin, was largely avoided.

    However, the late 19th to mid-20th centuries brought new actors to the east African region. The practice of “opting in” became a strategic, temporary option used by families to access services from western humanitarians.

    The earliest example of this shift I found in my research is from the 1890s. Fearing their children would be caught in the Indian Ocean slave trade, African parents sometimes chose to send their children to British missions until the region was safe. They knew the missionaries opposed the slave trade and knew they offered food and medical care.

    African parents thought they were making temporary arrangements to keep their children safe. Missionaries, however, understood parents to have abandoned their children. When parents returned to repay the debt – with agricultural produce or trade goods – and to reclaim their children, missionaries refused them.

    In another example from Kenya in the 1950s, the British colonial government opened “reform schools” for young men. The Wamumu Approved School was renowned for the relative quality of education it provided. But the state admitted only the “most vulnerable” for a free education. Feeling they had no way to access Wamumu, students claimed to be orphans.

    What have been the negative effects of Kenya’s orphan system?

    There are several problems with creating a situation in which people present themselves as vulnerable just to gain safety or improve their social and economic standing.

    First, research has shown that building orphanages in poor communities incentivises parents to abandon their children if they’re not also given the help to remain together.

    Second, research shows that children are often put at risk in these institutions. Institutionalisation exposes children to risks such as sexual abuse, gender-based violence and neglect.

    Third, orphanages have become so lucrative that African orphanage owners will go to great lengths to fit African children into the categories westerners wish to fund. The phenomenon of “paper orphans” is a prime example. “Paper orphans” are children who are recruited from their homes by proprietors (or middlemen/brokers) of orphanages and residential-care facilities. Fraudulent documentation is created for them – often including false death certificates of parents and new identity registration documents – rendering them orphans on paper, and vulnerable in practice.

    What should be done?

    Governments in Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean are trying to phase out orphanages, as are some African countries.

    Based on my research I believe that working with families to support vulnerable children in their homes of origin or with extended families is a better option. This can be done through assistance programmes for vulnerable families as well as child welfare programmes. These allow families to remain intact when experiencing hardship.

    Kenya is taking steps to do this by replacing orphanages and other forms of residential children’s homes with family-based, foster and community-based care and other forms of assistance. Family strengthening approaches include positive parenting instruction, life skills training, and income-generating activities, as well as supportive supervision.

    In addition to this, missionary and voluntourism trips to orphanages and residential care facilities should be banned or limited.

    Andreana Prichard received funding from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant.

    – ref. Choosing to be an orphan: for some Kenyan families it’s a strategy for survival – https://theconversation.com/choosing-to-be-an-orphan-for-some-kenyan-families-its-a-strategy-for-survival-247371

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Mbare Art Space: a colonial beer hall in Zimbabwe has become a vibrant arts centre

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Research Associate, University of Oxford

    In southern Africa townships were built as segregated urban zones for black people. They were created under colonial and white minority rule policies that controlled movement, confined opportunity, and kept people apart.

    I grew up in a different historic black township in Zimbabwe, but Mbare was the first of its kind. It holds a unique place in the nation’s imagination.

    Mbare was originally named Harare. But in 1982 that name was reassigned to the capital city that houses it. In its storied past, it was once the heartbeat of black urban life. At its centre is Rufaro Stadium, where Bob Marley and the Wailers famously performed at Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations.

    The township was a hub of cultural energy, sports, and political activism, and the community beer hall served as a vital gathering point. Today, many of these beer halls stand derelict.

    These once-thriving communal spaces reflect a broader neglect of civic infrastructure in post-independence Zimbabwe. Yet out of these ruins, new life is taking shape.

    One of the most influential figures in Zimbabwe’s artist-run spaces movement, Moffat Takadiwa, has transformed one of these former beer halls into the Mbare Art Space. The dynamic arts hub reclaims the building’s original spirit of gathering, creativity and public engagement.

    Operating under a long lease from the Harare City Council, this nonprofit initiative is part of a wider urban renewal and adaptive reuse project aimed at reimagining the city’s cultural infrastructure.

    My ongoing work in archival research includes mapping and visiting historical and cultural spaces like this. Here Takadiwa saw the potential for not just studios and an exhibition venue, but also for dialogue and community regeneration.

    Transforming spaces

    Beer halls were established by British colonial authorities in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) as part of a strategy of social control over the African urban population. They were designed to regulate leisure, restrict political organising and generate revenue through the sale of alcohol. By centralising drinking in state-run facilities, colonial administrators aimed to monitor and contain African social life while profiting from it.

    Situated in a repurposed colonial-era beer garden, Mbare Art Space turns a former site of segregation into a vibrant centre of artistic and communal revival. It redefines a legacy of constraint and control as one of creative freedom and empowerment. The place is now an artists’ haven with studios, office space, an exhibition hall and a digital hub.

    Takadiwa’s vision is informed by global precedents, notably inspired by US artist Theaster Gates, whose work includes the transformation of a derelict bank on Chicago’s South Side. It became the Stony Island Arts Bank – a hybrid space for art, archives and community engagement.

    Takadiwa opened Mbare Art Space in 2019 with a vision to support emerging artists through mentorship and access to resources. True to his artistic philosophy – resurrecting abandoned, often overlooked materials suffering the effects of urban decay – he revitalised a neglected site. Most of the artists working from this space follow his lead, upcycling and recycling found materials into compelling visual forms that speak to both history and possibility.

    When I arrive, Takadiwa is on his way out, but offers me a quick tour of his studio, where works in progress for his upcoming participation in the São Paulo Biennale are taking shape.

    Known for his lush, densely layered sculptures and tapestry-like works made from found objects – computer keyboards, bottle tops, toothbrushes, and toothpaste tubes – Takadiwa has garnered international acclaim. His works are collected by US rapper Jay-Z and major institutions like the Centre National d’Art Plastique in Paris, the European Parliament’s art collection in Brussels, and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare.

    Collaboration

    What Takadiwa is building is not just an arts centre – it’s a new model space rooted in history and responsive to the present. The site itself becomes an ongoing installation, activated by the artists, curators and community members who inhabit it.

    Tafadzwa Chimbumu, the operations manager, takes over the tour, guiding me through the rest of the precinct. The site retains the bones of its beer hall architecture, but it bursts with new life. Colourful murals adorn the walls. Tents draped over smaller buildings animate the exposed brickwork.

    Plans are underway to establish a library here, a resource where researchers and artists can engage with Zimbabwe’s under-documented art history. Much of this history is scattered across archives and unpublished dissertations, rather than in widely available books. The aim is to bring these materials together and make them more accessible to the public.

    Mbare Art Space is also becoming an exciting hub for collaboration and education. Community workshops, for example, are led by resident artists. Local schools take part in art education initiatives. Through community outreach and educational programming, the centre is extending its impact beyond its immediate geography.

    As it looks to the future, Mbare Art Space is focused on expanding its artist-in-residence programme, inviting both local and international artists to immerse themselves in the context of Mbare and Zimbabwe.

    Ultimately, what the space offers is something intangible – a feeling, a memory, a vision of what is possible when history and imagination meet in a shared place.

    Tinashe Mushakavanhu 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. Mbare Art Space: a colonial beer hall in Zimbabwe has become a vibrant arts centre – https://theconversation.com/mbare-art-space-a-colonial-beer-hall-in-zimbabwe-has-become-a-vibrant-arts-centre-256528

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The American mass exodus to Canada amid Trump 2.0 has yet to materialize

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Lori Wilkinson, Professor of Sociology, University of Manitoba

    In February 2025, the New Republic, reported there were a growing number of Americans who wanted to leave the country following the election of Donald Trump.

    Canadian reports backed up the assertion, particularly the news that three high-profile Yale professors would be joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in the fall of 2025.



    Read more:
    Yale scholars’ move to Canada can prompt us to reflect on the rule of law

    For some Canadian observers, it may feel like a case of déjà vu. After Trump’s first election in 2016, some media predicted a sharp increase in Americans seeking to escape their country’s harsh social and political climate for Canada’s “sunny ways.”

    According to Google Analytics, web searches originating in the United States involving “how to move to Canada” increased by 350 per cent on election night in 2016. A few months earlier, they’d increased by 1,500 per cent over normal search rates for the same phrase in March 2016, when Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president.

    More Canadians head south

    Despite such post-election musings nine years ago, the pending American mass exit didn’t materialize. According to migration data (a download is required) from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the number of Americans applying for permanent residency from January through March 2017 rose only slightly. There were 1,882 applications, just 66 more than from the same period in 2016.

    As for visas and authorizations issued to people from the U.S. during the same time period, they barely increased — from 2,497 in 2016 to just 2,523 in 2017.

    Americans taking up permanent residency in Canada jumped from about 8,400 in 2016 to 10,800 in 2019. However, that increase in the modest number of moves from the U.S. to Canada can hardly be construed as an exodus. Over those same two years, the number of Canadians becoming permanent residents of the U.S. continued to exceed the number of Americans who headed north.

    There has been, however, a decline in the number of Canadians moving to the U.S. In 2016, the year Trump was first elected, just over 19,300 Canadians moved to the U.S. In 2019, the year before Trump lost to Joe Biden, 14,700 Canadians took up residence in the U.S.

    That trend didn’t last as the gap in cross-border permanent residency widened once more during the Biden era. In 2023, while 10,600 Americans moved to Canada, 18,600 Canadians moved to the U.S.

    Looking at the data from 2016 to 2023 suggests politics isn’t the primary reason why Americans head to Canada. It’s more likely driven by economic considerations, better job offers or family ties.

    In terms of the apparent uptick in migrants from the U.S. heading to Canada during Trumps’s second term, it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions. But numbers for the first quarter of 2025, according to the same IRCC datasets, show no signs of any significant uptake, with a drop from 2,485 Americans headed Canada’s way between January to March 2024 to 955 over the same period in 2025.

    Moving to Canada isn’t easy

    Despite the surge in American internet searches on moving to Canada in 2016, when Trump won the Republican nomination and then the presidency, acting on impulse in a moment of political turmoil is complicated.

    Moving to Canada is not as simple as it may seem; it can be long and arduous. There’s a process and a waiting line with requirements that include an offer of employment in Canada, liquid assets and language proficiency in English, or French if Québec is the ultimate destination.

    It’s easier to immigrate to Canada if there’s a close family member already living there, but still not guaranteed. Canada’s tax rate is a migration deterrent for some, even though these higher tax rates come with more services.

    Although Canada’s health-care system is more inclusive and affordable, the wait times for procedures, along with the perception that Canadian services are not as robust as American health services, could also be a deterrent to migration.

    In short, even for Americans, it’s not easy to migrate to Canada.

    There is, however, one group of people living in the U.S. who may consider relocating to Canada: asylum-seekers.

    The second Trump administration has ended Temporary Protection Status for Afghan, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Cuban and Haitian residents.

    This means that people from these strife-torn countries must apply for permanent residency or “self-deport” — otherwise, they will become undocumented.

    Haiti is currently unsafe. Gangs control the country’s cities and neighbourhoods and have staged a successful coup. The country is also still rebuilding after the devastating 2010 earthquake.



    Read more:
    With Haiti in chaos, Canada buries its head in the sand

    Afghanistan remains in the throes of a decades-long war where women have have no rights. Venezuela is in a state of civil unrest; about 19 million citizens do not have enough food or sanitation. Nearly 7.7 million people have fled the country.

    The plight of asylum-seekers

    The crackdown on other undocumented residents and the recent issuing of large “civil penalties” in the form of fines for failing to self-deport may force others to leave the U.S. Where might they go?

    Many will return to their country of residence, but others may be unable to do so and could consider Canada a convenient and safe destination. In 2016, 23,919 people made asylum claims in Canada. That number slowly rose throughout the first Trump administration to 64,020 in 2019, the last full year of the president’s first term.

    Those seeking asylum in Canada declined to 23,680 in 2020 — the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic — but had increased to 171,850 by the end of 2024.

    The geographic distribution of these asylum-seekers was uneven. In 2017, 50 per cent of all asylum-seekers to Canada made their claim in Québec; in 2022, 64 per cent of asylum claims were made there.

    So rather than seeing a large influx of American citizens migrating to Canada during Trump’s second administration, there will likely be a larger number of asylum-seekers, many of whom have legitimate fears of persecution. How Canada chooses to handle these claims remains to be seen — but it’s urgently important for Canadian elected officials to figure it out immediately.

    Jack Jedwab, CEO of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, co-authored this article

    Lori Wilkinson 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 American mass exodus to Canada amid Trump 2.0 has yet to materialize – https://theconversation.com/the-american-mass-exodus-to-canada-amid-trump-2-0-has-yet-to-materialize-256853

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: A 16th-century Chinese writer spoke of workplace burnout, leaving a blueprint for radical acts of rest

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jason Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University

    Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion by Qian Gu, 1560 (Chinese, 1508–ca. 1578), Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Handscroll, ink C. C. Wang Family, Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1980/ MET open collection, CC BY

    We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic — aptly named the “burnout society” by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han.

    Four centuries ago, late Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin — brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom.

    The cover of ‘Burnout Society’ by Byung-Chul Han.
    (Stanford U Press)

    Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic.

    Amid the Wanli Emperor’s neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a “toxic workplace.”

    Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan’s landscapes and literary circles. There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention.

    Yuan’s xiaopin, alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires.

    The Ming Dynasty: A literary rebellion

    The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions.

    While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China’s Jiangnan region — the fertile Yangtze Delta in today’s Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces — flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture.

    Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633).

    The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam — once a path to prestige — had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin’s intimate vignettes.

    Chinese imperial examination candidates gathering around the wall where the results are posted (painting by Qiu Ying, c. 1540)
    (National Palace Museum)

    In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion, editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre’s “flavour beyond flavour, rhythm beyond rhythm” — a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality — rejecting moralizing orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics.

    Against neo-Confucianism’s rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study.

    Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted such playful text flourished among late Ming literati disillusioned with the era’s constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society.

    When doing less becomes radical

    Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati like Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance.

    Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the “crystal clear retreat” that scrubbed the heart of “worldly grime” and cultivated “a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.” For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savouring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow.

    A hanging scroll, ink on paper of a plum blossom branch by Chen Jiu (1558–1639).
    (Yale University Art Gallery/S. Sidney Kahn, 1959/Christie’s, lot 677, 1983/Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 1985), CC BY

    Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a “leisurely and elegant” esthetic rooted in nature’s rhythms.

    Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess “poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.” In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals.

    The art of living in a disconnected age

    In the late Ming’s burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation.

    In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it “lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:” moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes to cosmic echoes.

    Chen Jiru had study rituals — fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone — curated what he termed “incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.”

    This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American academic Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” where everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification.

    The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur, Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645), turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance.

    His xiaopin framed everyday choices — snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff “like a study adrift” — as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility.

    Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection.

    The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan) by Wen Zhengming, 1551. Wen painted 31 views of the site, each accompanied by a poem and a descriptive note.
    (Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1979/MET open source collection), CC BY

    The burnout rebellions: ‘Tang ping,’ ‘quiet quitting’

    Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today’s movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance.

    In April 2021, China’s tang ping (“lying flat”) movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: “Lying flat is justice.” The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance.

    In a backlash against China’s “996” work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms.

    In the West, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The “Great Resignation” saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And “quiet quitting” rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labour. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture.

    As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the “moral and spiritual damage” inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure.

    Just like the late Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today’s workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labour yet treat them as disposable.

    Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays, xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal “healing” as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic.

    Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-)optimization. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change, but to live as if the system’s demands are irrelevant.

    The revolution of pause

    Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments — on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat’s shadow — prove that resistance need not be loud.

    Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s vision of contemporary literature as “space of individual recovery,” the genre shelters us from “hierarchy and efficiency.”

    Here, time is not spent but reclaimed.

    To pause in an age of weaponized ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal’s vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on — these are not acts of shirking reality, but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world.

    Xiaopin’s revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language — one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard.

    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. A 16th-century Chinese writer spoke of workplace burnout, leaving a blueprint for radical acts of rest – https://theconversation.com/a-16th-century-chinese-writer-spoke-of-workplace-burnout-leaving-a-blueprint-for-radical-acts-of-rest-256651

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why have so few atrocities ever been recognised as genocide?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Sweeney, Professor, Lancaster Law School, Lancaster University

    xiquinhosilva via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    An intense argument is raging over whether what has been happening in Gaza since October 2023 is an act of genocide. It is the subject of a case being heard in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which South Africa has accused Israel of committing acts of genocide. The case began in December 2023 but the ICJ has yet to reach a judgment.

    The reason the issue is so controversial is that the word “genocide” holds so much power. To be accused of it is to be accused of what is considered in international law to be the “crime of crimes”. International law holds that not only should states not commit genocide, they must also prevent and punish it in their own criminal law. Some commentators would even argue that the use of armed force to stop genocide is acceptable.

    Yet the legal definition of genocide is much narrower than is generally understood. That’s why so few events have ever been labelled as genocide as a matter of law. Looking at some of them might help to shed some light on the Gaza controversy.



    Read more:
    Gaza: why it’s difficult to reach a legal judgment of genocide against Israel

    Genocide is about attempting to destroy a group of people. The concept was first defined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, in response to his horror at the mass killing of ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Empire amid the first world war as well as – of course – at the atrocities of the Nazis before and during the second world war.

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    It was such a novel concept that it was not prosecuted in the post-war trials of the surviving leading Nazis in Nuremberg. Instead, for their role in the Holocaust, the defendants were charged with “crimes against humanity”. And to this day, in the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, there is a close relationship between the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Rome statute uses the definition of genocide agreed in the 1948 genocide convention, which was negotiated after the considerable efforts of Lemkin to bring attention to his new concept.

    Despite the crime of genocide being established in 1948, the first international conviction for genocide was not until 1998. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu, a local politician, guilty of genocide as part of the extreme violence by ethnic Hutu against (mostly) minority ethnic Tutsis in 1994. Over the course of around 100 days around 800,000 people were killed.

    The mass killing was instigated at the highest levels of the Rwandan government after Tutsis were accused of killing the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, by shooting down a plane that was carrying him and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Both men were Hutus.

    The response to this was clearly a genocide, but surely there must have been other post-war genocides before this, you might think?

    Limitations of genocide

    Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, millions of people died or were killed in famines, executions and prison camps across the Soviet Union. Yet, these deaths do not fall within the 1948 definition of genocide because they were generally not aimed at groups defined by nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Only those four groups are protected in the genocide convention.

    The same goes for murders committed by the Khmer Rouge – the radical communist regime of Pol Pot that ruled what is now Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The regime was responsible for the deaths of between 1.5 and 3 million people. But the hybrid criminal tribunal set up in 1997 to judge these events has only been able to find that the killing of minority Vietnamese and Cham victims counted as genocide. The majority of those that the Khmer Rouge targeted for killing were fellow Cambodians selected for being “intellectuals” or were otherwise thought to oppose the regime.

    The choice of protected groups in the genocide convention was the result of political horse-trading between different factions, as the cold war was gaining in intensity. There was a tension between protecting enough groups, and agreeing a treaty that enough states would actually sign.



    Read more:
    How Canada committed genocide against Indigenous Peoples, explained by the lawyer central to the determination

    The atrocity of Srebrenica

    The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the ICJ have held that Bosnian Serbs committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in what is now Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. The Bosnian Serb army killed around 8,000 men and boys, and secretly buried them. They detained, treated badly and then expelled the remaining women.

    The atrocity at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered, has been ruled as an act of genocide.
    Skrewt25 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

    The ICTY has held, beyond reasonable doubt, that across Bosnia and Herzegovina there was a “strategic plan” to “link Serb-populated areas […] together, to gain control over these areas and to create a separate Bosnian Serb state, from which most non-Serbs would be permanently removed”. It also found that this plan “could only be implemented by the use of force and fear”. Yet, apart from at Srebrenica, genocide has not been proved in the former Yugoslavia.

    The issue here was not identifying a protected group, but a lack of evidence that the mass killings of non-Serbs were carried out as an end in themselves and not “just” to make them flee (something which is often called “ethnic cleansing”). This is because for a killing to be genocidal, it has not only to be carried out intentionally, but also to show the “special” intent to physically or biologically destroy a protected group.

    The problem is that – in the absence of an admission or a bundle of incriminating documents – then such special intent can only be inferred from the facts if it is the only reasonable inference that could be made.

    Why Gaza is controversial

    Should the definition of genocide be expanded to cover a greater range of protected groups, either by amending the genocide convention or by creative judicial interpretation? Should it be easier to infer the existence of genocidal intent from a pattern of facts? Both are important questions.

    Yet, until they are answered in the affirmative, it will remain difficult in law to apply the label of genocide even to the most egregious of mass killings. The labels of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are more easily applied, but the “crime of crimes” remains elusive.

    James Sweeney 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 have so few atrocities ever been recognised as genocide? – https://theconversation.com/why-have-so-few-atrocities-ever-been-recognised-as-genocide-257753

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Salt Path taps into a long history of searching for healing on England’s south-west coast

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lena Ferriday, Lecturer in the History of Science and the Environment, King’s College London

    Moth Winn was diagnosed with a terminal illness at the age of 53 and in the same week he and his wife, Raynor, lost their home. As the bailiffs arrived, the couple made a remarkable decision: to take a 630-mile year-long coastal walk from Somerset to Dorset, through Devon and Cornwall.

    Their journey was first told in Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path, which has now been made into a film. In The Salt Path, Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs portray the hardship and hope the couple experienced as they walked through sunshine and storms with little more than a tent and a handful of cash.

    But their walk is part of a much older story. Without realising it, Raynor and Moth joined a centuries-old tradition of seeking healing and transformation along the south-west coast. In the 19th century, people travelled to the coast because doctors believed coastal air and seawater could treat illness. This idea became known as “change of air” treatment and was widely prescribed to urban patients suffering from “nervous disorders”, such as stomach pains and chest issues. These seaside visits were understood as a form of medicine.

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    England’s westerly edge

    The South West Coast Path is the UK’s longest national trail. The route has over 115,000 feet of ascent and descent – the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest four times. It was officially protected in 1973 to preserve and improve access to the path and now attracts nearly 9 million visitors each year. But its origins lie in the working lives of local people, especially coastguards watching for smugglers and fishermen following pilchard shoals.

    In the 19th century, the region also became a destination for domestic tourists. It was made more accessible as passenger rail lines were extended to places including Plymouth and Penzance. Some visitors walked to explore unfamiliar landscapes, while others did so on medical advice.

    The seaside towns of Penzance and Torquay emerged as health resorts and by the first world war they were known as “havens for invalids”. Between 1800 and 1854, Torquay’s population grew from 800 to 14,000, mostly made up of medical residents on temporary stays.

    Healing in the elements

    Before the walk, Moth was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) after seeing a doctor about shoulder pain and tremors. CBD is a rare degenerative condition that affects the brain and gradually leads to difficulties with movement, speech, memory and swallowing.

    When he began the walk, Moth’s mobility had deteriorated and he was experiencing severe pain and numbness in his left leg. For the first half of the film, Jason Isaacs drags his foot along the ground to show this physical strain. The challenge of walking was made harder by the rugged terrain – steep hills, jagged rocks and harsh winds.

    As Moth and Raynor walked, something unexpected happened. Moth’s symptoms began to ease, his condition improved, and he eventually stopped taking pain relief. He believed the change was linked to the regular movement and the sense of purpose the walk gave them during a bleak period. He described walking as having a restorative power that offered him a new, unlicensed freedom.

    The idea that walking by the coast could have healing properties has deep roots. In the 19th century, walking was considered beneficial, but the emphasis was on gentle movement in clean air rather than endurance through rough landscapes. The air of Devon and Cornwall was praised for its soothing qualities and the climate for its warmth in the winter. Town planners even built flat promenades in seaside towns to make walking more accessible for people with chronic illnesses and low mobility.

    Spending time outside was considered particularly valuable for people suffering from tuberculosis. Before tuberculosis was known to be caused by bacteria, medical experts blamed it on bad-smelling air. Doctors suggested that city dwellers suffering with chest pains remove themselves from these dirty atmospheres and immerse themselves in the clean, salt air at the seaside.

    Nature plays a central role in The Salt Path. Its affect on the body is seen in Gillian Anderson’s sun-scorched cheeks and wind-tousled hair. The sounds of birds and the sea accompany panoramic drone shots of the cliffs. The sea is a key character.

    Arriving at Minehead, the Winns take a photo to begin their journey: of “the three of us”, the couple and the sea. Victorian travel writers also insisted that in the south-west, “The pedestrian must never wander more than a stone’s throw from the sea.”

    When Moth swims in the sea, he is empowered in his own body and able to move without constraint. The seaside has carried health connotations since the 1700s. In the 18th century, doctors claimed that sudden immersion in cold, salty and turbulent waters had therapeutic value for chronic illness. Today, open swimming remains a popular practice in the south-west and is praised for its mental and physical health benefits.

    As the film ends, we learn that 12 years after their walk Moth is still living with CBD and the couple still use long-distance walks to treat his symptoms. This experience of illness finds resonance in older practices, reminding us that healing can sometimes be found outside of clinical spaces. While the reasons for walking often change, the connection between place, body and wellbeing spans centuries. The Salt Path tells a deeply personal story but also continues a long cultural history of looking to the coastline for recovery and renewal.

    Lena Ferriday has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

    – ref. The Salt Path taps into a long history of searching for healing on England’s south-west coast – https://theconversation.com/the-salt-path-taps-into-a-long-history-of-searching-for-healing-on-englands-south-west-coast-257793

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Rise of the Zombie Bugs takes readers on a jaw-dropping tour of the parasite world

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Dittrich, Senior Lecturer in Zoology, Nottingham Trent University

    A “zombie” snail infected with a flatworm JoostP/Shutterstock

    Rise of the Zombie Bugs, by Mindy Weisberger, is a non-fiction book that borrows from popular culture to make one of the most complex and grisly interactions in the animal kingdom accessible to the reader.

    From fungi and viruses that infect the brains of insects, to parasites that burst through the abdominal cavities of their unsuspecting hosts, Weisberger shows readers a gruesomely fascinating world.

    Weisberger’s definition of a zombie bug is an insect that has become host to a parasite. The parasite modifies its host’s behaviour for its own means. She affectionately refers to these parasites as “zombifiers”. This zombification can make the host more susceptible to conditions that enable that parasite to complete its lifecycle or spread.

    The author takes the reader through a taxonomic feast of invertebrates and their parasites. The idea of “host-altered behaviour” is particularly interesting here, as it shows the ends that parasites go to to complete their lifecycle and reproduce.

    For example Leucochloridium, a flatworm that turns the eyes of snails vivid colours and patterns, which makes them more susceptible to bird predation. The flatworm also makes the snail stay out in the open. Once eaten by a bird, the flatworm can complete its life cycle in the bird’s gut. And Weisberger helps the reader understand some of the complex processes that underpin this phenomenon. For example, how these parasites hijack the host’s nervous system and cause unusual behaviour.

    There are parasitic flies that disrupt the natural foraging behaviour of ants. After the fly lays eggs in the ant’s thorax, the larvae eventually migrate to the ant’s head, making it fall off. There’s also the cordyceps fungi that infects the brains of many insect species and makes them move to a better location for the fungi, such as the ends of tree branches or the tips of grass stems. A location normally treacherous to the insect – but ideal for the fungi to spread its spores. Once there, a fruiting mushroom sprouts from the insect’s head.

    An ant infected with cordyceps.
    Jojo dexter/Shutterstock

    Parasites are all around us. Weisberger reassures us that, although the grisly and fantastical world of fiction is not far removed from what we see in nature, the processes she describes in the book are natural. And indeed necessary for a healthy planet, playing a crucial role in controlling and halting pest invasions. In the insect world, they are one of the most abundant natural controls on populations of pest insects.

    Although naturally occurring populations of these parasites are not more likely to attack invasive species than native ones, we have however used them to our advantage in exploiting their behaviour to protect our crops. For example, the parasitic wasps I mentioned before are key for controlling populations of beetle pests in fruiting crops.

    Parasites and us

    The war waged on insects by their parasites has inspired a lot of popular culture, such as the chest-bursting aliens from the Alien films – rumoured to have been based on parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside the bodies of unsuspecting insects. The video game and popular HBO series The Last of Us imagines a world where cordyceps infect humans, not just insects.

    As someone with a soft spot for invertebrate behaviour, I am drawn into the case studies where invertebrate animals interact with each other and the decapitated ants and disco snails are firm favourites of mine.

    However, the book does end on a note of caution. The author writes a worrying footnote on rabies and Toxoplasma gondii, and the ability of both to not only cause serious harm to us but to even alter our behaviour.

    Toxoplasma gondii is a single-cell parasite that causes an illness called toxoplasmosis in humans. You can catch it from cat faeces, or from eating infected meat. It is one of the most common parasitic infections of humans and other warm-blooded animals. It doesn’t make most adults seriously ill but it can cause blindness and developmental disorders in children infected as a foetus and cause life-threatening illness in immunocompromised people.

    Toxoplasmosis has been linked to rage and suicidal behaviour in humans. Although one third of people are estimated to have been exposed to toxoplasmosis, there is still much we don’t understand about it.

    Rise of the Zombie Bugs is a fun read that would appeal to a wide range of audiences, whether you work in science and education or simply want to expand your understanding of the natural world.

    Alex Dittrich 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. Rise of the Zombie Bugs takes readers on a jaw-dropping tour of the parasite world – https://theconversation.com/rise-of-the-zombie-bugs-takes-readers-on-a-jaw-dropping-tour-of-the-parasite-world-256026

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –