In 2021, Banksy revealed a mural of Oscar Wilde, clad in prisoner garb, making an escape from the abandoned Reading jail. The artist claimed that he would donate profits from the sale of the stencil he used to create the work (a projected £10 million) to set up an arts hub in the Grade II listed building.
This hasn’t yet taken place, but speaking about the work at the time, Banksy dubbed Wilde “the patron saint of smashing two contrasting ideas together to create magic. Converting the place that destroyed him into a refuge for art feels so perfect we have to do it.”
In 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for “gross indecency” after being convicted of “homosexual acts”. He was posthumously pardoned in 2017 under the Turing Law.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote two years after his release, hypnotically details the psychological and physical horrors of living in isolation in unsanitary single-cells for 23 hours a day.
It also reveals the mind-numbing conditions and physically exhausting jobs that were relentlessly inflicted on prisoners in Wilde’s day. They were required to ascend 56 steps a minute for nine hours a day on a treadmill, break stones and pick oakum (fibres from the ropes used on ships). And to do so in complete silence.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
In the poem, Wilde details the intense surveillance techniques and harsh punishments adopted by the prison wardens against the “outcast men”.
Oscar Wilde’s prison cell in Reading Gaol as it appears today. Jack1956/Wiki Commons
“Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb,” he writes, the inmates silently trudge the prison yard in their one allotted hour of exercise per day. The poem focuses on one prisoner in particular, named only as CTW, who is sentenced to death for murdering his wife. It traces his walk to the “hideous” shed where he is to be executed, which ghoulishly sees him “cross his own coffin”.
More gothic images abound. CTW’s impending burial in an unhallowed and anonymous grave is described as “with yawning mouth the horrid hole / Gaped for a living thing” while “the very mud cried out for blood”.
Wilde also references a scene from Coleridge’s 1797 masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as he envisions phantoms dancing a “grisly masque” in which they sing of inexorable triumph of sin in prison, “the Secret House of Shame”.
Moreover, Wilde denies that the sacrifice that CTW has offered to the prison with his execution is ultimately redemptive for him as:
He did not pass in purple pomp
Nor ride a moon-white steed
Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows need.
In the ballad, Wilde represents the prison experience as sadistic and unrelenting. Much like Banksy over a century later, Wilde used the degree of anonymity the poem afforded (he published it under his cell number, C33) to berate an inhumane society and the distressing penal policy of “hard labour, hard fare, hard board” that he was forced to endure.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol can ultimately be read as a celebration of compassion, resilience and art activism. Through the poem and letters he wrote to the Daily Chronicle, Wilde publicly attempted to “try and change [prison life] for others”.
Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas in 1893. British Library
Despite Wilde’s public notoriety, Irish MPs Michael Davitt and T.P. O’Connor even went as far as to quote the ballad in parliamentary debates, which led to the adoption of some of the recommendations that Wilde had made in his letters in the 1898 Prison Reform Act.
Although Wilde, himself, was to suffer the psychological and physical effects of his imprisonment until the end of his short life two years later, the 1898 Act saw the treadmill abolished, ensured solitary confinement could only be used for a maximum of 28 days and children were separated from adult prisoners. And yet, sadly, Wilde’s description of “the foul and dark latrine” of “humanity’s machine” continues to reverberate today.
On August 22 2024, “independent monitors” into the conditions at Wandsworth Prison (where Wilde was briefly held) found it to be “crumbling, overcrowded and vermin-infested, with inmates living in half the cell space available when it was first opened in 1851”.
While Wilde’s “swan song” joins with Banksy’s escaped prisoner to expose the failings of modern penal practices, it also reminds us of the enduring power of art and imagination to foster change.
Beyond the canon
As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Sondeep Kandola’s suggestion:
If you are looking for further reading on the topic of prison life and the prison experience, Andy West’s memoir The Life Inside (2022) offers a sobering and often witty reflection on living in the carceral state today. A philosophy teacher in prison, West explores the notion of freedom, redemption and our broken prison system.
You might also be interested to read Brendan Behan’s powerful 1958 autobiography Borstal Boy and Bobby Sands’ courageous Writings from Prison (2020), two incarcerated Irish writers who shared Wilde’s republican sympathies and similarly questioned the ethics and integrity of the British government who imprisoned them.
Sondeep Kandola 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.
They were proved wrong on May 22, 2025, when the court blocked St. Isidore. The one-sentence, unsigned order did not indicate how individual justices had voted, nor why, simply declaring it was a split 4-4 decision that leaves in place the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling against the school. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. Her former employer, the University of Notre Dame, runs a law clinic representing the school’s supporters.
Ever since the proposed school started making headlines, attention has focused on religion. Critics warned a decision in the school’s favor could allow government dollars to directly fund faith-based charter schools nationwide. In part, the justices had to decide whether the First Amendment’s prohibition on government establishing religion applies to charter schools.
But the answer to that question is part of an even bigger issue: Are charters really public in the first place?
The Supreme Court’s order applies only to Oklahoma, so similar cases attempting to open religious charter schools may emerge down the road. As two professors who studyeducation law, we believe future court decisions could impact more than issues of religion and state, determining what basic rights students and teachers do or don’t have at charter schools.
Dueling arguments
In June 2023, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore’s application to open as an online K-12 school. The following year, however, the Oklahoma high court ruled that the proposal was unconstitutional. The justices concluded that charter schools are public under state law, and that the First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids public schools from being religious. The court also found that a religious charter school would violate Oklahoma’s constitution, which specifically forbids public money from benefiting religious organizations.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court in the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City, May 19, 2014. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File
On appeal, the charter school claimed that charter schools are private, and so the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause does not apply.
Moreover, St. Isidore argued that if charter schools are private, the state’s prohibition on religious charters violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which bars the government from limiting “the free exercise” of religion. Previous Supreme Court cases have found that states cannot prevent private religious entities from participating in generally available government programs solely because they are religious.
In other words, while St. Isidore’s critics argued that opening a religious charter school would violate the First Amendment, its supporters claimed the exact opposite: that forbidding religious charter schools would violate the First Amendment.
Are charters public?
The question of whether an institution is public or private turns on a legal concept known as the “state action doctrine.” This principle provides that the government must follow the Constitution, while private entities do not have to. For example, unlike students in public schools, students in private schools do not have the constitutional right to due process for suspensions and expulsions – procedures to ensure fairness before taking disciplinary action.
In Caviness v. Horizon Learning Center, a case from 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that an Arizona charter school corporation was not a state actor for employment purposes. Therefore, the board did not have to provide a teacher due process before firing him. The court reasoned that the corporation was a private actor that contracted with the state to provide educational services.
In contrast, the 4th Circuit ruled in 2022 that a North Carolina charter school board was a state actor under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, students challenged the dress code requirement that female students wear skirts because they were considered “fragile vessels.”
The court first reasoned that the board was a state actor because North Carolina had delegated its constitutional duty to provide education. The court observed that the charter school’s dress code was an inappropriate sex-based classification, and that school officials engaged in harmful gender stereotyping, violating the equal protection clause.
If the Supreme Court had sided with St. Isidore – as many analysts thought was likely – then all private charter corporations might have been considered nonstate actors for the purposes of religion.
But the stakes are even greater than that. State action involves more than just religion. Indeed, teachers and students in private schools do not have the constitutional rights related to free speech, search and seizure, due process and equal protection. In other words, if charter schools are not considered “state actors,” charter students and teachers may eventually shed constitutional rights “at the schoolhouse gate.”
Amtrak: An alternate route?
People ride an Amtrak Acela train through Pennsylvania, en route from New York City to Washington, in 2022. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey
When courts have held that charter schools are not public in state law, some legislatures have made changes to categorize them as public. For example, California passed a law to clarify that charter school students have the same due process rights as traditional public school students after a court ruled otherwise.
Likewise, we believe states looking to clear up charter schools’ ambiguous state actor status under the Constitution can amend their laws. As we explain in a recent legal article, a 1995 Supreme Court case involving Amtrak illustrates how this can be done.
Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation arose when Amtrak rejected a billboard ad for being political. The advertiser sued, arguing that the corporation had violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Since private organizations are not required to protect free speech rights, the case hinged on whether Amtrak qualified as a government agency.
The court ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, reasoning that Amtrak was a government actor because it was created by special law, served important governmental objectives and its board members were appointed by the government.
Courts have applied this ruling in other instances. For example, the 10th Circuit ruled in 2016 that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was a governmental agency and therefore was required to abide by the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
Since the Supreme Court did not release any reasoning for its order, we do not know how the justices viewed the “government actor” question in the case from Oklahoma. That said, we believe charter schools fail the test set out in the Amtrak decision. Charter schools do serve the governmental purpose of providing educational choice for students. However, charter school corporations are not created by special law. They also fall short because most have independent boards instead of members who are appointed and removed by government officials.
However, we would argue that states can amend their laws to comply with Lebron’s standard, ensuring that charter schools are public or state actors for constitutional purposes.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 27, 2025.
Preston Green III is affiliated with the National Education Policy Center.
Suzanne Eckes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation, University of Exeter
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq has won the 2025 International Booker prize. Here, our literature experts review the book and the other five novels that were shortlisted for the prize.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp shines a light on the lives of Muslim women in rural India. In a bold and memorable translation from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, this quietly powerful collection of short stories opens up the intimate space of domestic rituals and family tensions.
Mushtaq’s fervent advocacy of women’s rights is evident in the compassion with which she brings to life the women in the stories: from the lack of autonomy suffered by young girls forced into wedlock to the indignity of an older woman obliged to accept her husband taking a second wife or a widow whose son arranges a new marriage for her, the women’s lives are dictated by men.
Heart Lamp is perhaps best summed up in the final story, “Be a Woman Once, O Lord!” Throughout these stories, Mushtaq invites us – and whichever male deity might be listening – to walk in the shoes of women overlooked by an unquestioned patriarchal hierarchy.
Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird offers us glimpses of one imagined future for earth and humanity.
Its vision could be described as post-apocalyptic. After unspecified cataclysmic events, humans exist only in tiny, scattered communities and extinction seems imminent. But this is also a beautiful, if dreamlike, world and one in which humanity still has the potential for astonishing growth and change.
Each chapter introduces something new and startling to the reader. Many of the tropes are familiar – cloning, superpowers, mutation, AI. Yet they are configured in unfamiliar ways and prompt reflections on the nature of humanity and our relationship with the rest of creation – as well as on time, religion and the possibility of an afterlife.
Despite grappling with so many huge questions, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is an accessible and absorbing novel. And, although tragedy is never far away, there remains humour – and hope.
Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson
Published in France in 2008 as Un chapeau léopard, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a novel about a friendship spanning 20 years between a woman called Fanny and a man known throughout only as “the Narrator”. He is not, though, the narrator of the novel. Rather, an unknown storyteller tells us how the Narrator sees Fanny gradually lose the fight against madness (the novel’s word) and, in the end, death.
This is a novel about the mystery of other people, about how unknowable others are to us. It explores how we narrate to try to understand people who are not us, but whom we love. What is most extraordinary about Serre’s novel is the way it shows us two friends doing very ordinary things – going out for dinner, going on holiday, walking in the countryside and swimming in lakes – but shows us through this the strangeness and complexity of friendship, love and life.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
Perfection is a slim account of the way that time “disappears” for Anna and Tom, an expat couple living in Berlin as creative freelancers in the 2010s.
Written in homage to Georges Perec’s Things: The Story of the Sixties (1965), the novel opens with an overbearing description of the items in their apartment, moving in and out of the characters’ dissatisfaction with the aesthetic, social, creative, economic and political routes open to them in 120 pages spanning a little over 10 years.
As international elections, the European refugee crises and climate catastrophe dance in and out of their peripheral vision, Anna and Tom find neither satisfaction with their current moment nor successfully imagine a better one. As such, Latronico gently, but with an increasing sense of fatalism, considers the stagnation of a millennial creative class whose views on influence, status, power and happiness remain deeply linked to the “new emotions” of digital mediation.
By Rachel Sykes, Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature and Culture
On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland
In On The Calculation of Volume, a woman, Tara Selter, finds herself trapped in an endlessly repeating day, November 18. Volume I, the first of seven books, recounts the first 365 days of this time loop, with Tara attempting to make sense of her predicament, to explain it to her husband – who is still bound by the normal rules of time – and to try to fix whatever has initiated this situation.
As the novel continues, it becomes less focused on the novelty of the situation and more on the philosophical questions it raises: the alternate claustrophobia and liberation of replaying the same day; how our friends and partners sometimes feel like they inhabit a different reality; the way in which time pulls things and people apart; of the importance we place in the idea of “tomorrow”.
What’s remarkable about Balle’s novel is how compulsive it is – even though we know time is standing still, we still want to know what will happen next.
David Hering, Senior Lecturer in English Literature
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson
Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat is a slim, bruising novel that centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 migrants in the English Channel in November 2021. In a small, inflatable craft, they reached out over crackling radio lines, asking for help that never came.
Small Boat focuses not on the migrants themselves, but on a French coastguard operator who spent that night on the radio, fielding their calls for rescue. Delecroix’s brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. It was not evil that allowed those people to die in the water, it was a string of decisions made by people in warm rooms who believed they were doing their jobs.
In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix’s novel is a necessary – and merciless – indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too.
Fiona Murphy, Assistant Professor in Refugee and Intercultural Studies
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Iain Boyd, Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives and Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
Posters that President Donald Trump used to announce Golden Dome depict missile defense as a shield.AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
President Donald Trump announced a plan to build a missile defense system, called the Golden Dome, on May 20, 2025. The system is intended to protect the United States from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space.
Trump is calling for the current budget to allocate US$25 billion to launch the initiative, which the government projected will cost $175 billion. He said Golden Dome will be fully operational before the end of his term in three years and will provide close to 100% protection.
The Conversation U.S. asked Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer and director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder, about the Golden Dome plan and the feasibility of Trump’s claims. Boyd receives funding for research unrelated to Golden Dome from defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Why does the United States need a missile shield?
Several countries, including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, have been developing missiles over the past few years that challenge the United States’ current missile defense systems.
These weapons include updated ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and new hypersonic missiles. They have been specifically developed to counter America’s highly advanced missile defense systems such as the Patriot and the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System.
For example, the new hypersonic missiles are very high speed, operate in a region of the atmosphere where nothing else flies and are maneuverable. All of these aspects combined create a new challenge that requires a new, updated defensive approach.
So it’s reasonable to think that, to ensure the protection of its homeland and to aid its allies, the U.S. may need a new missile defense capability.
Ukrainian forces are using the U.S.-made Patriot missile defense system against Russian ballistic missiles.
What are the components of a national missile defense system?
Such a defense system requires a global array of geographically distributed sensors that cover all phases of all missile trajectories.
First, it is essential for the system to detect the missile threats as early as possible after launch, so some of the sensors must be located close to regions where adversaries may fire them, such as by China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Then, it has to track the missiles along their trajectories as they travel hundreds or thousands of miles.
These requirements are met by deploying a variety of sensors on a number of different platforms on the ground, at sea, in the air and in space. Interceptors are placed in locations that protect vital U.S. assets and usually aim to engage threats during the middle portion of the trajectory between launch and the terminal dive.
The U.S. already has a broad array of sensors and interceptors in place around the world and in space primarily to protect the U.S. and its allies from ballistic missiles. The sensors would need to be expanded, including with more space-based sensors, to detect new missiles such as hypersonic missiles. The interceptors would need to be enhanced to enable them to address hypersonic weapons and other missiles and warheads that can maneuver.
Does this technology exist?
Intercepting hypersonic missiles specifically involves several steps.
First, as explained above, a hostile missile must be detected and identified as a threat. Second, the threat must be tracked along all of its trajectory due to the ability of hypersonic missiles to maneuver. Third, an interceptor missile must be able to follow the threat and get close enough to it to disable or destroy it.
The main new challenge here is the ability to track the hypersonic missile continuously. This requires new types of sensors to detect hypersonic vehicles and new sensor platforms that are able to provide a complete picture of the hypersonic trajectory. As described, Golden Dome would use the sensors in a layered approach in which they are installed on a variety of platforms in multiple domains, including ground, sea, air and space.
These various platforms would need to have different types of sensors that are specifically designed to track hypersonic threats in different phases of their flight paths. These defensive systems will also be designed to address weapons fired from space. Much of the infrastructure will be multipurpose and able to defend against a variety of missile types.
In terms of time frame for deployment, it is important to note that Golden Dome will build from the long legacy of existing U.S. missile defense systems. Another important aspect of Golden Dome is that some of the new capabilities have been under active development for years. In some ways, Golden Dome represents the commitment to actually deploy systems for which considerable progress has already been made.
Is near 100% protection a realistic claim?
Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has been described as the most effective system of its kind anywhere in the world.
But even Iron Dome is not 100% effective, and it has also been overwhelmed on occasion by Hamas and others who fire very large numbers of inexpensive missiles and rockets at it. So it is unlikely that any missile defense system will ever provide 100% protection.
The more important goal here is to achieve deterrence, similar to the stalemate in the Cold War with the Soviet Union that was based on nuclear weapons. All of the new weapons that Golden Dome will defend against are very expensive. The U.S. is trying to change the calculus in an opponent’s thinking to the point where they will consider it not worth shooting their precious high-value missiles at the U.S. when they know there is a high probability of them not reaching their targets.
CBS News covered President Donald Trump’s announcement.
Is three years a feasible time frame?
That seems to me like a very aggressive timeline, but with multiple countries now operating hypersonic missiles, there is a real sense of urgency.
Existing missile defense systems on the ground, at sea and in the air can be expanded to include new, more capable sensors. Satellite systems are beginning to be put in place for the space layer. Sensors have been developed to track the new missile threats.
Putting all of this highly complex system together, however, is likely to take more than three years. At the same time, if the U.S. fully commits to Golden Dome, a significant amount of progress can be made in this time.
What does the president’s funding request tell you?
President Trump is requesting a total budget for all defense spending of about $1 trillion in 2026. So, $25 billion to launch Golden Dome would represent only 2.5% of the total requested defense budget.
Of course, that is still a lot of money, and a lot of other programs will need to be terminated to make it possible. But it is certainly financially achievable.
How will Golden Dome differ from Iron Dome?
Similar to Iron Dome, Golden Dome will consist of sensors and interceptor missiles but will be deployed over a much wider geographical region and for defense against a broader variety of threats in comparison with Iron Dome.
A second-generation Golden Dome system in the future would likely use directed energy weapons such as high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves to destroy missiles. This approach would significantly increase the number of shots that defenders can take against ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles.
Iain Boyd receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed-Martin Corporation, a defense contractor that sells missile defense systems and could potentially benefit from the implementation of Golden Dome.
If you’re browsing the supermarket fridge for reduced-fat milk, it’s easy to be confused by the many different types.
You canfind options labelled skim, skimmed, skinny, no fat, extra light, lite, light, low fat, reduced fat, semi skim and HiLo (high calcium, low fat).
So what’s the difference between two of these common milks – skim milk and light milk? How are they made? And which one’s healthier?
What do they contain?
Skim milk
In Australia and New Zealand, skim milk is defined as milk that contains no more than 1.5% milk fat and has at least 3% protein. On the nutrition information panel this looks like less than 1.5 grams of fat and at least 3g protein per 100 millilitres of milk.
Light milk is sometimes spelled “lite” but they’re essentially the same thing.
While light milk is not specifically defined in Australia and New Zealand, the term “light” is defined for food generally. If we apply the rules to milk, we can say light milk must contain no more than 2.4% fat (2.4g fat per 100mL).
In other words, light milk contains more fat than skim milk.
You can find the fat content by reading the “total fat per 100mL” on the label’s nutrition information panel.
How about other nutrients?
The main nutritional difference between skim milk and light milk, apart from the fat content, is the energy content.
Any milk sold as cow’s milk must contain at least 3% protein (3g protein per 100mL of milk). That includes skim or light milk. So there’s typically not much difference there.
Likewise, the calcium content doesn’t differ much between skim milk and light milk. It is typically about 114 milligrams to 120mg per 100mL.
You can check these and other details on the label’s nutrition information panel.
How are they made?
Skim milk and light milk are not made by watering down full-cream milk.
Instead, full-cream milk is spun at high speeds in a device called a centrifuge. This causes the fat to separate and be removed, leaving behind milk containing less fat.
Here’s how fat is removed to produce skim and light milk.
Who should be drinking what?
Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend we drink mostly reduced-fat milk – that is, milk containing no more than 2.4g fat per 100mL. Skim milk and light milk are both included in that category.
The exception is for children under two years old, who are recommended full-cream milk to meet their growing needs.
The reason our current guidelines recommend reduced-fat milk is that, since the 1970s, reduced-fat milk has been thought to help with reducing body weight and reducing the risk of heart disease. That’s because of its lower content of saturated fat and energy (kilojoules/calories) than full cream milk.
However, more recent evidencehas shown drinking full-cream milk is not associated with weight gain or health risks. In fact, eating or drinking dairy products of any type may help reduce the risk of obesity and other metabolic disorders (such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes), especially in children and adolescents.
The science in this area continues to evolve. So the debate around whether there are health benefits to choosing reduced-fat milk over full cream milk is ongoing.
Whether or not there any individual health benefits from choosing skim milk or light milk over full cream will vary depending on your current health status and broader dietary habits.
For personalised health and dietary advice, speak to a health professional.
Margaret Murray 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.
Oscar Jenkins, a 33-year-old former teacher from Melbourne, was one of many foreigners who responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call in 2022 for volunteers to join Ukraine’s armed forces to help repel Russia’s invasion.
In early 2024, Jenkins joined Ukraine’s International Legion of Territorial Defence, which has attracted some 20,000 fighters from 50 countries since the war began. He had no previous military experience, but this wasn’t a requirement to join.
In December, Jenkins was captured by Russian forces in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine and accused of serving as a “mercenary” in Ukraine’s 66th Mechanised Brigade’s 402nd Rifle Battalion. He was tried in a Russian court and sentenced on May 16 to 13 years imprisonment in a maximum-security penal colony.
When a foreigner volunteers to fight in a war, their legal status under international law can be complicated.
Are they a soldier with the full authorisation of one of the warring parties to engage in hostilities? Or are they an illegal mercenary?
And what happens if they are captured?
Why legal status matters
The answers to these questions have very real importance to the thousands of foreigners who have joined Ukraine’s International Legion since 2022.
Russian authorities have classified all of Ukraine’s foreigner fighters as “mercenaries”. They’ve used this label to deny foreign fighters the status of “prisoner of war” (POW), with the requisite protections that come along with that under international humanitarian law.
While foreigners are permitted under international law to enlist in the armed forces of a state for political or moral reasons, mercenaries have historically been outlawed due to their sole motivation being financial gain.
International humanitarian law (the rules that govern war) define mercenaries as individuals who are not nationals or residents of a state engaged in war and are recruited to fight outside that state’s official armed forces.
They are motivated solely by private gain (like money or promises of reward), often well in excess of what the traditional armed forces are paid. Mercenaries are essentially professional soldiers who sell their services to a state without any real ties to that country.
Once a fighter is classified as a “mercenary”, they lose all the legal protections that are traditionally afforded lawful combatants.
This includes prisoner of war status if they are captured and immunity from prosecution for fighting in a conflict. Prisoners of war are also entitled to humane treatment and access to food and medical care. And they cannot be subjected to sham trials or torture.
According to my research, many of the foreign nationals who joined the International Legion were motivated by a desire to defend Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. They were sworn into Ukraine’s armed forces and paid the same as a Ukrainian soldier of equal rank.
Once enlisted in the armed forces, they were immediately exempt from “mercenary” status, irrespective of their motivation for joining.
As such, these foreign fighters should be entitled to the full range of protections guaranteed to members of Ukraine’s armed forces under the Geneva Conventions.
Labelling lawful foreign members of the Ukrainian armed forces as “mercenaries”, and denying them their protections, is an abuse of international law.
How can Australia protect its nationals?
If an Australian enlists in Ukraine’s armed forces and is captured by Russian forces, there is a limited toolkit the Australian government can use to help him or her. However, it is not powerless.
Through its embassy in Moscow, Australia can request access to detainees to assess their welfare while in prison. Russia can, however, decline this access. Details of a detainee’s capture may also be withheld.
Australia can also apply diplomatic pressure to ensure humane treatment of prisoners and their full POW rights.
This can be done by working with international bodies, such as the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention or organisations like the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), which can request access to detainees.
It appears the government is already doing some of these things. According to Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the government has been working with Ukraine and the ICRC to advocate for Jenkins’ welfare and release, and providing consular support to Jenkins’ family.
Australia also has an obligation to warn its citizens they will likely face severe consequences if they travel to Ukraine to fight and are captured by Russian forces, given Russia’s misuse of the “mercenary” label.
Through back-channel negotiations, Australia could also push Ukraine or its allies to include Australians being held by Russia in future prisoner swaps.
In January of this year, Ukraine and Russia carried out such an exchange of 470 prisoners from both nations. And in talks last week in Turkey, both sides agreed to release another 1,000 prisoners on each side.
Such exchanges have involved foreign fighters in the past. In 2022, 10 foreign citizens were included in a prisoner swap, including five Britons, two Americans, a Croatian, a Swede and a Moroccan. Several of them had been convicted of being mercenaries and sentenced to death after a Russian sham trial.
There is no guarantee Jenkins would qualify for such an exchange, however, if Russia continues to classify him as a mercenary.
Shannon Bosch 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.
A recent study has found a 50% decline in the use of semicolons over the last two decades. The decline accelerates a longterm trend:
In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words. Today, there’s just one semicolon for every 390 words.
Further research reported that 67% of British students never or rarely use a semicolon; more than 50% did not know how to use it. Just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users.
These findings may not be definitive. According to the Guardian, the Google Books Ngram Viewer database, which surveys novels and nonfiction, indicates that
semicolon use in English rose by 388% between 1800 and 2006, before falling by 45% over the next 11 years. In 2017, however, it started a gradual recovery, with a 27% rise by 2022.
Yet when you put the punctuation mark itself into the database, rather than the word “semicolon”, you get a quite different result – one that looks very much like a steady decline.
Virulent detractors
The semicolon first appeared in 1494, so it has been around for a long time. So have arguments about it.
Its dectractors can be quite virulent. It is sometimes taken as a sign of affected elitism. Adrian Mole, the pretentious schoolboy protagonist of Sue Townsend’s popular novels, says snobbishly of Barry Kent, the skinhead bully at his school: “He wouldn’t know what a semicolon was if it fell into his beer.” Kurt Vonnegut (whose novels are not entirely free of semicolons) said semicolons represented “absolutely nothing” and using them just showed that you “went to college”.
Other writers have expressed pure animosity. American journalist James Kilpatrick denounced the semicolon “girly”, “odious”, and the “most pusillanimous, sissified utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented”.
The utility of this much maligned punctuation mark in contemporary prose has been called into question. British author Ben McIntyre has claimed Stephen King “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semicolon”.
He obviously hasn’t read page 32 of King’s wonderful book On Writing, where King uses semicolons in three sentences in a row.
Impeccable balance
Before I defend the semicolon, it is worth clarifying what it actually does. Its two uses are as follows:
1) it separates independent clauses, but establishes a relation between them. It suggests that the statements are too closely connected to stand as separate sentences. For example: “Speech is silver; silence is golden.”
2) it can be used to clarify a complicated list. For example: “Remember to check your grammar, especially agreement of subjects and verbs; your spelling, especially of tricky words such as ‘liaison’; and your punctuation, especially your use of the apostrophe.”
Semicolons have long played a prominent role in classic literature. Journalist Amelia Hill notes that Virginia Woolf relies heavily on semicolons in her meditation on time, Mrs Dalloway. The novel includes more than 1000 of them, often used in unorthodox ways, to capture the flow of its protagonist’s thoughts.
Other supporters of the semicolon include Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Donna Tartt, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Novelist Philip Hensher has celebrated the semicolon as “a cherished tool, elegant and rational.” In 1953, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan called it “the prize-winning supporting crutch of English prose”.
In his essay Semicolons: A Love Story, Ben Dolnick refers to William James’s deft use of semicolons to pile on the clauses. He claims this is like saying to a reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, “Here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another?”
“The image of the grocery bags,” observed Mary Norris, a highly respected copyeditor at the New Yorker, “reinforces the idea that semicolons are all about balance.” Harvard professor Louis Menand has praised as “impeccable” the balancing semicolon on a public service placard (allegedly amended by hand) that exhorted subway riders not to leave their newspapers behind on the train: “Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.”
The poet Lewis Thomas beautifully captures the elegance of a well-used semicolon in his essay Notes on Punctuation:
The semicolon tells you there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a full stop. The full stop tells you that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
As Australian novelist David Malouf has argued, the semicolon still has a future, and an important function, in nuanced imaginative prose:
I tend to write longer sentences and use the semicolon so as not to have to break the longer sentences into shorter ones that would suggest things are not connected that I want people to see as connected. Short sentences make for fast reading; often you want slow reading.
We cannot do without the semicolon. The Apostrophe Protection Society is going along very strongly. I would be more than happy to join a Semicolon Supporting Society.
Roslyn Petelin 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.
Can you only start a boring admin task once your house is clean? Do you leave the trickiest emails to the end of the day?
Delaying a goal or task – usually to do something less important instead – is known as procrastination and it affects many of us. Most people report procrastinating some of the time, but for others it can be chronic.
While procrastination is common, it can be frustrating and lead to feelings of shame, guilt and anxiety.
Here’s why you might be avoiding that task – and five steps to get on top of it.
Am I procrastinating?
You might find yourself putting off starting something, abandoning it before it’s finished or leaving it to the very last minute.
Thoughts such as “I can catch up later” or “I’ll turn it in late” can be telltale signs of procrastination. Maybe you’ve Googled “Why do I procrastinate?” while procrastinating and have come across this article.
Other times, you might not even be aware you’re doing it. Perhaps you look up and realise you’ve been scrolling online shopping and kitten videos for the past hour, instead of doing your assignment.
Procrastination is not a character flaw, and it doesn’t mean you’re lazy or even bad at managing time. Framing it this way can make you feel even worse about the behaviour, and stops you learning the real reasons behind it.
If you want to stop procrastinating, it’s important to understand why you do it in the first place.
You may find yourself doing another, less urgent task, without even realising you’re procrastinating. Daenin/Shutterstock
Why do I procrastinate?
Procrastination can be a way of dealing with tricky emotions. Research shows we put off tasks we find boring or frustrating, as well as those we resent or that lack personal meaning.
We may avoid tasks that create stress or painful emotions, such as completing a tax return where you owe a lot of money, or packing up a parent’s house after their death.
There a few deeper reasons, too.
Procrastination can be a sign of perfectionism. This is when an intense fear of failure – of getting something wrong – creates so much pressure to be perfect that it stops us from even getting started.
People with low self-esteem also tend to procrastinate, whether or not they experience perfectionism. Here, it’s a negative self-view (“I’m not good at most things”) coupled with low confidence (“I probably won’t get it right”) that gets in the way of beginning a task.
Distraction can be a factor, too. Most of us battle constant interruptions, with pings and alerts designed to redirect our attention. But being very easily distracted can also be a sign you’re avoiding the task.
For some people, difficulty completing tasks could be a sign of an underlying issue such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. If you’re worried procrastination is affecting your day-to-day life, you can speak to your doctor to seek help.
Some people enjoy the pressure of a deadline. Leaving a task to the last minute can be a strategy to improve motivation or get it done in a limited time.
Procrastination can also be a coping mechanism.
Delaying unpleasant tasks may make us feel better in the moment. Avoiding the task may mean we don’t have to face the possibility of getting it wrong, or the negative emotions or consequences it involves.
But this usually only works in the short term, and in the long term it’s more likely to cause problems.
Procrastination can trigger self-criticism as well as negative emotions such as guilt and shame.
In the long term it can also lead to mental health problems including anxiety and depression. Procrastinating has even been linked to poor outcomes in education – such as being caught copying in exams – and at work, including lower salaries and higher likelihood of unemployment.
So what can we do about it?
5 steps to tackling procrastination
Face it – you’re procrastinating. Being able to identify and name these patterns is the first step to overcoming procrastination.
Explore why. Understanding the underlying causes is key. Are you afraid of getting it wrong? Is your to-do list unrealistic? Or do you just love a tight deadline? If your procrastination results from perfectionism or low self-esteem you may wish to explore evidence-based treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy, with a therapist or through self-guided activities.
Start prioritising. Take a good look at your to-do list. Are the most urgent or important things at the top? Have you given yourself enough time to complete the tasks? Breaking a task into smaller chunks and taking regular breaks will help prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. If you’re not sure what’s the most important, try talking it through with someone. If you tend to leave the most boring things to the last minute and then never get around to them, set some time aside at the start of each day to get these tasks done.
Avoid distractions. Set your phone to “do not disturb”, hang a sign on the door, tell those around you you’ll be “offline” for a little while. Setting a clear start and end time can help you stick to this rule.
Build in rewards. Life is hard work – be kind to yourself. Whenever you complete a difficult task or cross something off your to-do list, balance this by doing something more enjoyable. Building in rewards can make facing the to-do list a little bit easier.
Catherine Houlihan 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.
What if we could design a machine that could read your emotions and intentions, write thoughtful, empathetic, perfectly timed responses — and seemingly know exactly what you need to hear? A machine so seductive, you wouldn’t even realise it’s artificial. What if we already have?
In a comprehensive meta-analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we show that the latest generation of large language model-powered chatbots match and exceed most humans in their ability to communicate. A growing body of research shows these systems now reliably pass the Turing test, fooling humans into thinking they are interacting with another human.
None of us was expecting the arrival of super communicators. Science fiction taught us that artificial intelligence (AI) would be highly rational and all-knowing, but lack humanity.
We call these systems “anthropomorphic agents”. Traditionally, anthropomorphism refers to ascribing human traits to non-human entities. However, LLMs genuinely display highly human-like qualities, so calls to avoid anthropomorphising LLMs will fall flat.
This is a landmark moment: when you cannot tell the difference between talking to a human or an AI chatbot online.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re an AI
What does this mean? On the one hand, LLMs promise to make complex information more widely accessible via chat interfaces, tailoring messages to individual comprehension levels. This has applications across many domains, such as legal services or public health. In education, the roleplay abilities can be used to create Socratic tutors that ask personalised questions and help students learn.
At the same time, these systems are seductive. Millions of users already interact with AI companion apps daily. Much has been said about the negative effects of companion apps, but anthropomorphic seduction comes with far wider implications.
Users are ready to trust AI chatbots so much that they disclose highly personal information. Pair this with the bots’ highly persuasive qualities, and genuine concerns emerge.
Recent research by AI company Anthropic further shows that its Claude 3 chatbot was at its most persuasive when allowed to fabricate information and engage in deception. Given AI chatbots have no moral inhibitions, they are poised to be much better at deception than humans.
This opens the door to manipulation at scale, to spread disinformation, or create highly effective sales tactics. What could be more effective than a trusted companion casually recommending a product in conversation? ChatGPT has already begun to provide product recommendations in response to user questions. It’s only a short step to subtly weaving product recommendations into conversations – without you ever asking.
What can be done?
It is easy to call for regulation, but harder to work out the details.
The first step is to raise awareness of these abilities. Regulation should prescribe disclosure – users need to always know that they interact with an AI, like the EU AI Act mandates. But this will not be enough, given the AI systems’ seductive qualities.
The second step must be to better understand anthropomorphic qualities. So far, LLM tests measure “intelligence” and knowledge recall, but none so far measures the degree of “human likeness”. With a test like this, AI companies could be required to disclose anthropomorphic abilities with a rating system, and legislators could determine acceptable risk levels for certain contexts and age groups.
The cautionary tale of social media, which was largely unregulated until much harm had been done, suggests there is some urgency. If governments take a hands-off approach, AI is likely to amplify existing problems with spreading of mis- and disinformation, or the loneliness epidemic. In fact, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has already signalled that he would like to fill the void of real human contact with “AI friends”.
Relying on AI companies to refrain from further humanising their systems seems ill-advised. All developments point in the opposite direction. OpenAI is working on making their systems more engaging and personable, with the ability to give your version of ChatGPT a specific “personality”. ChatGPT has generally become more chatty, often asking followup questions to keep the conversation going, and its voice mode adds even more seductive appeal.
Much good can be done with anthropomorphic agents. Their persuasive abilities can be used for ill causes and for good ones, from fighting conspiracy theories to enticing users into donating and other prosocial behaviours.
Yet we need a comprehensive agenda across the spectrum of design and development, deployment and use, and policy and regulation of conversational agents. When AI can inherently push our buttons, we shouldn’t let it change our systems.
Jevin West receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and others. The full list of funders and affiliated organizations can be found here: https://jevinwest.org/cv.html
Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter 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.
You might have heard of people using tape to literally keep their mouths shut while they sleep. Mouth taping has become a popular trend on social media, with many fans claiming it helps improve sleep and overall health.
The purported benefits of mouth taping during sleep are largely anecdotal, and include claims of better airflow, less snoring, improved asthma symptoms, less of a dry mouth, being less likely to have bad breath, and better sleep quality.
The rationale for mouth taping during sleep is to encourage breathing through the nose rather than through the mouth. When a person’s nasal passages are blocked, breathing switches from the nose to the mouth. Mouth breathing has been linked to conditions such as obstructive sleep apnoea.
But is mouth taping an effective way to address these issues, and is it safe? A new review suggests taping your mouth shut while you sleep offers limited benefits – and could pose risks.
What did the review find?
In a new paper, Canadian researchers reviewed the scientific literature on mouth taping, searching for studies that mentioned terms such as “mouth breathing”, “mouth taping” and “sleep”.
They searched specifically for studies looking at people with known mouth breathing and breathing-related sleeping problems such as obstructive sleep apnoea to understand the potential benefits and harms of mouth taping for this group.
Obstructive sleep apnoea is a condition where your airway is partly or completely blocked at times while you’re asleep. This can cause you to stop breathing for short periods, called “apnoeas”. Apnoeas can happen many times a night, resulting in lowered oxygen levels in the blood as well as sleep disruption.
The researchers found ten eligible studies published between 1999 and 2024, with a total of 213 participants. Eight studies looked at mouth taping, and two studies involved using a chin strap to keep the mouth shut.
Only two studies identified any benefits of mouth taping for mild obstructive sleep apnoea. The observed improvements – to measures such as oxygen levels in the blood and number of apnoeas per hour – were modest.
And although they were statistically significant, they were probably not clinically significant. This means these changes likely wouldn’t make much difference to symptoms or treatment decisions.
The remainder of studies found no evidence mouth taping helps to treat mouth breathing or related conditions.
What’s more, four studies warned about potential serious harms. In particular, covering the mouth could pose a risk of asphyxiation (lack of oxygen that can lead to unconsciousness or death) for people whose mouth breathing is caused by significant blockage of the nasal airways. This kind of nasal obstruction could be a result of conditions such as hay fever, deviated septum, or enlarged tonsils.
In other words, mouth taping is definitely not a good idea if you have a blocked nose, as it’s unsafe to have both the nose and the mouth obstructed at the same time during sleep.
What’s the take-home message?
The authors concluded there are very few benefits and some potential serious risks associated with mouth taping in people who are mouth breathers or have obstructive sleep apnoea.
They did however note we need further high-quality evidence to better understand if mouth taping is safe and works.
This review didn’t focus on any research relating to mouth taping for proposed improvements to mood, skin, digestion, sharper jaw lines and other things, so the researchers could not draw conclusions about the efficacy and safety of mouth taping for those purposes.
If you have concerns about your sleep, the best thing to do is to consult trusted scientific sources or a health-care professional who will be able to guide you to address the underlying causes of your sleep challenges.
Trying social media trends such as mouth taping before you seek expert advice could lead to delays in diagnosing serious conditions for which there are evidence-based treatments available.
It’s possible that in some healthy adults, without respiratory conditions, without significant sleep disorders, and who don’t have tape allergies, that mouth taping could pose little harm and produce some modest benefits. But we don’t have enough evidence yet to know one way or the other.
Moira Junge is CEO of The Sleep Health Foundation. She is also affiliated with the Healthylife Health Advisory Board and is a psychologist and clinic director at Yarraville Health Group.
You’ve seen them in every gym: tight black leggings, neon sleeves and even knee-length socks.
Compression gear is everywhere, worn by weekend joggers, elite athletes and influencers striking poses mid-squat.
But do compression garments actually improve your performance, or is the benefit mostly in your head?
Let’s dive into the history, the science and whether they are worth your money.
From hospitals to hashtags
Compression garments didn’t start in sport. They were originally used in medical settings to improve blood flow in patients recovering from surgery or with circulation issues such as varicose veins.
Doctors found tight garments that applied gentle pressure to limbs could help move blood and reduce swelling.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, athletes, scientists and sports brands began experimenting with compression wear in training and competition.
Companies such as SKINS, 2XU, and Under Armour entered the scene with bold promises: improved performance, reduced fatigue and faster recovery.
Then, by the 2010s, compression wear wasn’t just for athletes – it had become a fashion statement.
Social media helped drive the trend: influencers wore these items in gym selfies, TikTokers praised the sleek, sculpted look. And with the rise of athleisure, compression garments became everyday apparel, blending fitness with fashion.
What are these garments supposed to do?
Compression gear is designed to fit tightly against the skin and apply gentle, consistent pressure to muscles. The big claims made by manufacturers include:
quicker recovery by boosting blood flow and reducing muscle stiffness
enhanced performance, including running faster, lifting heavier and improved endurance.
You’ll hear gym-goers say they feel “more supported” or “less sore” after using compression gear.
Some even report improved posture or a mental boost – like stepping into a superhero suit.
What the science says
Research into compression garments has been growing steadily and the results are mixed – but interesting.
A 2013 major meta-analysis reported moderate benefits across several recovery markers, including lower levels of creatine kinase (a sign of muscle damage) and less delayed-onset muscle soreness up to 72 hours after exercise.
A 2016 review found compression garments reduced muscle soreness and swelling and boosted muscle power and strength. These improvements were up to 1.5 times greater (compared to people who didn’t wear compression garments) in some cases.
Building on this, a 2017 review found people who wore compression gear recovered strength more quickly, with noticeable improvements within eight to 24 hours after a workout. Strength recovery scores were around 60% higher in those wearing compression gear compared to those who didn’t.
But the findings are not consistent. A 2022 review of 19 trials found little effect on strength during the first few days post-exercise.
And when it comes to actual performance, a comprehensive 2025 review of 51 studies concluded compression garments do not enhance race time or endurance performance in runners. And while they may reduce soft tissue vibration (which might feel more comfortable), they offered no meaningful edge in speed, stamina or oxygen use.
Overall, in simpler terms: compression gear may help you recover faster but don’t expect it to turn you into an Olympic sprinter.
When compression gear might help (and when it won’t)
Here are some situations when compression garments can be genuinely useful:
preventing swelling during long flights, especially for athletes travelling to competitions, and
improving circulation for people with medical conditions such as poor blood flow in the legs (chronic venous insufficiency) or long-term swelling (lymphedema), especially when recommended by a health-care provider.
But don’t count on them to:
improve your times: there’s no strong evidence they boost speed or endurance
make you stronger: while some research has noted improvements in strength and power, this won’t necessarily have a noticeable effect on your athletic performance
replace training or good sleep: recovery still depends on the basics – rest, hydration and nutrition.
So, should you wear them?
Compression outfits won’t magically transform your body or training results. But they aren’t a waste of money either.
If they make you feel more comfortable, confident or supported, that’s a valid reason to wear them. The psychological boost alone can be enough to enhance motivation or focus.
And when it comes to post-exercise recovery, the evidence is solid enough to justify keeping a pair in your gym bag.
Think of them like a good pair of shoes. They won’t run the race for you, but they might make the journey a little smoother.
And if you’re just wearing them for the outfit photo on Instagram? That’s fine, too. Sometimes, confidence is the best workout gear of all.
Ben Singh 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.
Africa has 38 coastal and island nations. Their maritime industries – including energy, tourism, maritime transport, shipping and fishing – play a crucial role in developing these nations.
Key to harnessing these resources are Africa’s maritime boundaries – lines on a map showing the legal divisions of the ocean between neighbouring coastal states.
Some of these boundaries were created by colonial powers and kept after independence. Their purpose was to achieve territorial security and ensure the exclusive exploitation of resources and to maintain navigational freedom.
But Africa’s maritime boundaries sometimes lead to conflict, prevent cooperation on resource management and create room for maritime crimes, like illegal fishing. This is because they are often contested. Countries have overlapping claims and varying interests in resource exploration. This is common in maritime areas rich in oil, gas and fisheries, and deep seabed resources.
In our recent paper we found that using international law to resolve maritime boundaries does not always bring peace, especially when it results in ceding the disputed area to one party. It can result in animosity between countries and breed room for continued distrust among peoples.
Today, Africa has the most unresolved maritime boundary disputes in the world and the lowest number of settled boundary disputes.
As more ocean resources are discovered, climate change may heighten disputes. Rising sea levels can gradually submerge maritime zones, potentially affecting the baselines from which these zones are measured. This could create uncertainty or trigger new conflicts.
In our paper, we suggest a collaborative approach to resolving maritime disputes. We hope that this will help prevent many African countries from missing out on the benefits of their oceans.
Price of disputed boundaries
Disagreements over maritime boundaries can have many negative effects.
Research has shown that criminal activities tend to increase in disputed maritime boundaries. For instance, illegal fishers are aware that because there is dispute over a border, there will also be enforcement gaps.
Countries in dispute will also not work together and will not be sending patrols to contested areas. For instance, in 2016, a Chinese vessel escaped into Sierra Leone to avoid capture. When Guinean naval forces boarded the vessel for enforcement, there was an exchange of fire and 11 Guineans were detained by Sierra Leone.
When boundaries are disputed, it also means that local fishers are likely to encroach into neighbouring waters, often unknowingly, in search of better catches. Given the significance of fisheries to coastal livelihoods and the extent of depletion, this threatens peace and security. It fuels tension between communities and countries over access to dwindling resources.
Disagreements over maritime boundaries also diminish maritime security cooperation, complicate joint patrols, and divert attention from tackling shared threats such as piracy.
Colonialism never ended
Unfortunately, resolving maritime boundary disputes is complicated by a principle in international law known as uti possidetis juris – “as you possess under law”.
The principle says that when countries argue over borders, international law, built around colonial-era boundaries, is used to decide who gets what. This creates a “winner-takes-all” approach – one side gains control over the disputed area and resources. International courts, like the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, follow the provisions of law reinforcing uti possidetis.
Our examination of maritime boundary disputes in west and central Africa found that the principle of uti possidetis juris had failed to alleviate maritime boundary tensions. In some cases, it has exacerbated them.
One example is a maritime dispute between Cameroon and Nigeria decided in 2002. The dispute was over who had control of Bakassi, an oil-rich region, and its maritime frontier.
The uti possidetis juris principle upheld the lines drawn at the time of Nigeria’s independence and resulted in the ceding of Bakassi to Cameroon. The impact of the resolution lingers. To date, thousands of displaced Bakassi people that returned to Nigeria have yet to be resettled and reintegrated. Disputes also continue between fishers from Nigeria and Cameroonian law enforcement agents. In extreme cases, it results in death, like the alleged killing of 97 Nigerian fishers by Cameroonian marine police.
The way forward
In our paper, we recommend that courts, tribunals or disputing countries consider joint management agreements to resolve maritime disputes. Under such agreements, countries share and manage disputed maritime resources.
These agreements will allow for the joint management of shared resources. It will also encourage cooperation and collaboration in other areas, such as joint operations to combat illegal fishing and piracy. While international courts may apply uti possidetis juris as required by law, countries should be encouraged to negotiate special arrangements – such as joint development agreements – as part of the resolution process. Especially in cases where livelihoods and longstanding community ties risk being disrupted by unilateral decisions or the ceding of disputed areas to one party.
Prolonged boundary disputes only enable criminal actors to exploit Africa’s resources, undermining collective progress. A shift towards collaborative solutions is essential for achieving a sustainable and prosperous future for the continent.
Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood receives funding from the PEW Charitable Trust and the Research Council of Norway. The St Andrews Research Internship Scheme (StARIS) supported the initial peer-reviewed research.
Elizabeth Nwarueze 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.
Vaccines have proved to be one of the most effective tools in fighting infectious diseases, but convincing people to get vaccinated can be tough. Especially young people.
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, many countries reported high levels of vaccine hesitancy among younger population groups. Negative healthcare experiences and general distrust of government have cultivated vaccine hesitancy across Africa. Misleading information about vaccine side-effects on social media adds to this challenge.
This hesitancy continues today. A 2024 study on adolescents and young adults (aged 10 to 35) in sub-Saharan Africa found a vaccine acceptance rate of just 38.7%.
These concerns were echoed in a recent study we carried out among 165 young adults in Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia, looking at attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine. We wanted to know what could be done to help improve future vaccine acceptance, inform campaigns and prepare for future public health responses.
Participants were hesitant to be vaccinated, for various reasons, and suggested what policymakers could do to improve vaccine uptake.
Understanding young people’s perspectives on vaccine hesitancy and what can be done to address this is crucial for improving vaccine acceptance in the future.
What young adults told us
Our research gathered data through focus groups and interviews.
The participants described a fear of injections, uncertainty about side effects, distrust in healthcare systems and rude healthcare workers.
Some participants were worried about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, particularly how it might affect those with pre-existing health conditions.
Many believed that the vaccine was developed too quickly without sufficient testing and a lack of accessible information.
Many expressed a strong fear of needles. A young South African woman aged 19 commented:
I am afraid of injections, so for me, it would be better if there was something that could be taken orally, something you can drink.
Getting over the hurdle
We found young people often felt left out of vaccine conversations. They wanted to be part of the solution and make informed choices but needed the right tools and support to do so.
Participants suggested practical ideas to help boost vaccine acceptance among their peers.
Several highlighted the importance of assessing individual health status before administering vaccines, to avoid adverse interactions with existing medical conditions and treatments. They believed that situations where vaccines were mistakenly blamed for pre-existing illnesses or ongoing treatments could be avoided.
Participants suggested innovative strategies to make vaccines more accessibile. Mobile vaccination sites and community-based outreach programmes were some of the suggestions.
They must introduce mobile clinics, so that people don’t find themselves having to travel long distances to vaccinate. – 18-year-old male, South Africa
Young people also suggested household visits to people who were immobile because of age, illness or disability.
Many advocated for non-injectable vaccine options, such as oral medications or microneedle patches, which could improve accessibility and reduce anxiety.
The oral polio vaccine, which has been widely used in global polio eradication efforts, is an example of a non-injectable vaccine.
COVID-19 microneedle patch prototypes are being explored for clinical testing.
The youth urged public figures, including politicians, celebrities and influencers, to publicly endorse the vaccine.
It would be nice if the president could be shown on television receiving a vaccine so that we can see for ourselves whether he is given the same thing that everyone else receives. – 20-year-old male, South Africa
More engaging videos, interactive interviews and testimonials from vaccinated individuals could be shared across social media platforms.
The young people also emphasised the importance of comprehensive training for healthcare providers. They highlighted the need for healthcare professionals to provide respectful and empathetic care. They suggested that, by fostering respectful communication, healthcare providers could create a more welcoming and comfortable environment for their clients.
In addition, providing vaccine education in schools could educate pupils so that they could make decisions on their own.
Way forward
Engaging young people as active participants in shaping public health strategies can help increase vaccine acceptance and ensure a healthier future for all.
We believe that our findings can be applied in two ways.
First, to inform the design of tailored interventions that better resonate with young people’s desires and needs, paving the way for increased vaccine uptake and acceptability.
Second, to highlight areas where young people may need further information and engagement, to better understand some of the broader issues and why some of their recommendations might not be feasible in the short or longer term.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Julia Yarkoni, Fellow in Global Journalism, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
This past April, the Boston Marathon attracted more than 32,000 runners and approximately half a million spectators. With such a huge crowd on hand, it’s easy to think that the athletes’ major source of support comes from fans of the sport. More than a million people annually run marathon races, and most of them have a team of people behind them.
Marathoners rely on the strengths of a community of people. Families, coaches, marathon volunteers, race directors and health professionals dedicate time and energy to the runners’ dreams. And each group protects the health of the athletes in a different way. These unsung heroes make the impossible possible and they do it because the sport of long-distance running is a community endeavour.
Families lay the foundation; research found that partners are “strikingly co-operative” as the non-running partner often picks up chores and child care uncomplainingly because they believe in the end goal. And a [2023 New York Times] article reported that athletes reciprocate by giving their partner recreational time.
Running is a lifestyle
When a family member is training to complete a marathon, families recognize there is safety in sticking together. Registered dietitian Kristy Baumann, owner of Marathon Nutritionist in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., has run 13 marathons. She describes how her mother would accompany her when she trained for hours.
“My mom would bike with me on my long runs,” she says.
In a 2015 article for Runner’s World, runner Courtney Crandell described how her family made sure she ate, maintained her health insurance and had a ride home after the race.
Long-distance running draws people together who are not family. Coaches get to know their runners intimately and can prevent racers from ending up in dangerous situations. For example, Molly Monk, an athlete with unpredictable blood pressure, relied on her coach to help her train so that she avoided passing out during the marathon.
Preparing physically and mentally
Andy Jones-Wilkins, an American endurance running coach and writer, takes pride in being able to train marathon racers for four to six months because he values his relationships with runners. Jones-Wilkins, 57, is currently coaching 24 athletes scattered across the U.S.
“My job as a coach is to give them not just the physical but also the mental and emotional tools to not just prepare for the race but to execute and to finish,” he says.
Jones-Wilkins stays in contact with his athletes to debrief and to discuss with them the next step forward, particularly if they were disappointed on race day.
Thirty-four years of long-distance running has taught Jones-Wilkins who the true unsung heroes are: “The people who put on these events (race directors) are the heart and soul of this sport.”
Supporting runners
Jones-Wilkins’ admiration for race directors led him to write “The Race Director Chronicles,” an online series profiling different race directors. He says they are often unpaid, deal with thousands of race details and invariably face negative feedback. He particularly admires the talent these individuals have for networking.
Long-distance running brings together introverts and extroverts. Tim Bradley is one of those extroverts. A volunteer co-ordinator specializing in running events in Los Angeles, he works 11 races a year and also created a volunteer registration platform to help other volunteer co-ordinators: “I can’t think of other sports that recruit so many volunteers and are so dependent on them.”
He typically starts recruitment four months before a race and registers 4,000 volunteers in preparation for race day. Volunteer responsibilities include raising funds, registering runners, building spectator stands, operating refreshment stations, regulating traffic, offering first aid, tracking and publishing results and cleaning up.
Sometimes the most important role a person can play in a marathon runner’s life is to tell them when there’s a higher priority requiring attention than the marathon itself. As a dietitian, Baumann says she encounters young women who struggle with nutrition issues that come to light when they start to train.
“My job is twofold: helping people fuel for performance, feel their best and finish their race strong but also a lot that comes with it for many people is healing their relationship with food,” she says.
Marathons get their name from the Greek legend of the messenger Pheidippides, who ran 40 kilometres from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce Greece’s victory over Persia in a battle on the plain of Marathon.
Today a marathon runner’s successful finish is celebrated by many people who love the sport of long-distance running because its message is that solidarity wins.
Julia Yarkoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Fernando Pizarro, Lecturer, Department of Journalism, City St. George’s, University of London, City St George’s, University of London
The first five months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been brutal for the Democratic party, which has been almost completely unable to stop his aggressive agenda. In March, CNN polling showed the favourability rating for the Democrats at just 29% – a record low in CNN polls dating back to 1992.
The problem with the Democratic party “isn’t a lack of talent”, says Federico de Jesús, a Democratic strategist and spokesman for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign who I interviewed for this story. It is a “problem of vision and strategy”, he argues.
“A lot of people, in theory, agree with the Democrats on a lot of issues. But they don’t necessarily feel comfortable with the direction the party is taking.” De Jesús told me that the Democrats allowed themselves to become identified by “woke issues” by many voters who abandoned them in November.
However, the Democrats now have some reasons to celebrate. In early April, a Democratic-backed judge called Susan Crawford secured a seat in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. This kept liberal control of the state’s highest court intact. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll released a few weeks later showed that only 37% of US voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy.
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As a Washington political correspondent for almost two decades, I have witnessed how the parties changed the guard after painful election cycles. This time, in the absence of clear leaders, the challenge is quite high for the Democrats.
But who are the Democrats positioning themselves to lead the struggle against Trump’s policies? The acts of defiance are coming from two fronts: lawmakers in Congress and governors.
Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has predicted that the Democrats will win back control of the Senate after the 2026 midterm elections. “The electorate will desert the Republican candidates who embraced Trump in an overwhelming way”, he said on April 23.
Others, like California senator Adam Schiff and Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, are using tactics like holding town halls in strong Republican districts to rally the opposition. Michigan congressman Shri Thanedar even filed articles of impeachment against Trump on April 28, but top Democrats shot down the effort as impractical.
At the same time, House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is facing an intra-party effort to unseat many long-time lawmakers in solid Democratic districts. David Hogg, vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, is pledging US$20 million (£15 million) to end a culture of “seniority politics” which allows “asleep at the wheel” lawmakers to stay in office.
But it is New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has been stealing the headlines. She is setting fundraising records, preparing for an effort to challenge Schumer in a New York senatorial primary in 2028. Surveys this early are rarely predictive, but an April head-to-head poll has Ocasio-Cortez leading Schumer by double digits.
Three Democrat governors are standing out at present: Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Minnesota’s Tim Walz and California’s Gavin Newsom.
Shapiro is very popular with voters in his crucial swing state, and gets good marks even from Republicans on his bipartisan record. Walz was Kamala Harris’s running mate in November’s election, and his campaign performance was well received by his party. Walz is an obvious contender to run for the White House in 2028.
But Newsom is probably the most notable of the three. While he’s been critical of his party, telling the Hill newspaper on April 21 that Democrats haven’t performed a thorough autopsy of what led to the loss in November, he is seen as someone who can address Republican voters well.
A second tier of governors include Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, whose soft criticism of the Trump administration’s tariff regime saw Trump praise her for doing an “excellent job”. She is joined by Maryland’s Wes Moore, who is young and popular in his state, and JB Pritzker of Illinois.
Pritzker called for “mass mobilisations and disruption” against Trump at a Democratic event in New Hampshire in late April. “These governors need to stand out”, said de Jesús, “either by fighting against Trump, or either [by] achieving something memorable.”
Harris had largely kept a low profile since November’s election. But on April 30 she sharply criticised Trump’s first 100 days in office during a speech in San Francisco. She may decide to enter the race for California governor in the summer of 2025.
Dark horse leader
There could also be a dark horse leader waiting in the wings: Rahm Emanuel. As former Chicago mayor, Illinois congressman, Obama and Bill Clinton aide and US ambassador to Japan, he is considered a political heavyweight.
Emanuel has hinted he may again run for public office, while criticising the party’s focus on gender issues and not on “kitchen table” issues as reasons for November’s defeat.
Progressives chafe at the idea of dialling down the talk about certain policies, such as gender and identity issues. But both Newsom and Emanuel are among those suggesting that the focus should instead shift to defending changes that most voters can relate to.
At the moment, the party still lacks a clear leader and direction to recover from the 2024 defeat. Newsom, for instance, told the Hill that he doesn’t “know what the party is”. “I’m still struggling with that,” he added.
According to de Jesús, “people don’t necessarily want someone to just hate Trump, but to identify the issues voters care about and co-opt that populist message.”
Fernando Pizarro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Powell, Teaching Fellow in Strategic and Air Power Studies, University of Portsmouth
Donald Trump has unveiled plans for a new “next-generation” missile defence system which he says will by “capable even of intercepting missiles launched from the other side of the world, or launched from space”. The US president says “Golden Dome”, which is reportedly partly inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system that protects the country from missile attacks, will be operational by the end of his current four-year term of office.
But critics say that it’s much harder to design a defence system to protect a land mass the size of the United States. This is particularly the case in an era characterised by the threat from hypersonic missiles, such as those used by Russia against Ukraine, as well as attacks from space.
Ever since the first aerial attacks on civilian populations, there have been increasing calls to provide systems that can defend and destroy the potential for an adversary to attack people, governments and infrastructure.
This developed from relatively basic defence systems, such as those employed by the UK from 1917 to protect London and the south-east of England from attack during the first world war, which developed further to provide a relatively large degree of protection during the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940.
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During the cold war, which followed the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, research accelerated globally into ways of providing greater protection against nuclear attack. The most eye-catching of these ideas was the announcement by Ronald Reagan in 1983 of plans to develop a massive (and hugely expensive) land and space-based missile defence system.
The project, officially called the Strategic Defence Initiative quickly became known colloquially – if slightly mockingly – as “Star Wars”.
The concept behind the missile defence system was that it would provide a way of effectively making nuclear weapons obsolete. Through the application of a defensive system that incorporated both land and space-based missiles, it was believed that any nuclear warhead fired would be destroyed before it was able to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
This would not only prevent intercontinental ballistic missiles from striking their intended target, but their destruction so high above the Earth would mean that they would not pose a threat in terms of nuclear radiation and fallout.
It’s important to note that what was announced by Reagan in March 1983 was not about the development, construction or application of an actual defensive system. It was about funding research into the technologies that would be required for such a system.
Reagan claimed this was a move to create a more peaceful world by making nuclear weapons effectively obsolete. But it was certainly not seen this way in Moscow.
It was also something of a half truth. The move should be seen within the wider context of cold war relations and developments. The Reagan administration was seeking to bring the Soviet Union to the negotiating table to discuss reductions in strategic weapons.
By developing a defensive system that would make strategic nuclear weapons almost obsolete, it was hoped this would force the hand of the Soviets and effectively compel them to agree to talks.
The ‘Star Wars’ era: Ronald Reagan hoped his planned missile defence system would force the USSR to the negotiating table. He was right. Yuryi Abramochkin/RIA Novosti archive., CC BY
But at the same time, as far as the decision-makers in the Kremlin were concerned, such a system – if developed and deployed – would give the United States a colossal strategic advantage. By the mid-1980s, it was highly unlikely that the Soviets could ever afford the investment in research and development and production capabilities to design their own system. This would mean that the Soviet Union was now highly vulnerable to a nuclear attack, while the US would be protected.
This would place the United States in a similar position to that which it had enjoyed between 1945 and 1949, when it was the only nation that had the ability launch nuclear weapons. The theory of mutually assured destruction would fall almost overnight, meaning that the US had very little to fear from launching a nuclear attack, as any Soviet response would be futile.
Given the potential for nuclear blackmail by the all-powerful US, it might cause the Kremlin to consider launching a pre-emptive strike against the US before such a system could be developed or implemented. Rather than making the world a safer place and diminishing the place of nuclear weapons, the world would become more dangerous.
Pie in the sky?
The Strategic Defence Initiative never really got off the ground. The initial mockery from large parts of the public of the US hid many real challenges to the development of such a defensive system. The research and development aspect alone came with a very large price tag. This was largely out of step with Reagan’s ideas about small government and limited public spending.
In order to fund such a programme, money would have to be diverted from other domestic and social programmes, such as health and education. Despite the cold war context, this may well have risked unrest and protest from large swaths of the US population.
The new technologies that were supposed to be developed as a part of this initiative were untested. It became evident that the only real way to test the efficacy and capability would be to expose the world to a nuclear attack and hope that the theoretical concepts that had been developed actually worked in practice.
The Soviet Union also found ways of countering the potential developments that may emerge from the Strategic Defence Initiative, making the system almost redundant before it had begun.
Proposed defence systems, like the Strategic Defence Initiative or the Golden Dome, can appear to be a panacea to defensive worries caused by heavily armed adversaries. Announcements about their development can cause global headlines and speculation about what this means for relations between nations and the international system.
Take a step back from the US president’s hype, however, and it’s clear that Golden Dome will be hugely expensive and challenging to operate. Moreover it will require significant capabilities that do not yet exist and have yet to be tested operationally.
Matthew Powell 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.
Canada needs to rethink how to prepare Canadians for the workforce.(Shutterstock)
Canada is facing a significant skills shortage. According to recent data, 77 per cent of Canadian businesses surveyed say they are unable to find suitably skilled candidates for the jobs they have available.
This mismatch persists despite Canada having one of its largest-ever graduating classes — nearly 360,000 students from colleges, universities and trade schools.
As labour shortages deepen across sectors, the disconnect between formal education and real-world job requirements is becoming harder to ignore.
Canada’s antiquated apprenticeship system is struggling to produce enough workers to fill this gap. It is slow, outdated and has low completion rates: just 32 per cent of male and 35 per cent of female candidates complete their training.
Some employers are losing confidence in using qualifications as a basis for hiring. (Shutterstock)
Completing an apprenticeship can take up to four years in Canada, while many other nations have much higher completion rates in two years or less.
It is not just trades that Canada has challenges with. If current trends continue, Canada is projected to face a shortage of 100,000 nurses by 2030. Significant shortages are also expected in technology-related positions, construction engineering and K-12 education, where demand for teachers and school administrators is rising.
Other companies, like Shopify, take candidates from high school and put them through custom programs designed to ensure they have the skills needed to work in a particular organization or industry.
Colleges and universities have long been seen as the primary pipelines for skilled labour. But as employer expectations evolve, Canada needs to reconsider the role these institutions play in producing skilled workers.
Simply expanding existing programs or opening new programs will not solve the underlying problem. What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking of how we prepare Canadians for the workforce.
5 steps Canada should take
Canada’s new government, in collaboration with provinces, territories and industry, needs to pursue a five-pronged strategy to address the country’s deepening skills crisis:
1. Modernize the apprenticeship system.
Canada must transition from a traditional, time-based apprenticeship model to a flexible, competency-based system. Instead of being tied to rigid journeyperson-to-apprentice ratios and multi-year timelines, learners should be able to demonstrate their skills on demand anywhere, anytime. The goal should be to reduce completion times to two years or less.
Learning should be accessible through multiple formats, including workplace mentorship, YouTube tutorials, boot camps, micro-credentials and virtual labs. What matters is not where learning takes place, but whether a learner can demonstrate competence.
Learners should be able to demonstrate their skills on demand anywhere, anytime. (Shutterstock)
2. Accelerate skills recognition through micro-credentials.
Canada should fast-track the adoption of micro-learning, stackable micro-credentials and competency-based certification. Micro-credentials are short, focused learning experiences that recognize specific skills or knowledge.
In fields like IT, project management and supply chain management, many professionals succeed without formal academic degrees, instead relying on industry-recognized certifications.
This model must expand into other sectors, especially health care, manufacturing and finance, where skills-based hiring could address labour shortages.
Canada needs a nationally coherent, on-demand competency-based assessment system. Certified assessors should be able to validate individuals’ skills and link them to job profiles, occupational standards and credentials. This is not just an equity issue, but is an economic imperative. Other countries are much better at this than Canada is.
Competency-based, work-integrated learning models that are designed with industry and delivered in two- or three-year formats could dramatically increase job readiness.
5. Incentivize employer investment in upskilling and reskilling.
Canada needs a stronger incentive framework for continuous learning. Canada’s training credit — a refundable tax credit that helps offset the cost of eligible training fees — helps some individuals, but employers still view training as a cost rather than a driver of productivity, retention and competitiveness.
A new approach should include tax incentives for employers and employees investing in learning; co-funded, industry-led training partnerships; industry-sponsored micro-credentials; and public recognition for employers who demonstrate leadership in workforce development.
Canada cannot meet today’s workforce challenges with outdated systems and thinking. Doing more of the same and expecting different results is no longer an option. What is needed is evidence-informed and future-focused reforms that prioritize skills, flexibility and inclusion.
Stephen Murgatroyd 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.
So, how do they know what’s likely to happen months in the future?
I’m an atmospheric scientist who studies extreme weather. Let’s take a look at what Atlantic hurricane forecasts are based on and why those forecasts can shift during the season.
What goes into a seasonal forecast
Think of the preseason hurricane forecast as the 30,000-foot view: It can’t predict if or when a storm will hit a particular location, but it can offer insight into how many storms are likely to form throughout the entire Atlantic, and how active the season overall might be.
These outlooks rely heavily on two large-scale climate factors.
The first is the sea surface temperature in areas where tropical cyclones tend to form and grow. Hurricanes draw their energy from warm ocean water. So when the Atlantic is unusually warm, as it has been in recent years, it provides more fuel for storms to form and intensify.
Once water temperatures are 79 degrees Fahrenheit (26 degrees Celsius), hurricanes can form. Most of the Gulf was above that by late May 2025. NOAA/NESDIS
The second key ingredient that meteorologists have their eye on is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which forecasters refer to as ENSO. ENSO is a climate cycle that shifts every few years between three main phases: El Niño, La Niña, and a neutral space that lives somewhere in between.
During El Niño, winds over the Atlantic high up in the troposphere – roughly 25,000 to 40,000 feet – strengthen and can disrupt storms and hurricanes. La Niña, on the other hand, tends to reduce these winds, making it easier for storms to form and grow. When you look over the historical hurricane record, La Niña years have tended to be busier than their El Niño counterparts, as we saw from 2020 through 2023.
We’re in the neutral phase as the 2025 hurricane season begins, and probably will be for at least a few more months. That means upper-level winds aren’t particularly hostile to hurricanes, but they’re not exactly rolling out the red carpet either.
At the same time, sea surface temperatures are running warmer than the 30-year average, but not quite at the record-breaking levels seen in some recent seasons.
It’s important to emphasize that these factors merely load the dice, tilting the odds toward more or fewer storms, but not guaranteeing an outcome. A host of other variables influence whether a storm actually forms, how strong it becomes, and whether it ever threatens land.
The smaller influences forecasters can’t see yet
Once hurricane season is underway, forecasters start paying close attention to shorter-term influences.
These subseasonal factors evolve quickly enough that they don’t shape the entire season. However, they can noticeably raise or lower the chances for storms developing in the coming two to four weeks.
These dust plumes tend to suppress hurricanes by drying out the atmosphere and reducing sunlight that reaches the ocean surface. Dust outbreaks are next-to-impossible to predict months in advance, but satellite observations of growing plumes can give forecasters a heads-up a couple weeks before the dust reaches the primary hurricane development region off the coast of Africa.
Dust blowing in from the Sahara Desert can tamp down hurricane activities by shading the ocean over the main development region for hurricanes and drying out the atmosphere, just off the African coast. This plume spread over 2,000 miles in June 2020. NASA
Another key ingredient that doesn’t go into seasonal forecasts but becomes important during the season are African easterly waves. These “waves” are clusters of thunderstorms that roll off the West African coast, tracking from east to west across the ocean. Most major storms in the Atlantic basin, especially in the peak months of August and September, can trace their origins back to one of these waves.
Forecasters monitor strong waves as they begin their westward journey across the Atlantic, knowing they can provide some insight about potential risks to U.S. interests one to two weeks in advance.
Also in this subseasonal mix is the Madden–Julian Oscillation. The MJO is a wave-like pulse of atmospheric activity that moves slowly around the tropics every 30 to 60 days. When the MJO is active over the Atlantic, it enhances the formation of thunderstorms associated with hurricanes. In its suppressed phase, storm activity tends to die down. The MJO doesn’t guarantee storms – or a lack of them – but it turns up or down the odds. Its phase and position can be tracked two or three weeks in advance.
Lastly, forecasters will talk about the Loop Current, a deep river of warm water that flows from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico.
When storms pass over the Loop Current or its warm eddies, they can rapidly intensify because they are drawing energy from not just the warm surface water but from warm water that’s tens of meters deep. The Loop Current has helped power several historic Gulf storms, including Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Ida in 2021.
The Loop Current stretched well into the Gulf in May 2022. The scale, in meters, shows the maximum depth at which temperatures were 78 F (26 C) or greater. Nick Shay/University of Miami, CC BY-ND
But the Loop Current is always shifting. Its strength and location in early summer may look very different by late August or September.
Combined, these subseasonal signals help forecasters fine-tune their outlooks as the season unfolds.
In early summer, the Gulf of Mexico warms up faster than the open Atlantic, making it a notable hotspot for early-season tropical storm development, especially in June and July. The Texas coast, Louisiana, and the Florida Panhandle often face a higher early-season risk than locations along the Eastern seaboard.
These are generally the busiest areas during each month of hurricane season, but that doesn’t mean hurricanes won’t make landfall elsewhere. NOAA
By August and September, the season reaches its peak. This is when those waves moving off the coast of Africa become a primary source of storm activity. These long-track storms are sometimes called “Cape Verde hurricanes” because they originate near the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. While many stay over open water, others can gather steam and track toward the Caribbean, Florida or the Carolinas.
Later in the hurricane season, storms are more likely to form in the western Atlantic or Caribbean, where waters are still warm and upper-level winds remain favorable. These late-season systems have a higher probability of following atypical paths, as Sandy did in 2012 when it struck the New York City region and Milton did in 2024 before making landfall in Florida.
At the end of the day, the safest way to think about hurricane season is this: If you live along the coast, don’t let your guard down. Areas susceptible to hurricanes are never totally immune from hurricanes, and it only takes one to make it a dangerous – and unforgettable – season.
Colin Zarzycki’s research lab receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stephen Cushion, Chair Professor, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University
Following a legal battle with GB News, the UK’s media regulator is proposing to tighten its rules on politicians appearing as presenters.
Earlier this year, a judge concluded that Ofcom’s current impartiality guidelines are badly worded, and do not clearly explain to broadcasters when and where politicians can present news or current affairs programming.
Ofcom is now recommending changing its code to clarify that politicians cannot act as newsreaders, news interviewers or news reporters in any type of programming.
Ofcom defines news programming as a newsreader presenting information in bulletins, and reporters or correspondents delivering packages and live reports. Current affairs content is interpreted as long-form programming, involving extensive discussions, analysis or interviews with guests.
The proposed rule change is under consultation until June 2025. Ofcom noted: “The distinction between news and current affairs content has become more blurred and the use of politicians presenting programmes has become more prevalent.”
In February 2025, Ofcom lost a legal case to GB News about whether the channel breached “due impartiality” rules. The case involved Conservative former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was acting as a presenter on GB News while an MP.
Ofcom found GB News had breached impartiality rules without exceptional editorial justification. In separate programmes, Rees-Mogg had acted as a newsreader by reading out an Autocue summary of breaking news and engaging with a news correspondent.
GB News challenged Ofcom’s ruling. A judge at the high court found that the politician had produced news-related content, but within a current affairs programme. The judge concluded that Ofcom’s impartiality code was ambiguous about how politicians could present across different broadcast programming. Ofcom is proposing to clarify this in the rule change.
GB News, which has been the subject of several Ofcom investigations, has now accused the regulator of bias and demanded that it withdraw the proposals.
Due impartiality and public opinion
In recent years, new radio stations and television channels have begun pushing the boundaries of the UK’s rules on impartiality. High-profile politicians such as Nigel Farage have acted as presenters in programming that blurs the lines between news and current affairs.
Ofcom has so far allowed this on the grounds of freedom of expression and audience engagement. But the regulator has faced increasing pressure from politicians, lobby groups and the public to curb the creeping partisanship on TV and radio.
My new research project with colleagues at Cardiff University and broadcasters is exploring the impartiality of news across media platforms. We are also examining the implications of Ofcom’s rule change by asking whether the public wants politicians to act as broadcast presenters.
Ofcom has justified its decision to allow politicians to act as broadcast presenters by referring to audience research it commissioned in June 2024 that found no consensus against it.
However, the commissioned research by Ipsos UK was not an accurate representation of public opinion.
It involved a qualitative focus group study of 157 people across 29 online focus groups. Fifteen of the focus groups were frequent viewers or listeners of news and current affairs programmes, three had people who did not frequently watch or listen to these type of programmes, and 11 were with audiences of channels where politicians have regularly presented current affairs content.
In other words, the study drew on a highly constructed sample likely to support politicians presenting. Well over a third of the participants were represented by audiences who choose to regularly watch channels featuring politicians presenting.
Despite the skewed sample, according to Ipsos UK the “most prevalent opinion” – among focus group participants – “was feeling uncomfortable with politicians presenting current affairs content”.
This suggests that there was, in fact, a consensus of respondents concerned with politicians acting as presenters – and that consensus was opposed to politicians acting as presenters on TV and radio. This highlights the need for a representative study of public opinion on this issue.
What does the public really want?
Existing evidence suggests that public opinion is more against opinionated presenters than supporting partisanship in broadcasting. One poll in 2020 found more people opposed than favoured a Fox News-style channel to broadcast in the UK.
Academic research, including my ongoing work with colleagues, has consistently found the public prefers impartial news over partisan journalism. The Reuters Institute for Journalism has long found in representative surveys that the public rate neutral news well ahead of partisan reporting.
While Ofcom’s proposed latest amendment would tighten the rules on politicians acting as news presenters, it appears out of step with public opinion because many people feel uncomfortable with politicians presenting in any type of broadcast programme.
While GB News has recorded an increase in online views over recent years, its reach on broadcast media is relatively small. But the bigger impact of GB News could be in normalising political partisanship on TV and radio, and gradually pushing the boundaries of the UK’s regulations on broadcast impartiality.
At a time when political disinformation is rising and trust in journalism is declining, is it time for Ofcom to rethink giving politicians a bigger platform to promote their politics? In doing so, it should properly consult the public on how they want broadcasting to be impartially regulated.
Stephen Cushion has received funding from the BBC Trust, Ofcom, AHRC, BA and ESRC.
Certain university degrees – especially in the arts and humanities – are often maligned as “rip-offs” or “Mickey Mouse degrees”. The argument is that while some degrees lead to high-paying jobs, others offer little financial return and may leave graduates worse off than if they hadn’t gone to university.
Financial returns are important, and prospective students should understand the cost implications of different degrees. This is a particularly vital consideration when recent reports suggest that the graduate premium – the boost in earnings that comes from having a degree – may be faltering, with some degrees particularly implicated.
But part of making an informed decision also means understanding how degrees shape graduates’ early experiences of work. That’s where our research comes in.
The research study I carried out with colleagues explores this broader view of graduate success. We analysed responses from UK graduates who finished university in 2018-19, surveyed 15 months after graduation through the national Graduate Outcomes survey. This gave us a sample size of over 67,500 graduates.
Rather than focusing on salary, we looked at how graduates responded to three simple but telling questions:
1) Do you find your work meaningful?
2) Does it align with your future plans?
3) Are you using the skills you learned at university?
Our results challenge the idea that only high-earning degrees offer value. While some vocational courses – such as medicine, veterinary science, and education – perform especially well on these measures, graduates across all subjects reported largely positive experiences. In fact, 86% said their work felt meaningful, 78% felt on track with their careers, and 66% said they were using their university-acquired skills.
This matters because public debate has long been dominated by a single metric: income. While earnings are undoubtedly an important outcome of higher education, they’re not the only one.
Many would trade a higher salary for work that offers purpose and uses their talents. These aren’t just “touchy-feely” concerns: they’re key drivers of employee retention, productivity, and competitiveness.
Vocational and generalist degrees
Graduates of medicine and dentistry were around 12 percentage points more likely than others to say their work was meaningful, and more than 30 points more likely to say they were using their university-acquired skills. Education, allied health, and veterinary science also performed well.
But generalist degrees – including many of those that have been labelled “low value” – held their own. History, languages, and the creative arts all produced graduates who, on average, felt positively about their work. Once we adjusted for background factors like social class, gender, and prior attainment, many of the gaps between vocational and generalist fields narrowed.
Graduates of generalist degrees, such as languages and history, also felt positive about their careers. Atthapon Niyom/Shutterstock
Crucially, we found little support for the idea that certain degrees routinely leave students disillusioned. Even in subjects like history or media studies, often targeted in value-for-money debates, the data show a more positive picture than the headlines suggest.
Of course, our study has limitations. It captures only the first 15 months after graduation, which are still early days for recent graduates. It also doesn’t track income or job stability over the longer term. But it provides something previously missing from the debate: nationally representative evidence on how UK graduates across different degree subjects experience their early careers.
And the findings are striking. Many of the most heavily criticised degrees consistently deliver positive subjective outcomes for their graduates. This challenges the idea that the arts, humanities, and social sciences are bad investments, for individuals or for society.
More than financial returns
Our findings prompt broader questions about how value in higher education should be defined. Framing only high-earning degrees as “worth it” reduces university study to a financial transaction.
It risks sending the message that choosing a subject based on personal interest, talent, or intellectual curiosity is a mistake, and may deter students from pursuing degrees that, while less lucrative, often lead to fulfilling and meaningful work.
Yes, graduates should be employable. And yes, some degrees deliver clearer financial returns than others. But higher education is also about developing individual potential, nurturing intellectual curiosity, and enabling people to make meaningful contributions to society beyond just income. If we ignore these dimensions, we risk undervaluing not just certain degrees, but the wider purpose of education itself.
By branding arts and humanities degrees as “rip-offs”, we risk further weakening the talent pipeline for one of the UK’s genuinely world-leading sectors — arts and culture. This sector is already facing skills shortages following years of cuts to creative education.
So, before we write off a subject as a rip-off, we should ask: what are we really measuring? Because for many university graduates, we now have credible evidence that success is about more than just a pay packet.
Sean Brophy 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.
Endometriosis is a long-term and invisible gynaecological condition that affects around 1.5 million women in the UK alone. It’s known for its unpredictable and debilitating symptoms, like chronic pelvic pain, heavy periods and fatigue. But many women face outdated practices in the workplace that just don’t accommodate the reality of the condition.
Women with endometriosis can be unfairly thought of as unreliable or weak for not being able to adhere to conventional ideas of productivity or working hours. Times could be changing, though, with the UK’s employment rights bill, which is making its way through parliament.
The bill could mark a significant turning point by framing menstruation and related health conditions as legitimate workplace issues. What this could mean, in practice, is a move towards employers taking measures such as offering flexible hours as the norm rather than the burden falling on individual women to make the case for what they need.
But as a researcher on women’s health and wellbeing at work, I believe the bill must go further. If this legislation is to represent a new era for women, it should explicitly include provisions to support all reproductive health as part of its gender equality plans. After all, it has been estimated that menstrual health issues, including endometriosis, cost the UK economy £11 billion per year due to worker absences.
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Workers deserve a framework that supports the entire lifecycle of women’s health at work – from menstruation to miscarriage to menopause and beyond. Incorporating menstruation action plans alongside the bill’s proposed menopause action plans could include measures to destigmatise menstrual health. This could help workers feel safe sharing their symptoms or condition.
It could also involve training for managers so conversations focus on support as opposed to the burden of medical proof. And clearly, sick leave policies should not penalise women for symptoms that can frequently be irregular.
Historically, endometriosis was labelled the “career woman’s disease”. The suggestion was that it was a consequence of women delaying motherhood for paid work, and the stressful professional lives of women.
These outdated theories framed endometriosis as the result of ambition. But the echoes persist, reinforcing the idea that women must silently manage their condition at work. This framing, rather than recognising that endometriosis can in some cases be considered a disability, diverts attention from failures in workplace policies and healthcare systems.
Women with endometriosis can lose between 1.9 and 15.8 work hours per week managing painful and fluctuating symptoms within rigid work schedules and unaccommodating workplaces.
However, having the permission to adjust where and how you work can help with managing symptoms and can also help to prevent them. For example, having the flexibility to start work later in the day for pain that presents in the morning, or to work from home on bad pain days, can make it easier to manage symptoms, and actually increases productivity. On the other hand, rigid working days can cause stress that exacerbates symptoms.
Issues like stigma, disbelief of the level of pain and other symptoms, and the inability to deal with symptoms when they come on (by taking frequent breaks or using a hot water bottle, for example), as well as unfriendly absence policies, make work more difficult than it needs to be.
This time lost can also place women in a precarious position, forcing them to choose between concealing their pain or risking career setbacks by disclosing their condition. Workplaces are typically designed for those who can maintain uninterrupted schedules, leaving workers with symptoms that come and go at a disadvantage.
My research on “endo time”, which will be published later this year, reflects this. It highlights how women with endometriosis must constantly adjust their routines to manage symptoms. This is a reality at odds with rigid workplace expectations. It can mean having to think about every day in advance like “strategising a war”.
Emotional and economic costs
The cost of managing endometriosis extends beyond physical pain. Women with endometriosis in the UK can experience reduced earnings alongside lost promotions, bonuses and clients. A major constraint can be the need to take frequent sick days. This is often treated as a performance issue rather than a medical issue.
As such, women can be left ducking and diving, and trying to work out little systems and workarounds for fear of losing their jobs. Women with endometriosis may also be pushed into part-time or insecure work, or feel compelled to become self-employed, trading stability for flexibility.
Ultimately, left unsupported, endometriosis can make it extremely difficult for women to work within standard schedules and timetables. Yet, despite its prevalence, endometriosis research remains underfunded, contributing to continued misunderstandings and inadequate support.
Unsupported menstrual health issues are thought to cost the UK economy £11 billion per year in lost work days. tuaindeed/Shutterstock
The employment rights bill could be a significant step forward. It will require organisations with more than 250 employees to develop gender equality plans, including menopause support. The bill also aims to promote transparency around gender pay gaps and strengthen flexible working rights. These provisions would undoubtedly support the economic and emotional costs of working with endometriosis.
Endometriosis is more than a health challenge. It is a lens through which we can understand broader issues around gender, health and work. By pushing for more comprehensive policies, the UK can shift the narrative from one of individual struggle to one of collective responsibility. This could create a workplace culture where women can thrive without being penalised for their health.
The bill presents an opportunity to do just that – but only if it goes far enough to address the full spectrum of reproductive health challenges that women face throughout their careers.
Victoria Williams is affiliated with The Menstruation Friendly Accreditation.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Space Agency (Esa). It has launched spectacularly successful missions, but is different to other space agencies which generally represent one country. Esa is funded by 23 member states and also has cooperation agreements with nations such as Canada.
Esa operates cutting edge spacecraft designed to monitor the Earth, as well as space telescopes that study the distant cosmos. It has launched robotic spacecraft to other planets and to objects such as comets. It is also involved in human spaceflight – training European astronauts to work on the International Space Station (ISS).
These are hugely successful achievements. But the agency now faces challenges as competition heats up among newer space powers such as China and India.
The history of Esa can be traced to events immediately after the second world war, when many European scientists moved to either the US or to the Soviet Union. Many of them realised that projects supported only by a single nation could not compete with those supported by the two big geopolitical players at the time.
This motivated the physicists Pierre Auger, from France, and Edoardo Amaldi, from Italy, to propose a European organisation that would carry out space research and would be “purely scientific”.
In 1962, two agencies were created. One of these, the European Launch Development Organisation (ELDO), would concentrate on developing a rocket. The other, the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), would focus on developing robotic spacecraft. Both were joined together in 1975 to form the European Space Agency.
The push to build a European rocket would eventually yield the Ariane launcher, which is operated by the French company Arianespace.
The first satellite to be launched under the banner of the newly formed European Space Agency was Cos-B. This spacecraft was designed to monitor a high energy form of radiation called gamma rays, being emitted from objects in space.
Esa collaborated with other space agencies on the Hubble Space Telescope. ESA/NASA
In 1978, Esa cooperated with Nasa and the UK on the International Ultraviolet Explorer mission. This space telescope was designed to observe the cosmos in ultraviolet light, something that cannot be done from Earth.
The agency would later collaborate with Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency on one of the most successful space telescopes of all time: Hubble. Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope helped confirm the expansion rate of the universe and showed that black holes are at the cores of almost all galaxies. Hubble’s stunning images also changed the way that many people saw the universe. Esa funded one of the original instruments on the space telescope, the Faint Object Camera, and provided the first two solar arrays.
The space agency is also a partner on the revolutionary James Webb Telescope, which launched in 2021. Esa contributed two of the telescope’s instruments: the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NirSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri).
Solar System missions
Esa has also launched pioneering missions to other planets and objects in our solar system. The first of these was the Giotto comet explorer. This robotic spacecraft flew past Halley’s comet in 1986 and was successfully woken up in 1992 to study a comet called Grigg-Skejllerup.
A second successful cometary mission followed when the Rosetta spacecraft entered orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta despatched a lander called Philae to touch down on the comet’s surface.
Rosetta has been my favourite of all Esa achievements, simply due to the pure audacity of attempting to land on an object whose shape and composition was until then only sparsely known. In order to “land” on an object with low gravity, Philae was to have deployed harpoons that would attach the lander to the surface. These systems did not work, but the overall mission was a success, leading to high levels of engagement from the public.
Besides comets, Esa launched one of the most successful missions to the red planet: Mars Express. The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2003 and has played a key role in enhancing understanding of our planetary neighbour. It is expected to continue working until at least 2034. Mars Express also carried the ill-fated British Beagle 2 spacecraft to Mars. This was supposed to land in 2003, but contact was never established with the probe, which is presumed to have been damaged while touching down.
In 2005, Esa’s Huygens spacecraft landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This was the furthest from Earth that a spacecraft has ever landed. These are all outward facing missions, but Esa has also had major success with projects to study what’s going on here on Earth. These include the Envisat satellite, which operated from 2002-2012, and the Sentinel series of spacecraft, which have operated from 2014 to the present.
These have helped map agriculture and forests, understand the Earth’s climate, track ice, and monitor atmospheric ozone. In addition, the Galileo navigation satellites are providing a high precision alternative to GPS.
Esa is also a major player in human spaceflight, having been a partner in the International Space Station project since 1993. It has built sections of the ISS, including the Columbus laboratory, launched in 2008, and the Cupola viewing window, which gives astronauts panoramic views of Earth. The agency’s astronauts regularly spend time on the ISS as crew and could even fly to the Moon under Nasa’s Artemis programme.
Since the 1990s, Esa has frequently collaborated with Nasa – often very successfully. However, this relationship has also faced challenges. In the wake of the financial crisis, for example, Nasa cancelled its participation in several collaborative missions with Esa. Under a proposed Nasa budget this year, the US space agency may again cancel its involvement with the joint Nasa-Esa Mars Sample Return mission.
Esa’s future
Times have changed in the space industry since Esa’s founding 50 years ago. Major countries such as China, India and Japan all have their own space programmes. Esa faces considerable financial pressures to compete with them.
Nevertheless, Esa is working on strengthening its space exploration and launch capabilities through the use of a commercial space port in Norway.
It has also put together a long-term strategy for 2040. This document highlights important areas where Esa can play a major role, including protecting Earth and its climate, continued missions to explore space and also efforts to boost European growth and competitiveness.
All this should strengthen and secure the agency for the future. Through a mixture of developing its own missions and collaborating with other agencies and commercial partners on others, Esa should be a major player in space exploration for decades to come.
Daniel Brown 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.
Pseudonyms are used in this article; interviewees who asked for their real names to be used are asterisked.
In 2016, one of us (Kath) attended New Normal, a conference in London which opposed LGBT+ rights, including lesbian parenting and gender recognition. As a lesbian parent, I was upset by what was said – and by the way people stood to applaud speakers who warned of the dangers of parents like me, while mentioning the need to “protect children”.
Yet that conference also opened my eyes to my – and perhaps, many other people’s – lack of understanding of what it can mean to stand against the apparent state-supported, liberal consensus on such issues. On day two, the organisers appealed for help for the parents of a trans or gender-diverse child. My notes from that day read:
The parents feel they are not listened to, and are ‘encouraged by social services’ to treat ‘her’ like a boy. But social services have only known ‘her’ for six months – so they don’t know ‘her’. The parents are told if they don’t agree to a name change, it is neglectful and that she is suicidal. The mother argues: ‘We love our daughter.’
Unexpectedly and conflictually, I found myself relating to the parents’ story in some way. And I wondered how I would feel as a same-sex parent if I was ever in a situation where my child rejected their family as a “moral abomination”.
These thoughts proved a starting point for Beyond Opposition – our project which, since 2020, has been looking at the lives of people who are reticent about or object to the perceived liberalising of societies’ sexual and gender laws in Great Britain, Ireland and Canada.
The idea of this research is not to defend their positions. Nor is it to explore their politics around sexualities and genders, which we and many others do in research into anti-gender movements. Rather, we wanted to understand the experiences that might drive these politics.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
As far back as 2012, prompted by my colleague, urban geographer Catherine Nash, I (Kath) began noticing an evolution in arguments against changes like same-sex marriage, gender recognition and relationship and sexuality education in schools – an evolution that was not always fully recognised, or even noticed, by supporters of these changes. People who objected to such societal shifts were sometimes being politicised through court cases around their work and their children’s experiences at school.
For Beyond Opposition, we put a call out to people who opposed or had concerns about changing laws and policies related to gender, sexuality or abortion. As well as contacting organisations and activists who actively campaigned against these changes, we used social media to reach out to people who had no connections with these groups.
In more than 160 interviews between 2020 and 2022, we explored the daily experiences of living outside the social consensus in three countries where, at the time, there was broad legal, political and social agreement in favour of same-sex marriage, abortion, gender self-identification and related policies. The surprising diversity of positions and experiences we heard not only shed new light on how societies were changing; they painted a sometimes disturbing picture of how these shifts were being challenged and resisted.
Not all far-right
In the 1990s in secondary school, I would have been completely open about my view on [abortion], because it was a more accepted view, I suppose … [Now] I have this view and don’t feel I can even express it [because] everyone else disagrees … I feel like I can’t even say this to anyone.
We first met Niamh in 2021, three years after Ireland’s historic referendum to repeal one of the EU’s strictest legal barriers to abortion, which led to limited access to abortion care. Where once her anti-abortion views were considered mainstream, in Ireland and many other countries where abortion is accepted legally and socially, now her views are in the minority.
Niamh was clear she did not regard herself as “conservative” and said she was strongly in favour of human rights. She told us: “If I have to categorise myself, I’d categorise myself as ‘pro-life’.” But she expressed frustration at how people assumed this position automatically predicted what she thought about other topics relating to gender and sexuality, explaining:
There’s this thing that’s like: [because] you’re against abortion, you’re against same-sex marriage or against refugees coming into the country … I struggle with it because the people in my circle on social justice issues are not usually aligned with my [anti-abortion] position. They tend to have the opposite view – [mine] tends to be seen as a really conservative stance, not a rights-based stance.
Niamh, like many of our interviewees, expressed views quite differently from the organisations opposing sexual and gender equalities that I (Kath) had encountered in earlier research. While those organisations were diverse, they were often aligned on abortion, same-sex marriage and gender recognition. This contrasted with the differences that people such as British woman Jane identified when we met her.
“I wouldn’t want to sit down in a room with somebody who said gay people were going to hell,” Jane told us. “We just wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” But she also felt it would be “impossible to have a conversation with somebody who does not believe in the existence of biological sex”.
While Jane objected to trans rights being “given primacy”, she thought of herself as different to people who are seen as anti-gender activists. Describing herself as “gender critical”, she said: “Why this is so toxic and has started to spill out into my day-to-day life is that we are all just lumped under one umbrella of hate.”
Like many of our interviewees, Jane objected to being placed in a single category that, in her experience, carries overwhelmingly negative associations. She told us her daily life was being affected because people attributed opinions to her that she considers hateful.
On the whole, public attitudes across the EU and Canada still favour a broadening of gender and sexual inclusion. But academic research on changing social norms relating to gender and sexuality is largely silent on how these changes can affect those who “do not agree”.
Many of our interviewees emphasised their distance from other people who held similar views. Indeed, this sentiment of not fitting a stereotype was so common that we still have no single phrase to describe the group of people we spoke to. Common terms like “anti-gender” or “far-right” were rejected by most participants.
Yet we found the experiences they described had a lot in common. James, in Ireland, said he “came down towards the ‘no’ side” in the 2018 Irish abortion referendum, yet the social associations of this troubled him:
I definitely wouldn’t ever go on a pro-life parade or protest, or anything like that. I see those people [as] ultra-religious conservatives who are not free-thinking, who want to just force their opinions on other people. There’s no way I could ever want to be associated with people like that.
While most interviewees resisted the stereotypes they say get assigned to their position, pushing back against being seen as anti-rights or anti-equalities, some did express positions more in line with a stereotypical anti-gender activist. Brian in Canada, for example, told us he was “in a pro-life Catholic Christian bubble”, and that he would not welcome gay or trans people into his home for dinner.
‘I don’t feel comfortable in my own house’
Anne, a Canadian woman who described herself as a feminist with gender-critical opinions, said she had withdrawn from her volunteer work supporting survivors of sexual violence because she recognised that “my gender-critical opinions are really toxic to others”.
But the relationship that most troubled her was with her daughter. Anne described how her home life had been significantly affected by her interest in “gender-critical” content:
In my house, which should be the place where I feel the most comfortable, at no time do I discuss these things. If I’m watching a video with these concerns, or am online in some way with these concerns, when my daughter who lives with me comes into the room, I turn it off. So I don’t feel at all comfortable in my own house.
Anne was distressed by the impact her gender-critical position had on her relationship with her daughter. She recognised that content she sometimes viewed was considered “toxic” by many people, including her daughter, and expressed sadness about the damage this had done to their relationship:
It’s very saddening to me because my daughter and I are so close, but this has become a barrier. It has become a block. The only time we talked about it at length, we were both in tears.
We heard a number of stories like Anne’s, of close relationships becoming deeply fractured by differences on such topics. These interviewees felt their positions were fundamentally opposed by family members. Some, conscious of the tensions, kept their views to themselves even in their own home. As a result of her differences with her daughter, Anne said: “I don’t speak to her about anything in order to keep peace in the house.”
Ciara, a leftwing Irishwoman who voted against abortion in the 2018 referendum, described the careful way she navigated her friendships, recognising that her friend group would hold very different views to her on abortion:
You kind of judge the friendship a little bit. Can this friendship take this news that I voted ‘no’? [Laughs] I’ve lied – I’ve told others I voted ‘yes’.
Ciara noted that in her everyday life, it was generally assumed everybody was pro-choice – as she had once been. She was not religious and, like many of our interviewees, distanced herself from rightwing politics.
But in her family and among her friends, being against abortion was automatically understood as being rightwing, so she kept quiet about it. This made her question herself, resulting in what she described as “a whole range of inner dilemmas”:
You strategise – you suss out, like, how is this going to go down? How is this going to impact on this friendship? And on trust – how will I be seen?
Keeping quiet among friends and family makes concerned, oppositional positions harder to see and understand. So, it is possible for researchers and others to deny these positions exist – and to not address their impact. Many people spoke to us on condition that their identities would be concealed – something that came across especially strongly when they spoke about their fears at work.
‘At work, I can’t risk my livelihood’
Work is central to many people’s lives. Tammy* from Canada, who described herself as “not a pro-gay person, just a pro-people person”, told us she felt uncomfortable with some workplace inclusion policies, such as Pride month:
At work, we have an app on our phone and … for gay pride, in June, the whole month is just devoted to that history, right? And it annoys me because it’s like: OK, I get it … [but] I don’t like people trying to program me.
The promotion of LGBTQ+ rights through corporate platforms made Tammy feel suspicious. Other Beyond Opposition participants went further, fearing their jobs could be at risk.
For Cindy, who is also from Canada and described herself as “dabbling in gender-critical feminism”, her position was out-of-line with her workplace. Her employer took positive actions to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion. She felt that to object to such actions might “risk my livelihood, so I can’t even broach the subject”.
It was not only the owners and managers who Cindy feared would view her “as a bigot”. She also worried that colleagues might cause conflict for her if she expressed her position outside the workplace consensus.
Like others in our research, Cindy deliberately stayed out of activism. But during her mandatory workplace training, she said: “The whole time I’m biting my tongue.” Her concern was that she might be obliged to take an action that she didn’t believe in:
If anyone were ever to say: ‘Go around the room and say your preferred pronouns,’ I’m not sure how I would answer that because I don’t believe in the ideology of preferred pronouns. I worry that if I just said something like: ‘No thank you, I don’t believe in it,’ that might actually cause me to lose my job.
Workplace inclusion policies, training and practices have been shown to be effective in improving workplaces in terms of their productivity and wellbeing for employees – although in some cases, they can be poorly implemented and insufficient. But some of the people we spoke to, including Tammy and Cindy, described them as “feared” and “hated”.
Mark went even further, suggesting he was being asked to deny his “moral values” – and that his work would not be secure if he didn’t. A freelance worker in rural Ireland, Mark believed he needed to “keep his head down” with regard to his views on sexuality and abortion:
I’m self-employed … I can say it here to you but I’m certainly not shouting about this in the pub. I depend on the milk of human kindness from people.
Some of our interviewees have used the law to challenge employers where their jobs were lost or under threat. Most had not experienced any official sanctions – yet many feared them. Cindy said that as a result, she kept her views to herself at work: “I guess I choose harmony and peace over being right.”
It is these “quiet concerns” at work and among family and friends – of people who are not vocal in opposition to changing laws and policies, but still act against them – that we believe are not well documented or understood. And our research shows that in their experience of being negatively labelled and having their experiences dismissed or minimised, some have been driven to look beyond their usual communities to find support for their views.
Although most people in our study are not activists and did not seek to be public about their views, many quietly supported those who were, or engaged with them to find support for their views.
Those who felt uncomfortable talking to people in their own circles often told us about how they had found support elsewhere. Suzy, a British woman who said she was gender critical, described the first meeting she had attended that opposed trans rights:
I just happened to make the decision to go [to a conference run by an organisation opposing gender self-identification] on my own … I had nobody in my life at that point who was a feminist who had these views. It’s why I went by myself. And I met some really amazing women who just completely welcomed me into this world. That opened a lot of doors for me.
Suzy’s experience was echoed by others who had concerns about trans rights or gender recognition. Such groups were not always public, and some organised in secret – something Suzy believed was unjust but necessary, because of the distance from the social consensus of people who held views like hers:
There is a private online messaging app – you have to be invited. I had to be vetted … to make sure I was a real person – [that] I wasn’t trying to infiltrate. It’s so ridiculous that we are having to jump through these hoops just to talk about it and express our opinion about something that for a really long time was okay to think. Now all of a sudden, it’s not okay to think this way. So you’re a societal pariah.
At the time of our interview in 2020, Suzy was actively involved in organising to oppose the proposed amendments to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act. She had moved from having “nobody in my life … who was a feminist who had those views”, to participating in an organised campaign to influence this legislation:
I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as an activist – I think that word is quite a bit loaded in negative connotations now … I prefer the term ‘campaigner’ because what I started to get involved in was campaigning for the law not to be changed. I wasn’t going out on marches or anything like that.
Proposals to update the Act in line with international human rights standards stalled and then were halted in the UK from 2018 onwards, with the support of civil society campaigners including Suzy. Since then, other campaigns have had greater successes – including, most recently, a Supreme Court ruling defining “sex” as “biological sex” in the 2010 Equality Act.
‘I’m not saying that I am right’
For the many people who have spent years campaigning for gender equality and to improve LGBTQ+ lives, it is possible to understand the day-to-day accounts of our interviewees as evidence of success. Many told us they could not now express opinions on others’ relationships, sexual activity or their decisions about pregnancy and parenthood in some workplaces – and sometimes even at home.
For some interviewees, this shift was expressed as fear, where their positions were seen to negatively affect them at work even if they didn’t express them openly. They didn’t feel able to raise questions about gender and sexual equality or abortion at work or in their volunteering and organising spaces.
It is possible to understand this shift as a welcome victory for equalities. But our research highlights that, for many people who maintain reticence to these societal changes, the ability to reconsider or change their position has been reduced by their day-to-day work, social and family experiences.
Cindy, for example, expressed a moment of doubt about her concerns about trans rights, admitting: “I’m not saying that I am right. Like, there is the possibility I’m not …” However, this reflective stance was not encouraged by experiences of work that she described as forcing her to “bite my tongue”.
She and others told us the implementation of inclusion policies and training in their workplaces felt paradoxical – because they’d had the effect of making their own behaviour less inclusive. Cindy admitted she was less inclined to question herself because of the way she felt her views were treated.
Mark, the freelance worker in Ireland, considered himself “very leftwing” and said he would “always defend the underdog”. But he told us people like him were “very much put off” by what he saw as the “tactics of what now are leftwing liberal policies”. His experiences of feeling outside the consensus, and fearing a loss of employment opportunities, meant he – and others we interviewed – were less open to engaging sympathetically with the experiences of sexual- and gender-minoritised people.
Fear, upset and discomfort from social change
While stories like Niamh’s and Cindy’s are sometimes used to argue that transformations have “gone too far”, research does not support this argument. In fact, those “left out in the cold” are typically the LGBTQ+ people whose needs are not being met by policies like same-sex marriage (or who remain excluded from these policies), and those seeking sexual and reproductive healthcare in all its forms.
Our interviewees do not negate this. They highlight the fear, upset and discomfort that results from social change for some people who hold firm to their positions opposing or questioning provisions such as abortion, same-sex marriage, gender recognition. In research, these everyday experiences are rarely considered beyond their political views (assumed to be rightwing) and how to explain or change them.
Our interviewees believe their positions are frequently mis-characterised and conflated in the media and by policymakers in order to dismiss them – and therefore, that their experiences go unseen and unrecognised. And in their experience of being outsiders – feeling labelled and minimised – they may, like Suzy, find their way to actively opposing legislation and social change that benefits LGBTQ+ people and/or those who need abortion rights. Some offered quiet support to political causes, including donating their time or money.
The world today is very different even to 2022, when we finished the Beyond Opposition interviews. The UK has seen some fundamental shifts especially regarding gender recognition, including the recent Supreme Court ruling that defined “sex” as “biological sex” in the 2010 Equality Act.
In the US, providing affirmative care to trans children was deemed “mutilation” in recent executive orders from the president, Donald Trump, which stated that offering support to trans and gender-diverse children against their families’ will would be considered as “child abuse”.
As the struggle for rights continues, we believe it’s essential for research, policy and practice to pay attention to the full range of impacts of the divisions that drive much of today’s politics. Experiences like those of the parents at the conference mentioned at the start of this article, who felt that affirming their child’s gender identity went against their beliefs, contribute to the shape of the world we all live in.
It is possible to have a clear and firm view on the rights of trans and gender-diverse children, while also considering the implications for society of the experiences (as distinct from the opinions and arguments) of those who disagree. It feels important to do this now in places where some of us – lesbian parents, parents of trans kids and others – are still (somewhat) protected by the system, as we find ourselves, in the US and elsewhere, once again labelled “a danger to children”.
For the second phase of Beyond Opposition, we brought people together from very different positions to see if they could imagine a world where they could live together, without seeking to change each other’s minds. We wanted to know if there were new ways of thinking about the problem of division, which recognised that some differences may be here to stay.
Our intention was not to debate, negotiate or resolve their differences, but to explore the idea that it may be necessary to live together without ever agreeing on aspects related to gender, sexuality or abortion. One key outcome of these workshops was a number of moments in which participants met a complete impasse – where they had to acknowledge that their utopia could not accommodate the other person’s position at all.
This is a starting point for important questions about not being able to change someone else’s mind, yet still needing to share places with them. We hope to write more on this subject soon.
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Dr. Carol Ballantine researches genders, sexualities and violence. She worked as the Ireland and UK postdoctoral researcher on Beyond Opposition, funded by the ERC.
This article is funded by work undertaken under the ERC Grant No: 81789 granted to Kath Browne and also receives EU Horizon Europe funding. She has worked for LGBTQIA+ organisations is affiliated with LinQ.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation, University of Exeter
Banu Mushtaq’s quietly powerful collection of short stories, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, shines a light on the lives of Muslim women in rural India. It is the first time that the International Booker prize has been won by a book translated from Kannada, a language of south India spoken by between 50 and 80 million people.
Mushtaq is a writer who has previously worked as a journalist and lawyer, fighting for women’s rights and speaking out against caste and religious oppression. This comes through in the vignettes collected in Heart Lamp. At the centre of this work is great compassion for the women Mushtaq brings to life in her writing.
Inspired by encounters with women who came to her for help, each of Mushtaq’s stories introduces us to a different woman from a different family. What the women of Heart Lamp share is that their lives are all dictated by men.
We meet a young girl forced into wedlock, and a woman whose son arranges a new marriage for her. Elsewhere, an older woman is obliged to accept the indignity of her husband taking a second wife.
Heart Lamp opens up an intimate world of domestic rituals and family tensions, rife with judgement, suspicion, righteousness and sacrifice. In the quiet of daily life, Mushtaq reveals the enormity of human emotion and experience. She also reveals the resilience of the women who resist the violence – physical, emotional, social and psychological – inflicted on them.
Women are insulted for not expressing desire when they are forced into the conjugal bed, reproached for bearing girls, and warned repeatedly that any non-compliance is a stain on family honour. They are beaten, and casually replaced with second wives.
In one horrific instance from the title story, a woman is told in no uncertain terms that “if you had the sense to uphold our family honour, you would have set yourself on fire and died” – a chilling sanction that hangs over the story until its tense dénouement.
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Deepa Bhasthi’s bold and memorable translation invites us not to impose our own language and linguistic system on the original work.
There are several words that are offered as a transliteration of their original Kannada form, without heavy-handed glosses or an attempt to transpose them into something more immediately recognisable to Anglophone readers. In her translator’s note, Bhasthi describes this as “against italics”, where using italics would signal to the reader that a word has been brought across from the Kannada.
Bhasthi favours a way of translating that aims to respect the culture and language of the original text. This trusts readers to come to that language and culture rather than rendering the text in a blandly comfortable English that might make the setting more familiar but would strip it of its specificity.
Instead, Bhasthi’s work welcomes Kannada’s evocative phrases, introducing into English lines such as “No matter how many times I tell you, you don’t let it fall inside your ears.” “Is the fruit a burden on the creeper?” And “the snake of arrogance had laid many, many eggs.”
Bhasthi selected the 12 stories of Heart Lamp from a range of pieces written by Mushtaq over many years, and with her translation of the title story, was a winner of the first issue of PEN Presents, a digital initiative led by English PEN (which stands for poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists).
This organisation funds and promotes samples of original and diverse literature not yet available in English translation, fostering bibliodiversity by brokering connections between under-represented cultural contexts and UK publishers and readers.
Following its promotion through PEN Presents, Heart Lamp was acquired by And Other Stories, a Sheffield-based independent publisher that has been at the vanguard of publishing innovative literature in translation over the past 15 years. The award represents multiple important firsts.
As well as being the first book translated from Kannada to win the International Booker prize, it is the first time the prize has been won by an Indian translator. It is the first time a short story collection has won the award.
It is also the first time And Other Stories has won the award and the first International Booker prize to be awarded to a PEN Presents winner. That it has received this highest of accolades in the translated literature sector of the publishing industry shows the importance of publishing that takes risks, of representing a broader range of languages and cultures in translation and of initiatives to support translators.
This striking collection is perhaps best summed up in the final story, “Be a Woman Once, O Lord!”, in which the narrator teasingly implores her creator:
“If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu!”
With unfailing compassion and humour, Mushtaq and Bhasthi lead us through a society that prioritises masculinity, male dominance, and father-son lineage. In so doing, they invite us – and whichever male deity might be listening – to walk in the shoes of women overlooked by an unquestioned patriarchal and religious hierarchy, and to re-evaluate what we think we know about social dynamics.
Helen Vassallo 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.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the marriage referendum in Ireland on May 22. The first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, Ireland has transformed itself from a conservative stronghold to a liberal state. This transformation could not have occurred without the important contributions of activists like Mary Dorcey, one of Ireland’s most significant LGBTQ+ writers.
Dorcey began her political activism in the 1970s, having returned to Ireland after living in France and England. Having met other queer people abroad, Dorcey was struck by the repression that characterised Irish life: “The word ‘homosexual’ was not spoken or written in Ireland before the 1970s. The word ‘gay’ didn’t exist.”
Determined to break through the silence, Dorcey became a founding member of various activist groups, including the Sexual Liberation Movement at Trinity College Dublin.
One of Dorcey’s most prominent displays of early activism occurred at the Women’s Week conference at University College Dublin, where she substituted for an absentee speaker. Frustrated by the erasure of homosexuality from Irish life, Dorcey took the stage, quoting the American feminist slogan “if feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice”.
Mary Dorcey discusses the controversy around her statement at Women’s Week.
A headline appeared on the front page of the Irish Times the following day. It read: “Self-confessed lesbian denounces heterosexuality as sadomasochism.” While the headline caused ruptures at home, Dorcey remained an advocate of queer rights. “I wasn’t going to make any apologies,” she told the Museum of Literature Ireland. “It was their problem if they couldn’t see how beautiful we were.”
Dorcey’s unwavering commitment to breaking the silence surrounding queerness is clearly displayed in her first poetry collection, Kindling (1982). Poems like Night, for example, are explicit in their bold use of homosexual imagery:
I ask you then what am I to do with all these memories
heavy and full?
Hold them, quiet, between my two hands,
as I would if I could again
your hard breasts?
The collection made waves, with even members of the queer community commenting on its outspokenness. Dorcey has discussed how her unflinching portrayal of homosexuality worried many community members – did her candidness threaten to expose them?
Despite this, her activist tendencies prevailed, recognising the power of literature to shock readers into sociopolitical awareness, as expressed in poems like Deliberately Personal.
Deliberately Personal, read by Mary Dorcey.
One of Dorcey’s most important literary contributions is her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed (1989). The collection debuted a year after her former Sexual Liberation Movement comrade David Norris’s landmark victory at the European Court of Human Rights, which required Ireland to decriminalise homosexual activity between men.
Lesbianism was never explicitly illegal in Ireland under its adoption of British legal codes, which feared that writing it into law would introduce otherwise “respectable” women to its existence.
Dorcey’s overtly lesbian stories are therefore groundbreaking. They depict autonomous women unafraid to voice their lesbian desires. Much of her work responds to the main concerns of the “decriminalisation era”, resulting in a charged critique of traditional Irish life.
For example, the title story of A Noise from the Woodshed follows a group of lesbians refusing domestic duties to bask in the sensuality of a rural Irish landscape. The collection won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature a year after its publication.
Writing desire
Seven years after Norris’s win, a 1995 referendum signalled further shifts in Irish society. Succeeding by only a whisper, the legalisation of divorce reflected the further weakening influence of the Catholic church, making way for alternative family structures.
Although Dorcey’s Biography of Desire doesn’t address the referendum directly, its story touches on many of the same issues. The 1997 novel follows the growing relationship between Katherine and Nina. Katherine has left her husband and children to start a new life with Nina.
While Katherine chooses to only separate from her husband, she is fearful that a judge will grant him full custody of their children because of her lesbian relationship. “Can there be any doubt which of us would be considered the more respectable parent by the law?” she wonders.
In this regard, the novel anticipates many of the issues that would emerge during the 2015 referendum.
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Biography of Desire also marks an early exploration of bisexuality in Irish literature, with Katherine and Nina’s intense affair leading critics to position the book as one of the first erotic novels in Irish history.
Dorcey’s commitment to voicing the fluid possibilities of queerness continues with Katerine’s suggestion: “We ought to be bisexual all of us … Men would learn to surrender themselves to pleasures … and women would learn to please themselves … instead of waiting passively.”
The novel, however, should not be taken as a simplistic disavowal of heterosexuality, but rather aligned with Dorcey’s mission to explore the universality of human love, life and experience.
While Dorcey is no longer making such a ruckus at public gatherings, she continues to publish, with her influence on queer Irish literature voiced by the likes of Irish Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue and affirmed by her admittance to the prestigious Irish organisation of artists, the Aosdána in 2010.
Her most recent poetry collection, Life Holds its Breath (2022), testifies to her talents as a writer, and concludes with the poem Banshee, which reflects on her activist days: “We are the women our mothers / warned us about.”
Jack Reid 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.
Hay fever can be annoying at the best of times. But this year, many people are reporting their usual symptoms are worse than ever before – with their normal go-to remedies doing little to provide relief.
Here’s what you can do if you’re finding that nothing seems to be helping your itchy eyes, sneezing and runny nose this year.
There are several reasons why hay fever is so bad right now. Climate change and pollution have lengthened and intensified pollen seasons, so trees and grasses now release allergens earlier and for longer. Urban smog may even make pollen grains more potent.
In the UK, 2025’s unusually dry and warm spring has worsened conditions, leading to earlier and more intense tree pollen release. Birch pollen, which affects around 25% of UK hay fever sufferers, peaked sharply this year due to the high temperatures and low rainfall – two factors which increase pollen production and dispersal. The lack of rain has also prevented pollen from being cleared from the air, prolonging exposure and symptom severity.
Another issue is timing. For full relief from hay fever symptoms, allergy medicines (especially steroid nasal sprays) should be started one to two weeks before pollen appears. So in the UK, steroid nasal sprays should ideally be started in early March for tree pollen or late April for grass pollen. Starting them late can make them seem ineffective.
You can also develop new sensitivities, even as an adult. Pollen that didn’t bother you years ago might start causing symptoms now. Grass and birch pollen are among the most common types of seasonal pollen that start bothering people in adulthood.
Managing symptoms
If you’re finding allergy pills alone just aren’t cutting it this year, the best thing you can do to reduce symptoms is cut your pollen exposure wherever possible.
Before going outdoors, check the local pollen forecast. Avoid exercising outside during peak pollen hours (usually mid-morning on dry, windy days).
If you do go outside, wear a face mask (such as an N95 mask) when pollen counts are high. After coming inside, remove your shoes at the door, change your clothes and take a shower to wash off pollen.
Inside, you can use a HEPA air purifier or high-MERV filters in your heating or cooling system. These will capture airborne pollen particles, which may help to reduce the severity of your symptoms during high-pollen seasons. On high-pollen days, keep windows and doors closed. You might also want to vacuum with a HEPA-filter vacuum and wash bedding often to remove any pollen.
While these steps won’t cure allergies, they can sharply reduce your total exposure. This gives medications a better chance to work.
While non-drowsy antihistamines such as loratadine, cetirizine and fexofenadine are common first-line treatments, research suggests fexofenadine may provide more consistent symptom relief for people with moderate to severe seasonal allergies compared to other types of antihistamines. However, each person will respond differently – so use whichever type provides you the most relief. Allergy tablets work best when taken daily and pre-emptively, ideally before peak exposure each morning.
Nasal steroid sprays, such as fluticasone, are often more effective than antihistamines for nasal congestion. These should be started one to two weeks before the allergy season begins and used consistently.
Allergy wipes and saline nasal rinses may also help reduce pollen exposure – though evidence of their benefit have only been shown in small studies, so larger, high-quality trials confirming their effectiveness are still needed.
Some people may also decide to try at-home remedies for their symptoms. However, the science behind whether they really work is mixed.
Take local honey, for example. The idea is that it exposes you to local pollen and helps build tolerance. In reality, the pollen that triggers hay fever is usually windborne and not present in honey. Studies haven’t shown eating it reduces allergy symptoms. At best, it may soothe a sore throat, but it’s not a proven remedy.
You may have better luck by targeting your gut. Some research suggests a more diverse gut microbiome may help moderate allergic reactions. A recent meta-analysis also found that probiotic supplements can offer a small but measurable improvement in hay fever symptoms. Still, results vary by probiotic strain and treatment length. Probiotics should be seen as a complement to – not a replacement for – conventional allergy management.
Longer-term fixes
When symptoms stay severe, allergy immunotherapy – which helps desensitise a hay fever sufferer to pollen – can help. This works like an allergy “vaccine”. You receive tiny, gradually increasing doses of your specific allergen either by regular injection or as a daily under-the-tongue tablet or drop. This trains your immune system to tolerate the pollen and shifts your immune response by making your body better able to block allergens while simultaneously dampening the allergic response.
In one study, around 90% of patients who underwent a full course of immunotherapy had major relief from symptoms – and this effect often lasted many years. The trade-off with immunotherapy is commitment: a typical course lasts 3–5 years under a specialist’s guidance. But for people with chronic hay fever, immunotherapy can dramatically improve their quality of life.
Researchers are also refining immunotherapy to make it faster and more efficient. One method, which only requires a few small injections into a lymph node, can reduce symptoms by up to 40% within a season.
Technology is also reshaping allergy care. Smart monitors and mobile apps can now track pollen and pollution in real time, while AI tools are being developed to identify specific pollen types from air samples. These tools could soon provide personalised alerts to help people avoid triggers before symptoms start.
Pollen seasons are getting longer and stronger, so allergies can feel worse than in the past. But the good news is that science is keeping pace. By combining smart exposure-reduction strategies with the right medical treatment, most people can significantly reduce their hay fever misery.
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.
The U-turn is a long and, depending on your point of view, honourable or dishonourable tradition in British politics. Now Keir Starmer has been accused of following this tradition after heavily hinting the UK government is reconsidering last year’s decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners.
As a reminder, the winter fuel payment is a lump sum of £200 or £300 paid to pensioner households to help pay heating bills. Last year, the government restricted eligibility to those who qualify for pension credit or other income-related benefits, in order to save £1.4 billion.
This was followed by months of pressure from Labour MPs that has intensified since the local elections. Starmer seemed to confirm at prime minister’s questions on May 21 that the government would change the threshold (by how much remains unclear), allowing more pensioners to qualify for the payment.
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One view is that this is a belated but ultimately sensible recognition, in the wake of Labour’s drubbing at the local elections, that the policy was hurting the party badly. On the other hand, in giving in to pressure to ditch it, the government may be setting a dangerous precedent. Capitulate on this and Labour’s anxious backbenchers would soon be demanding Starmer and Rachel Reeves go back on their intention to cut billions from the welfare budget.
Both takes are essentially correct. Polling evidence points to the removal of the allowance being one of the most unpopular measures announced by the government since it came to power in 2024. Regardless of the £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances, taking a universal benefit away from a bunch of people who are regarded by most voters as uniquely deserving was bound to be as politically toxic as it was (arguably) financially rational.
The only question now is quite how far Starmer’s rethink on the payment to pensioners will go. He has said the government will look at changing the income threshold that determines eligibility, but has not said by how much.
One has to ask whether a change along those lines would actually constitute a U-turn at all. By definition, a U-turn is a 180-degree reversal of a previous commitment. In this particular case, that would mean restoring the allowance to everyone in receipt of a state pension, irrespective of their income or wealth.
This is not merely semantic nitpicking, a pointy-headed demand for terminological exactitude. It’s a deeply political question.
Will a complicated (and costly) mitigation of the policy be sufficient – symbolically and substantively – to cut through to a disappointed electorate? And will Starmer be able to convince the public that this is a government holding its hand up, admitting it got it wrong, and determined now to do the right thing?
How to U-turn
Successful U-turns have tended to be big and bold. The best example, perhaps, is John Major’s announcement after he took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990 that he was scrapping the poll tax. “Scrapping” is the operative word: unlike Thatcher, he didn’t try to preserve the principle of a per person charge by getting the Treasury to subsidise individuals’ bills. Instead, he returned to financing local government via a charge to households rather than every adult within them.
And as for the parliamentary precedents, history teaches us that once a government’s MPs realise they can prevent it from doing something they’re convinced will harm their chances of re-election, they will try to do exactly that – however much the policy makes long-term sense for the nation as a whole. Just look at how “Nimby” (not in my back yard) Tory backbenchers continually scuppered the last government’s attempts to get more houses built in those parts of the country that needed them most.
That’s not to say that Starmer and Reeves won’t now get their way on welfare cuts (or “welfare reform” as they like to frame the issue). Labour has a massive majority, and its MPs aren’t (yet) as habituated to rebellion as their Conservative counterparts became over the course of their party’s 14 years in power.
What’s more, we are still four years from a general election, and the media narrative around “benefit cheats” means voters are far more inclined to support cuts to welfare than, say, the NHS.
Whether, then, Starmer’s U-turn (if, indeed, we should really be calling it that) works – whether electorally or in terms of his ability to force his backbenchers to accept measures they don’t like – remains to be seen.
Unfortunately for him, he faces something of a paradox. In order to convince the public, he should probably go the whole hog; but doing so may well render his life at Westminster rather trickier than he would like it to be.
No surprise there, perhaps. After all, “Politics,” the economist JK Galbraith once suggested to US President John F. Kennedy, “is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable”.
Tim Bale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Annie Curtis, Professor (Assoc), School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences (PBS), RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
We’ve long known that a lack of sleep is bad for the heart – but scientists are now starting to understand exactly how it causes harm.
In a new study from Uppsala University in Sweden, researchers found that just three nights of restricted sleep – around four hours a night – triggered changes in the blood linked to a higher risk of heart disease.
The researchers looked at inflammatory proteins in the blood. These are molecules the body produces when it is under stress or fighting off illness. When these proteins stay high for a long time, they can damage blood vessels and raise the risk of problems like heart failure, coronary heart disease and atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat).
The study involved 16 healthy young men who spent several days in a lab, where everything from their meals to their activity levels and light exposure was carefully controlled.
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The participants followed two routines: three nights of normal sleep (8.5 hours) and three night of sleep restriction (4.25 hours). After each sleep phase, the men completed a short, high-intensity cycling workout, and their blood was tested before and after.
Researchers measured almost 90 different proteins in the blood samples. They found that sleep deprivation caused a clear rise in inflammatory markers linked to heart disease. And while exercise usually boosts healthy proteins such as interleukin-6 and BDNF (which support brain and heart health), these responses were weaker after poor sleep.
The researchers looked at 90 protein markers in the blood of healthy volunteers. Dusan Petkovic/Shutterstock
Even young adults
Strikingly, the changes happened even in young, healthy adults, and after only a few nights of bad sleep. That’s worrying given how common it is for adults to experience poor sleep from time to time – and around one in four people work shifts that disrupt sleep patterns.
The researchers also discovered that the time of day blood was taken mattered: protein levels varied between morning and evening, and even more so when sleep was restricted. This suggests that sleep affects not only what’s in your blood, but when those changes are most visible.
Although modern life often encourages us to trade sleep for productivity, socialising or screen time, studies like this remind us that the body keeps score – quietly, chemically and without compromise.
Annie Curtis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When it comes to the sincerity, or otherwise, of Vladimir Putin’s apparent willingness to talk peace with Ukraine, the Russian leader has given us plenty of hints. He may insist he wants to see a deal done and an end to the killing. But his insistence that any agreement would have to address the “root causes” of the war is a clear indication that he hasn’t rowed back from his original maximalist war aims. To whit: no Nato membership, a Kremlin-friendly government in Kyiv, ownership of Crimea and control – preferably annexation – of the four provinces of Ukraine presently under Russian occupation.
Meanwhile his great ally Dmitry Medvedev continues to insist that there are at present no Ukrainian officials who legitimately qualify as partners for negotiation. The Russian national security council secretary claims that Ukraine is a “failed state” whose leaders’ lack of legitimacy, meanwhile, raise “serious questions” about who Russia can conclude any agreement with.
So when Donald Trump said this week after a two-hour chat with Putin that Russia and Ukraine would “immediately start negotiations” toward a ceasefire, it’s not clear who he thought the Russian president was planning to talk to if, as Putin and his cronies insist, Zelensky and his team are not legitimate. And, from what he had to say about his recent phone call with Putin, it appears that Trump has his eyes more on the sorts of deals that might be done with Russia once this is all cleared up.
As he posted on his Truth Social platform after talking with Putin: “Russia wants to do largescale [sic] TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic ‘bloodbath’ is over, and I agree. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED.”
Accordingly, he has backed away from his previous willingness to join Europe in imposing fresh sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile Russia continues to hammer Ukraine both on the battlefield and via ever larger drone and missiles attacks against its civilian population.
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The real clue to Trump’s attitude, writes Stefan Wolff, is the order of phone calls on Monday. Before settling down to talk with Putin, the US president put in a call to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Reporting back on the call, Zelensky said he had urged Trump that he mustn’t make any decisions about Ukraine “without us”. Having subsequently spoken at length with Putin, Trump emerged saying in his Truth Social post that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start negotiations” towards a ceasefire and an end to the war.
The state of the conflict in Ukraine, May 21 2025. Institute for the Study of War
But Wolff, professor of international security at the University of Birmingham who has written regularly here about the conflict, believes that the fact that Trump added the conditions for peace “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be” suggests he is indeed planning to abandon his peacemaking ambitions. The whole deal was taking far longer than the 24 hours he boasted of during the election campaign last year.
Where this leaves Europe is unclear, writes Wolff. If it can no longer rely on Washington as a security partner (and the signs aren’t good), then this will require a substantial rethink. Indeed there are signs, with the UK’s recent agreement over security and defence, that minds are increasingly focused on a more self-reliant future. In turn, this has implications for US security. If Europe is compelled to rethink its security relationship with the US it could cut both ways as Washington pivots to face an increasingly aggressive China.
Of course, it should have been clear to all concerned not to take Putin at face value over his apparent willingness to talk peace with Zelensky when he failed to turn up to talks in Istanbul at the end of last week. As Natasha Lindstaedt writes here, none of the main players attended the talks, despite plans for Putin, Zelensky and Trump to all meet face-to-face.
Lindstaedt, an expert in international relations at the University of Essex, describes what for all the world seemed like a bizarre game of bluff – certainly as far as Putin and Trump are concerned. All three leaders had promised to be there, but in the end they all sent intermediaries with the result that nothing of any consequence was agreed. Trump’s aides insisted that if Putin attended he would be there. Then the US president said the reason that Putin hadn’t turned up was because he knew Trump wasn’t going to be there.
“It’s certainly hard to take peace talks seriously when there is an awkward back-and-forth just about who is going to attend,” Lindstaedt concludes. “And while Trump thinks peace is only possible through bilateral meetings between himself and Putin, it’s clear he can’t even influence Putin to show up to peace talks that the Russian president himself suggested.”
The US president, meanwhile, has announced plans for an ambitious missile defence system to be called “Golden Dome”. It’s a next-generation system, says Trump, “capable even of intercepting missiles launched from the other side of the world, or launched from space”.
The plan, for which US$25 billion (£18.6 billion) has been set aside in the US president’s “one big beautiful bill”, presently before the US Congress, calls for a network of surveillance satellites complemented by a separate fleet of offensive satellites that would shoot down offensive missiles soon after lift-off. Trump has estimated this will cost US$175 billion and will be completed by the end of his current four-year term. But other estimates are that it will be much more expensive and take far longer to complete.
“There has never been anything like this”, the US president said. And indeed there hasn’t, writes Matthew Powell, an expert in air power from the University of Portsmouth. In fact, Powell is deeply sceptical that the technology to enable such an ambitious defence system exists at present. He points to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which became known by critics, with their tongues in their cheeks, as “Star Wars”, which never really got any further than the drawing board.
It did, however, have the effect of signalling to the Kremlin and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the sky would be the limit in terms of US willingness to push the boundaries of defence spending. Powell believes it significantly changed the calculations when it came to the feasibility of continuing the nuclear arms race and may have been responsible for the end of the cold war.
Incidentally, the US president’s funding bill scraped through the House of Representatives with 215 votes for and 214 against. In addition to setting aside funds for Golden Dome, the bill, which in its current form adds trillions of dollars to the US debt, has been described by Democrat critics as a “tax scam”. A statement from Democrat leaders said: “This fight is just beginning, and House Democrats will continue to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the GOP Tax Scam is buried deep in the ground, never to rise again.”
But how much stomach do the Democrats have for the fight? They’ve had a pretty terrible few months since the election. Their approval rating in March was at 29%, the worst since polling began in 1992. Fernando Pizarro, a lecturer in journalism at City St Georges, University of London, who has several Emmys under his belt for his work on US politics, has cast his eye over some of the leading Democrats who he thinks will spearhead the opposition to the Republicans over the next few years and identifies a few players who could vie for the presidential nomination in 2028.
Meanwhile, after 11 weeks of Israeli blockade of aid to the people of Gaza, limited deliveries have now recommenced in the face of pressure from both the US and increasingly outspoken interventions from the likes of the UK, France and Canada.
But despite reports that up to 100 trucks are now being allowed into the Gaza Strip, human rights agencies and aid organisations have said that there is a desperate threat of widespread starvation unless the amount of food, fuel and medicine getting through increases exponentially. And fast.
There is talk of a US-administered programme, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which could be up and running by the end of May and could accelerate the delivery of vital supplies to the civilian population while ensuring it does not does not get into the hands of militants or black marketeers.
But this scheme has its critics, write Sarah Schiffling and Liz Breen, experts in humanitarian logistics and health service operations at Hanken School of Economics and the University of Bradford respectively. They point to a number of flaws, including the plan to concentrate the secure distribution points in southern and central Gaza, forcing large numbers of people to travel considerable distances for supplies.
The GHF plan also calls for aid distribution to be coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces, which humanitarian organisations says is a “humanitarian cover for a military strategy of control and dispossession”.
Schiffling and Breen point out that humanitarian organisations have 160,000 pallets of supplies and almost 9,000 aid trucks ready to be dispatched across the border “as soon as Israel allows it”. Whether Israel will allow it is, of course, another question entirely.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, Research Fellow at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson appear on the red carpet prior to the screening of ‘Die, My Love’ at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2025.Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
Cannes reminded guests to follow the standard black-tie dress code for evening events at the Grand Theatre Lumière – “long dresses and tuxedos” – while highlighting acceptable alternatives, such as cocktail dresses and pantsuits for women, and a black or navy suit with a tie for men.
The real stir, however, came from two additions to the formal guidelines: a ban on nudity “for decency reasons” and a restriction on oversize garments.
But I study the cultural and economic forces behind fashion and media, and I think a lot of the criticism of Cannes is unfounded. To me, the festival isn’t changing its identity. It’s reasserting it.
Red carpet control
Concerns about indecency on the red carpet have appeared before – most notably during the first televised Academy Awards in 1953.
In 1952, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a censorship code in response to concerns about television’s influence on young audiences. Among its rules for “decency and decorum” were guidelines against revealing clothing, suggestive movements or camera angles that emphasized body parts – all to avoid causing “embarrassment” to the viewers.
Actress Inger Stevens at the 39th Academy Awards in 1967, a year before she was reprimanded for her skimpy attire. Bettmann/Getty Images
In my book “Fashion on the Red Carpet,” I explain how Head equipped backstage staff with kits to deal with any sartorial emergencies that might arise. That same year, the balcony cameras at the Pantages Theatre accidentally peeked down into the actresses’ cleavage as they walked to the stage. From then on, a supply of tulle – a type of versatile fabric that can easily cover revealing openings that expose too much skin – was kept backstage.
However, in the 1970s, the Oscars eliminated Head’s fashion consultant position. Despite maintaining its black-tie dress code, the absence of a fashion consultant opened the door to some provocative attire, ranging from Cher’s see-through, sheer outfits, to Edy Williams’ provocative, barely-there getups.
Once the fashion consultant position was eliminated for the Oscars, many attendees – like actress Edy Williams – tried to stand out from the crowd with provocative attire. Fotos International/Getty Images
Old rules in a new era
Racy red carpet appearances have since become a hallmark of awards shows, particularly in the digital age.
And in an era when red carpet looks are carefully curated ahead of time through partnerships with fashion brands, many celebrities expressed frustration about being unable to sport the outfits they had planned to wear at Cannes.
Stylist Rose Forde lamented the restrictions, saying, “You should be able to express yourself as an artist, with your style however you feel,” while actress Chloë Sevigny described the code as “an old-fashioned archaic rule.”
But I still can’t see the Cannes rules as part of any sort of broader conservative backlash.
Cape Verdean model Leila Depina arrives for the screening of the film ‘Asteroid City’ during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images
The festival has routinely reminded guests of its dress code, regardless of the cultural zeitgeist.
The “decency” rule, for example, is actually required by French law. Article 222-32 of the French Criminal Code classifies showing private parts in public as a sexual offense, and can lead to a year in prison and a fine. While the legal definition hinges on intent and setting, the festival, as a public event, technically has to operate within that framework.
Compared to white-tie events like the Nobel Prize award ceremony or a state banquet, Cannes’ black-tie requirement is relatively flexible. It allows for cocktail-length dresses and even accommodates pants and flat sandals for women.
Meanwhile, the worry about voluminous clothes points to a practical issue: the movement of bodies in tight spaces.
Unlike the Met Gala – where the fashion spectacle is the focus, and its red carpet is a stage for photo-ops – Cannes is a film festival. The red carpet is the main path thousands of people use to enter the theater.
A dramatic gown – like the one worn at the Met Gala by Cardi B in 2024 – could block others and cause delays. While a photo-op may be the primary goal for celebrities and the brands they promote, the festival has a screening schedule to stick to, and attendees must be able to easily access the venue and their seats.
Red carpet rules are fluid. Sometimes they adapt to cultural shifts. Sometimes they resist them. And sometimes, they’re there to make sure you can fit in your seat in the movie theater.
Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén received funding from Fulbright (2023-2024)
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