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Category: Reportage

  • MIL-OSI Global: There’s growing evidence of possible life on other planets – here’s why you should still be sceptical

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Manoj Joshi, Professor of Climate Dynamics, University of East Anglia

    Artist’s impression of K2-18 b. NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

    A team of researchers has recently claimed they have discovered a gas called dimethyl sulphide (DMS) in the atmosphere of K2-18b, a planet orbiting a distant star.

    The University of Cambridge team’s claims are potentially very exciting because, on Earth at least, the compound is produced by marine bacteria. The presence of this gas may be a sign of life on K2-18b too – but we can’t rush to conclusions just yet.

    K2-18b has a radius 2.6 times that of Earth, a mass nearly nine times greater and orbits a star that is 124 light years away. We can’t directly tell what kinds of large scale characteristics it has, although one possibility is a world with a global liquid water ocean under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

    Such a world might well be hospitable to life, but different ideas exist about the properties of this planet – and what that might mean for a DMS signature.

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    Claims for the detection of life on other planets go back decades.

    In the 1970s, one of the scientists working on the Viking mission to Mars claimed that his experiment had indicated there could be microorganisms in the Martian soil. However, these conclusions were widely refuted by other researchers.

    In 1996, a team said that microscopic features resembling bacteria had been found in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. However, subsequent studies cast significant doubt on the discovery.

    Since the early 2000s there have also been repeated claims for the detection of methane gas in the atmosphere of Mars, both by remote sensing by satellites and by in-situ observations by rovers.

    Methane can be produced by several mechanisms. One of these potential sources involves production by microorganisms. Such sources are described by scientists as being “biotic”. Other sources of methane, such as volcanoes and hydrothermal vents, don’t require life and are said to be “abiotic”.

    The claimed detection of phosphine gas in Venus’ atmosphere has been proposed as a biosignature.
    Nasa

    Not all of the previous claims for evidence of extraterrestrial life involve the red planet. In 2020, Earth-based observations of Venus’s atmosphere implied the presence of low levels of phosphine gas.

    Because phosphine gas can be produced by microbes, there was speculation that life might exist in Venus’s clouds. However, the detection of phosphine was later disputed by other scientists.

    Proposed signs of life on other worlds are known as “biosignatures”. This is defined as “an object, substance, and/or pattern whose origin specifically requires a biological agent”. In other words, any detection requires all possible abiotic production pathways to be considered.

    In addition to this, scientists face many challenges in the collection, interpretation, and planetary environmental context of possible biosignature gases. Understanding the composition of a planetary atmosphere from limited data, collected from light years away, is very difficult.

    We also have to understand that these are often exotic environments, with conditions we do not experience on Earth. As such, exotic chemical processes may occur here too.

    In order to characterise the atmospheres of exoplanets, we obtain what are called spectra. These are the fingerprints of molecules in the atmosphere that absorb light at specific wavelengths.

    Once the data has been collected, it needs to be interpreted. Astronomers assess which chemicals, or combinations thereof, best fit the observations. It is an involved process and one that requires lots of computer based work. The process is especially challenging when dealing with exoplanets, where available data is at a premium.

    Once these stages have been carried out, astronomers can then assign a confidence to the likelihood of a particular chemical signature being “real”. In the case of the recent discovery from K2-18b, the authors claim the detection of a feature that can only be explained by DMS with a likelihood of greater than 99.9%. In other words, there’s about a 1 in 1,500 chance that this feature is not actually there.

    While the team behind the recent result favours a model of K2-18b as an ocean world, another team suggests it could actually have a magma (molten rock) ocean instead. It could also be a Neptune-like “gas dwarf” planet, with a small core shrouded in a thick layer of gas and ices. Both of these options would be much less favourable to the development of life – raising questions as to whether there are abiotic ways that DMS can form.

    A higher bar?

    But is the bar higher for claims of extraterrestrial life than for other areas of science? In a study claiming the detection of a biosignature, the usual level of scientific rigour expected for all research should apply to the collection and processing of the data, along with the interpretation of the results.

    However, even when these standards have been met, claims that indicate the presence of life have in the past still been meet with high levels of scepticism. The reasons for this are probably best summed up by the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. This is attributed to the American planetary scientist, author and science communicator Carl Sagan.

    While on Earth there are no known means of producing DMS without life, the chemical has been detected on a comet called 67/P, which was studied up close by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. DMS has even been detected in the interstellar medium, the space between stars, suggesting that it can be produced by non-biological, or abiotic, mechanisms.

    Given the uncertainties about the nature of K2-18b, we cannot be sure if the presence of this gas might simply be a sign of non-biological processes we don’t yet understand.

    The claimed discovery of DMS on K2-18b is interesting, exciting, and reflects huge advances in astronomy, planetary science and astrobiology. However, its possible implications mean that we have to consider the results very cautiously. We must also entertain alternative explanations before supporting such a profound conclusion as the presence of extraterrestrial life.

    Manoj Joshi receives funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)

    Maria di Paolo receives funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

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

    – ref. There’s growing evidence of possible life on other planets – here’s why you should still be sceptical – https://theconversation.com/theres-growing-evidence-of-possible-life-on-other-planets-heres-why-you-should-still-be-sceptical-256050

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why walking may be the key to a long and healthy life

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thomas E. Yates, Professor of Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Health, Diabetes Research Centre, University of Leicester

    PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

    Throughout history, few things have inspired as much quackery as the pills, potions and promises to slow ageing, boost vitality, or extend life. Yet, amid the hype and hollow claims, a few golden truths remain. As far back as 400 BC, Hippocrates, widely considered the father of modern medicine, famously said, “Walking is man’s best medicine.” More than two millennia later, science is finally catching up with that wisdom.

    People who walk more than 8,000 steps a day reduce their risk of premature death by half, compared to those who walk fewer than 5,000 steps – the threshold for a sedentary lifestyle. But beyond 8,000 steps, the benefits tend to plateau, which challenges the long-held belief in the magic of 10,000 steps a day.

    In fact, that benchmark wasn’t born of science, but of marketing. The 10,000-step goal originated from a 1960s Japanese advertising campaign for the world’s first commercial pedometer called the manpo-kei, which literally translates to “10,000 steps meter”.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    Lately, researchers have been exploring a simple but important question: does every step count the same, or can walking faster — at a brisk pace of more than 100 steps a minute, or around three to four miles per hour — actually give you more health benefits?

    For ageing and heart health there is mounting evidence that pace really matters. Simply converting a 14-minute daily stroll into a seven-minute brisk walk has been associated with a 14% reduction in heart disease.

    An analysis of more than 450,000 adults in the UK used a genetic marker of biological age to reveal that by middle age, a lifetime of brisk walking reduces biological age by up to 16 years compared to a lifetime of slow walking.

    A follow-up study suggested it is never to late to benefit from brisk walking. An inactive 60-year woman or man was modelled to gain around an additional year of life expectancy through simply introducing a ten minute brisk walk into their daily routine.

    The power of brisk walking can also be seen in its ability to predict future health outcomes. It has been shown to be a stronger predictor of the risk of dying from heart disease than traditional predictors such as blood pressure and cholesterol, while also being a more powerful predictor than many other measures of lifestyle – including diet, obesity levels, and total physical activity.

    In fact, perhaps the single most informative question a doctor could ask their patient is: “How fast is your walking pace in comparison to other people?”

    Halo of benefits

    But brisk walking may not provide additional benefits for all outcomes or in all contexts. For example, the benefit of brisk walking over light-intensity walking in lowering cancer risk is less certain.

    A recent study suggested that although total walking was associated with reduction in 13 different types of cancers, there was no added value from brisk walking. Breaking prolonged sitting with light-intensity pottering around has also been shown to have profound impacts on metabolic effects.

    Importantly, walking has a halo of benefits beyond physical health. It can help with brain activity, doubling creative idea production. Indeed, the systems in the brain that support memory and imagination are also the same as those activated during whole body movement.

    Many of us already harness this very phenomenon, using walking to mull over problems and arrive at solutions or insights that would otherwise remain elusive. Context is also important here, with the mental health and cognitive benefits of walking thought to be enhanced when walking through nature.

    So called “nature prescriptions” for clinical populations have harnessed these principles to increase walking activity and improving both mental and physical health.

    Physical inactivity is a major driver of the modern epidemic of long-term conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, that are now observed in industrialised and developing economies alike. It has been estimated that 3.9 million premature deaths could be averted annually through targeting physical inactivity.

    However, instead of prevention, medical systems are largely based on management – people get ill and are then prescribed medicines to treat the illness. On average it takes $1 billion to bring a new drug to market which, despite these research and development costs, still go on to generate sizeable profits for shareholders showing the scale of the health economy.

    If just a fraction of these costs were diverted into public health initiatives aimed at increasing walking and physical activity opportunities for all, the need for an ever more sophisticated medical management ecosphere may retreat.

    In short, when searching for the elixir of life, you could do worse than looking down at your feet.

    Prof Yates receives funding from the The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre

    – ref. Why walking may be the key to a long and healthy life – https://theconversation.com/why-walking-may-be-the-key-to-a-long-and-healthy-life-255655

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: 7 queer African works of art: new directions in books, films and fashion

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Gibson Ncube, Senior Lecturer, Stellenbosch University

    Queer African creatives have been making their mark around the world through a range of forms – books, films, fashion, art, music. Their work wins awards, sets trends and is studied by scholars. Most research on African queerness, however, comes from outside the continent.

    So, we put together a special journal issue to celebrate some of these works that have appeared over the past decade or so. And also to create a space for African and Africa-based scholars to reflect on what’s happening on the continent.

    The contributors don’t only examine what these creative works reveal. They also consider how these artists are experimenting with style, voice, genre and imagery to express queer lived experiences.

    Here we highlight seven works of art discussed in papers in the special issue – from stories of childhood sexual experiences to bold fashion shows, musical films to maverick lesbian novels. They show the complex ways queer people shape their identities and express desire in very different African settings.

    1. Tell Me Your Politik by Nakhane

    Nakhane is a South African singer, writer, and actor whose work examines the meeting place of queerness and blackness. The song Tell Me Your Politik (from the 2023 album Bastard Jargon), presents Black men in a hypermasculine, military-style training environment. But two of them are quietly and tenderly beginning to express desire for each other. This moment of intimacy is interrupted by aggressive military drills led by a white commanding officer. The song’s lyrics insist on the need for ideological alignment (“tell me your politik”) before intimacy. This raises questions about love, politics, and consent.

    In his article, Gibson Ncube argues that the music video for the song uses touch to explore queerness as a form of resistance. Gentle and intimate gestures between Black men challenge dominant ideas of Black masculinity. The contrast between caring and violent touch reveals how queerness disrupts systems of domination. Touch becomes political, offering new ways of being and imagining queer futures.

    2. Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

    Under the Udala Trees is a 2015 novel by Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta. It follows Ijeoma, a Nigerian girl discovering her same-sex attraction during the time of the Biafran War.

    Chinelo Okparanta.
    FrimousseRoche/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    Forced into Bible lessons by her mother to “cure” her queerness, Ijeoma grapples with shame, rejection, and a coerced heterosexual marriage. The novel critiques religious and political oppression. It imagines resilience and queer love in a hostile environment.

    In his article, Wisani Mushwana shows that Under the Udala Trees exposes how Nigerian religious and political leaders weaponise biblical shame to enforce a heteronormative society, inflicting religious trauma in the process.

    Ijeoma’s bold questioning of the Bible challenges traditional Christian teachings and the use of scripture to shame or judge others. The novel highlights the lack of spaces where queer identity can be affirmed. At the same time, it uses the power of storytelling to reclaim agency and reimagine queer liberation.

    3. The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker

    The Quiet Violence of Dreams by the late South African novelist K. Sello Duiker was published in 2001. Tshepo is a queer Black man in post-apartheid South Africa. He navigates trauma, identity, and survival. After being raped and robbed, Tshepo finds temporary refuge in a Cape Town male brothel where he explores same-sex intimacy and community.

    Ntokozo Wandile Mbokazi and Lucy Valerie Graham think about the novel alongside the controversial South African film Inxeba/The Wound. They argue that the book and film challenge traditional ideas of Africanness. Tshepo’s story is a postcolonial coming-of-age tale which is shaped by disillusionment as the protagonist tries to fit into society.

    Racial and class tensions weaken the solidarity of queer people. This shows the limits of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa and how enforcing traditional masculinity often involves violence.

    4. Lagos Space Programme by Adeju Thompson

    Lagos Space Programme is a Nigerian fashion label created by designer Adeju Thompson. The brand combines west African fabrics and non-binary gender expression to challenge traditional ideas of masculinity. Through fashion, it connects Yoruba beliefs, queer politics, and bold design to celebrate the fluidity of gender.

    Khaya Mchunu and Isaiah Negedu show how the label uses clothing to question to imagine freer, more inclusive futures. Rather than looking for acceptance by fitting in, Lagos Space Programme insists on visibility and creative self-expression. It reclaims African traditions while disrupting fixed social norms.

    5. Nine Pieces of Desire by Idza Luhumyo

    The past decade has seen the publication of several important anthologies of queer African short stories.

    Two stories in particular are given attention in the special issue. Kenyan writer Idza Luhumyo’s 2017 story Nine Pieces of Desire is about 10-year-old Mariam, who lives in a Kenyan Muslim community. It explores her silent rebellion against patriarchal and religious norms after a fleeting same-sex encounter with her friend Grace.



    Read more:
    Being queer in Africa: the state of LGBTIQ+ rights across the continent

    6. Plums by Kharys Laue

    South African writer and editor Kharys Laue’s 2018 short story Plums recounts Chris’s childhood memory of a tender moment with her friend Gloria on a South African farm. This is contrasted with her adult struggles in a heteronormative and racist society.

    Leila Hall argues that these two stories disrupt the harmful binary of “innocent children/perverse homosexuals” by portraying childhood same-sex desire as natural and consensual, outside of adult coercion. They push back against the false idea that being queer means being dangerous. The young narrators help us see how systems of oppression work in everyday life.

    7. Kanarie by Christiaan Olwagen

    Kanarie is a 2018 South African film by Christiaan Olwagen. It follows Johan Niemand, a young gay man conscripted into the apartheid-era army in the 1980s. Under the racist system, white men were conscripted to help maintain the government’s power. Selected for a military choir, “the Canaries”, Johan deals with his sexual identity within a hypermasculine space. The film blends musical elements and melodrama to explore his inner conflict, his love for pop culture, and a tentative romance with another recruit. All in the face of conservative Christian nationalism.

    Andy Carolin argues Kanarie is more than a coming out story. It uses melodrama to imagine a queer way of being. By merging fantasy with realism, it shatters ideas of good versus evil or right versus wrong.

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

    – ref. 7 queer African works of art: new directions in books, films and fashion – https://theconversation.com/7-queer-african-works-of-art-new-directions-in-books-films-and-fashion-256252

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Virtual churches are popular in Ghana. But what about online safety?

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Theodora Dame Adjin-Tettey, Senior Lecturer, Durban University of Technology/Research Associate, School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa, Rhodes University

    Many churches have been holding worship services online via live-streaming platforms in recent times. This is unsurprising since many congregants use digital technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic also pushed churches to swiftly embrace digital platforms. This allowed them to continue with religious activities when physical and mobility restrictions were in place.

    Some churches invest heavily in audio-visual equipment, lighting systems and other gadgets to provide the right conditions for media production and to enhance the worship experience for congregants, online and in person.

    Digital technologies and platforms have become core components of the outreach and evangelistic activities of churches. Some contemporary pastors have a strong online presence with a huge following, mostly in the millions. They actively engage their followers and share different forms of messages with them.

    As the amount of online content generated by churches grows, questions of safety, security and privacy have come to the fore. It is important to look at how churches address these concerns as they rapidly deploy digital platforms to reach and maintain virtual church membership.

    I am a media and communication studies academic and researcher. In a recent paper I worked with my student to examined the concerns of congregants of a church in Ghana over the security dangers that digital church engagement poses.

    Christianity is the religion with the largest following in Ghana. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches turned to online services and have continued with them.

    The research revealed that there were no established policies guiding the church’s virtual engagements. The media team relied primarily on their subjective judgement to address any potential ethical dilemmas.

    Beside enhanced privacy measures and access control, we recommend ethical frameworks and guidelines to govern the management of congregants’ personal information in both physical and virtual environments. This must include the inputs of congregants and experts.

    The research also found that word of mouth was still the primary means by which congregants came to learn about the church. This suggests churches cannot abandon the old ways of reaching out to people.

    Digital technology and the church

    Radio, TV and social media are all used to extend invitations to the public, promote and advertise churches, and generally facilitate church activities. The importance of having an online presence has compelled a significant number of churches to have dedicated media teams. They create and distribute content meant for digital platforms. The content includes photos and audiovisual testimonies of church members.

    To ensure that members of online churches have a positive experience during live streaming, most media departments also invest creativity into their videography. On live streams, followers (virtual congregants) react to songs being sung and respond to what the preacher says with comments and the use of emojis and GIFs. This is synonymous with how they might react in the physical church environment.

    But during the streaming of worship services, information about church members is not just shared in the physical church environment but also with a broader online audience. By the nature of live-streaming, there is no control over who has access to the content, how widely it is distributed, and for what and how the content is used by third parties.

    The study and some of its key findings

    Data collection for our study involved 170 survey respondents (congregants) and eight interview participants (videographers, video editors and social media managers from the church media department).

    We asked the congregants how they had first learned about the church; factors influencing their participation in virtual church services; and what safety and security concerns they had around their virtual church engagements.

    The interview participants were asked about the ethical considerations directing their work.

    Our study found that congregants had a range of concerns. Based on the sense of safety, confidence and trust they have in the church, congregants participating in physical church services may divulge personal information. These include prayer requests, personal hardships, or testimonials about their accomplishments. They sometimes do this with the understanding that the information will remain inside the church’s walls.

    Chief among the concerns were:

    • the risk of identity theft

    • the potential misuse of personal data for targeted advertising

    • potential privacy invasion because of their interactions with the church’s digital platforms.

    Some members of the media team admitted that congregants might have privacy and security concerns. However, in the absence of formal guidelines, any attempt to ensure the privacy and security of congregants might be an ad hoc measure. This was demonstrated in the study’s finding that the media team’s privacy and security adherence was largely based on their judgement and sometimes on prodding from congregants.

    What can be done

    Based on concerns raised by congregants, we argue that churches must ensure the privacy of those participating in services by instituting confidentiality and anonymity measures, particularly when sharing their personal or sensitive information.

    In addition, participants in our research held the view that some sensitisation could be useful to cater to those concerns. This could take the form of regular sensitisation of congregants on how they can enhance their online safety and security.

    We believe that because churches sometimes rely on photos, videos and testimonies of members to build their social media profiles, a rule-based system must be put in place. This could involve delayed broadcasting techniques to prevent the airing of sensitive information.

    We suggest that steps be taken to protect sensitive information and content about members that is shared online. An example of how this can be done is being set by a non-denominational prayer movement that has taken over Ghana’s online sphere. To secure the privacy of members who share testimonies, their identities are kept anonymous and certain details, such as names and places, are also protected.

    Finally, the right technology must be put in place to allow for delayed broadcasts. This means live-streamed content can be reviewed and, where necessary, edited so that sensitive content can be removed before the broadcast reaches a wide online audience.

    Theodora Dame Adjin-Tettey received funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa for her post doctoral fellowship.

    – ref. Virtual churches are popular in Ghana. But what about online safety? – https://theconversation.com/virtual-churches-are-popular-in-ghana-but-what-about-online-safety-255627

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What the voter gender divide means for Canada’s political future

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Marshia Akbar, Researcher, Labour Migration at the CERC Migration and Integration Program, Toronto Metropolitan University

    Canada’s recent federal election suggests a growing gender divide in political preferences.

    Polling indicated women voters leaned strongly toward the Liberals, while an increasing number of men — particularly younger men — gravitated toward the Conservatives.

    This polarization was not simply a matter of partisan preference, but reflected deeper social, cultural and economic realignments rooted in identity politics and diverging values.

    The gender gap also mirrors patterns across western democracies, where far-right populist parties increasingly draw male support through nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-feminist narratives, while women — especially racialized and university-educated — opt for progressive parties promoting equality and social protection.



    Read more:
    Pierre Poilievre’s ‘More Boots, Less Suits’ election strategy held little appeal to women

    What the polls showed

    While official voting records by gender are not available, several public opinion polls heading into the election indicated gender was a key predictor of party support.

    Abacus Data found that women’s early preferences were nearly evenly split — 31 per cent for the Liberals and 32 per cent for the Conservatives. But as the campaign progressed, Liberal support among women rose steadily by two to three points per week, reaching 35 per cent by April 8, while support for the Conservatives fell to 30 per cent.

    This pattern was echoed by an EKOS Politics analysis, which described the 2025 election as defined by a “massive gender divide” — women supported the Liberal Party by a 25-point margin, while the Conservatives held a slight lead among men, especially those under 50.

    Findings from Angus Reid further underscored this divide. Among men, support was closely split, with the Conservatives holding a slight lead over the Liberals (44 per cent to 42 per cent). Among women, however, the Liberals enjoyed a commanding lead, with 51 per cent support compared to 32 per cent for the Conservatives.

    Together, these three polls suggest a growing gender gap in Canadian politics — one that shaped party support throughout the election campaign.

    The New Democratic Party, meanwhile — once positioned as a progressive bridge between working-class voters and social justice movements — struggled to attract voters as it had in previous elections.

    The NDP’s waning influence in the 2025 election highlights the erosion of class-based solidarity, which has seemingly been supplanted by identity politics.

    Economic insecurity, cultural values

    This gender gap was not just about party preference — it reflected deeper ideological divides shaped by cultural values, policy priorities and gender identities.

    Research into voting patterns in Canada over the past two decades found that Canadian women are more likely to support social welfare, state intervention and wealth redistribution — driven not by self-interest, but by values of equity and collective responsibility.

    These preferences are shaped not only by gender, but also by age, race, class, religion and gender identities. The research highlighted a growing feminist consciousness and suggested that evolving understandings of identity, especially among younger women, have strengthened support for progressive platforms.

    Voting preferences in the 2025 Canadian election reflected these patterns. Rising geopolitical tensions — fuelled by punitive American tariffs on Canadian goods and United States President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada — stirred national anxiety and shaped voter priorities.

    At the same time, the American rollback of reproductive rights and attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies raised alarm among women worldwide, reinforcing concerns about gender equity and human rights.

    Policy priorities

    That meant that how the Conservative and Liberal party leaders articulated their stances on these issues played a crucial role in shaping voter preferences.

    The Conservative Party emphasized economic policies such as tax cuts and reducing government spending. The party also tapped into cultural frustrations by opposing “woke” ideologies and promoting traditional values.

    This dual approach sought to resonate with voters alienated by progressive norms, particularly younger men who have felt marginalized by the housing crisis, insecure job markets and shifting cultural expectations around gender roles.



    Read more:
    The ‘freedom convoy’ protesters are a textbook case of ‘aggrieved entitlement’

    CBC report on male voter intentions.

    In contrast, the Liberal platform emphasized defending Canadian sovereignty, promoting national unity, expanding housing affordability, addressing climate change and advancing economic measures for the middle class — policies that seemingly resonated more with women voters, particularly those prioritizing social programs and long-term social stability.

    Although reproductive rights were not a central issue in Canada’s 2025 campaign, the erosion of those rights in the U.S. cast a shadow north of the border.

    The Liberal Party pledged to make its Sexual and Reproductive Health Fund permanent and to introduce a new IVF program offering up to $20,000 per cycle — measures aimed at improving access, especially for 2SLGBTQI+ Canadians.

    The Conservative platform emphasized support for universal health care but made no mention of reproductive health. As a result, many women may have viewed the Liberals as stronger defenders of both reproductive rights and Canadian sovereignty.

    Addressing the gender divide

    The 2025 election did more than reveal a partisan split; it exposed fundamentally different visions of Canada’s future between men and women.

    Gender divides in politics often mirror divisions in online discourse. Social media platforms tend to reinforce gendered political identities, with men more likely to be drawn into algorithm-driven spaces that amplify anti-establishment and masculinist narratives.

    Following the U.S. presidential election in 2024, The Guardian noted how social media algorithms feed their users content that’s aligned with the preferences of similar users, deepening ideological silos.

    American podcaster Joe Rogan exemplifies this dynamic — his show consistently tops charts in the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Canada, but with an audience that’s more than 80 per cent male.

    These digital bubbles not only reflect polarization — they entrench it, merging political and online identities in ways that make cross-cutting dialogue harder to achieve.

    Affecting personal lives

    This divide affects more than politics. It’s reshaping personal relationships. As political identity becomes central to personal values, dating and marriage across ideological lines have become more difficult.

    According to the American Survey Center, these political divisions are even preventing young people from building meaningful relationships.

    Similarly, the Atlantic reports that nearly two-thirds of liberal and conservative singles are likely to reject a potential partner who does not share their political beliefs. In this climate, political compatibility is becoming a prerequisite for long-term commitment, rather than a negotiable difference.

    Addressing this fragmentation requires building narratives that transcend identity silos and foster common ground, both online and offline. It’s essential for democratic resilience and for sustaining meaningful human connection.

    Marshia Akbar receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

    – ref. What the voter gender divide means for Canada’s political future – https://theconversation.com/what-the-voter-gender-divide-means-for-canadas-political-future-255857

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Algebra is more than alphabet soup – it’s the language of algorithms and relationships

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Courtney Gibbons, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Hamilton College

    Algebra often involves manipulating numbers or other objects using operations like addition and multiplication. Flavio Coelho/Moment via Getty Images

    You scrambled up a Rubik’s cube, and now you want to put it back in order. What sequence of moves should you make?

    Surprise: You can answer this question with modern algebra.

    Most folks who have been through high school mathematics courses will have taken a class called algebra – maybe even a sequence of classes called algebra I and algebra II that asked you to solve for x. The word “algebra” may evoke memories of complicated-looking polynomial equations like ax² + bx + c = 0 or plots of polynomial functions like y = ax² + bx + c.

    You might remember learning about the quadratic formula to figure out the solutions to these equations and find where the plot crosses the x-axis, too.

    Graph of a quadratic equation and its roots via the quadratic formula.
    Jacob Rus, CC BY-SA

    Equations and plots like these are part of algebra, but they’re not the whole story. What unifies algebra is the practice of studying things – like the moves you can make on a Rubik’s cube or the numbers on a clock face you use to tell time – and the way they behave when you put them together in different ways. What happens when you string together the Rubik’s cube moves or add up numbers on a clock?

    In my work as a mathematician, I’ve learned that many algebra questions come down to classifying objects by their similarities.

    Sets and groups

    How did equations like ax² + bx + c = 0 and their solutions lead to abstract algebra?

    The short version of the story is that mathematicians found formulas that looked a lot like the quadratic formula for polynomial equations where the highest power of x was three or four. But they couldn’t do it for five. It took mathematician Évariste Galois and techniques he developed – now called group theory – to make a convincing argument that no such formula could exist for polynomials with a highest power of five or more.

    So what is a group, anyway?

    It starts with a set, which is a collection of things. The fruit bowl in my kitchen is a set, and the collection of things in it are pieces of fruit. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 also form a set. Sets on their own don’t have too many properties – that is, characteristics – but if we start doing things to the numbers 1 through 12, or the fruit in the fruit bowl, it gets more interesting.

    In clock addition, 3 + 12 = 3.
    OpenStax, CC BY-SA

    Let’s call this set of numbers 1 through 12 “clock numbers.” Then, we can define an addition function for the clock numbers using the way we tell time. That is, to say “3 + 11 = 2” is the way we would add 3 and 11. It feels weird, but if you think about it, 11 hours past 3 o’clock is 2 o’clock.

    Clock addition has some nice properties. It satisfies:

    • closure, where adding things in the set gives you something else in the set,
    • identity, where there’s an element that doesn’t change the value of other elements in the set when added – adding 12 to any number will equal that same number,
    • associativity, where you can add wherever you want in the set,
    • inverses, where you can undo whatever an element does, and
    • commutativity, where you can change the order of which clock numbers you add up without changing the outcome: a + b = b + a.

    By satisfying all these properties, mathematicians can consider clock numbers with clock addition a group. In short, a group is a set with some way of combining the elements layered on top. The set of fruit in my fruit bowl probably can’t be made into a group easily – what’s a banana plus an apple? But we can make a set of clock numbers into a group by showing that clock addition is a way of taking two clock numbers and getting to a new one that satisfies the rules outlined above.

    Rings and fields

    Along with groups, the two other fundamental types of algebraic objects you would study in an introduction to modern algebra are rings and fields.

    We could introduce a second operation for the clock numbers: clock multiplication, where 2 times 7 is 2, because 14 o’clock is the same as 2 o’clock. With clock addition and clock multiplication, the clock numbers meet the criteria for what mathematicians call a ring. This is primarily because clock multiplication and clock addition together satisfy a key component that defines a ring: the distributive property, where a(b + c) = ab + ac. Lastly, fields are rings that satisfy even more conditions.

    At the turn of the 20th century, mathematicians David Hilbert and Emmy Noether – who were interested in understanding how the principles in Einstein’s relativity worked mathematically – unified algebra and showed the utility of studying groups, rings and fields.

    It’s all fun and games until you do the math

    Groups, rings and fields are abstract, but they have many useful applications.

    For example, the symmetries of molecular structures are categorized by different point groups. A point group describes ways to move a molecule in space so that even if you move the individual atoms, the end result is indistinguishable from the molecule you started with.

    The water molecule H₂O can be flipped horizontally and the end result is indistinguishable from the original position.
    Courtney Gibbons, CC BY-SA

    But let’s take a different example that uses rings instead of groups. You can set up a pretty complicated set of equations to describe a Sudoku puzzle: You need 81 variables to represent each place you can put a number in the grid, polynomial expressions to encode the rules of the game, and polynomial expressions that take into account the clues already on the board.

    To get the spaces on the game board and the 81 variables to correspond nicely, you can use two subscripts to associate the variable with a specific place on the board, like using x₃₅ to represent the cell in the third row and fifth column.

    The first entry must be one of the numbers 1 through 9, and we represent that relationship with (x₁₁ – 1)(x₁₁ – 2)(x₁₁ – 3) ⋅⋅⋅ (x₁₁ – 9). This expression is equal to zero if and only if you followed the rules of the game. Since every space on the board follows this rule, that’s already 81 equations just to say, “Don’t plug in anything other than 1 through 9.”

    The rule “1 through 9 each appear exactly once in the top row” can be captured with some sneaky pieces of algebraic thinking. The sum of the top row is going to add up to 45, which is to say x₁₁ + x₁₂ + ⋅⋅⋅ + x₁₉ – 45 will be zero, and the product of the top row is going to be the product of 1 through 9, which is to say x₁₁ x₁₂ ⋅⋅⋅ x₁₉ – 9⋅8⋅7⋅6⋅5⋅4⋅3⋅2⋅1 will be zero.

    If you’re thinking that it takes more time to set up all these rules than it does to solve the puzzle, you’re not wrong.

    Turning Sudoku into algebra takes a fair bit of work.
    Courtney Gibbons

    What do we get by doing this complicated translation into algebra? Well, we get to use late-20th century algorithms to figure out what numbers you can plug into the board that satisfy all the rules and all the clues. These algorithms are based on describing the structure of the special ring – called an ideal – these game board clues make within the larger ring. The algorithms will tell you if there’s no solution to the puzzle. If there are multiple solutions, the algorithms will find them all.

    This is a small example where setting up the algebra is harder than just doing the puzzle. But the techniques generalize widely. You can use algebra to tackle problems in artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptography, quantum computing and so much more – all with the same bag of tricks you’d use to solve the Sudoku puzzle or Rubik’s cube.

    Courtney Gibbons is affiliated with the Association for Women in Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society.

    – ref. Algebra is more than alphabet soup – it’s the language of algorithms and relationships – https://theconversation.com/algebra-is-more-than-alphabet-soup-its-the-language-of-algorithms-and-relationships-234541

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: US safety net helps protect children from abuse and neglect, and some of those programs are threatened by proposed budget cuts

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Todd Herrenkohl, Professor of Social Work, University of Michigan

    Safety net programs protect children in many ways. Energy/E+ via Getty Images

    President Donald Trump and Republicans in the House of Representatives have put forward budget proposals that would slash spending by hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade on several programs that support low-income U.S. families with children.

    If those cuts are in the version of the 2026 budget that clears Congress, and Trump signs it into law, funding for early childhood education, support for grocery purchases and an array of programs that help keep children fed, housed and cared for would decline sharply.

    As professors who conduct research about child welfare, we are alarmed by these proposed cuts and concerned about their potential impact on children and families. We are particularly concerned that steps taken to reduce costs will make children less safe and more susceptible to the consequences of abuse and neglect.

    Help for low-income families

    Our research has shown that increasing access to programs that support low-income families decreases child abuse and neglect while improving parents’ well-being. Examples of these programs include subsidies for child care and the earned-income tax credit, which supplements the earnings of many low- and moderate-income Americans.

    Other researchers have found further evidence that policies that help low-income families put food on the table, keep a roof over their heads and obtain health care also provide for children’s basic needs, such as food and education, and keep children safe.

    The proposed budget cuts could cost all taxpayers down the line because child abuse and neglect is costly for not only the people who are mistreated as kids but also for society.

    What’s more, a series of cost-benefit studies have found that providing a safety net for families not only helps the families who receive assistance but also society as a whole.

    Child abuse and neglect

    In 2023, child protection agencies received 4.4 million reports for suspected abuse and neglect, and 546,159 cases were confirmed. As high as these numbers are, they drastically underestimate the number of abused and neglected children in the U.S. because many acts of abuse and neglect are never reported.

    Research documenting the consequences and costs of child abuse and neglect has led many experts, including us, to recommend programs and policies that can reduce risks.

    Without attempts to reduce these risks, more children would suffer or die. The U.S Department of Health and Human Services found that 2,000 children died from abuse and neglect in 2023. Nearly half of these fatalities were among children under the age of 1.

    Parents experiencing high levels of stress can be more prone to abusing their kids.
    salim hanzaz/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Risks tied to poverty

    Some of the most helpful programs to prevent child abuse and neglect focus on reducing poverty.

    Poverty can place children at risk of abuse and neglect. When families can’t afford the bare necessities, it can add to the stress that makes parenting more difficult.

    Poverty isn’t the only cause of child abuse and neglect, but it is high on the list of risk factors. And its harms can be hard to reverse.

    A recent campaign by Prevent Child Abuse America, a nonprofit, posits that child abuse and neglect are not a “bad parent problem” but rather “a lack of resource problem.” Researchers have found that child abuse and neglect often come from the social and economic issues that lead families into crises.

    For example, parenting stress rises and children’s basic needs can go unmet when parents don’t have jobs, lack high-quality child care and generally struggle to make ends meet.

    When families’ basic needs are met, children are safer.
    Jackyenjoyphotography/Moment via Getty Images

    Government programs that help everyone

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that improving public health requires government programs that can reduce harm to children and promote childhood development and well-being.

    These programs include efforts to improve parenting skills, expand access to high-quality child care and early education, and strengthen the financial resilience of families.

    And yet the Trump administration initially sought to eliminate Head Start, a successful federally funded preschool program for low-income children, and dismantle many essential services. Evidence indicates that children who participate in Head Start are more likely to finish high school and college, which is important for employment and financial security.

    The CDC and our own review of the research point to big improvements in children’s health and fewer cases of child abuse and neglect with economic policies such as the earned-income tax credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

    We believe these programs are worth investing in because children’s lives are at stake. Especially when the economy appears to be in trouble, the consequences of weakening the safety net are dire.

    Todd I. Herrenkohl has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is affiliated with the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect and serves as an editor for Child Abuse & Neglect and the Journal for the Society for Social Work and Research.

    Kathryn Maguire-Jack receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Ohio Department of Children and Youth, Triple P America, and Wisconsin Children’s Hospital.

    Rebeccah Sokol receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

    – ref. US safety net helps protect children from abuse and neglect, and some of those programs are threatened by proposed budget cuts – https://theconversation.com/us-safety-net-helps-protect-children-from-abuse-and-neglect-and-some-of-those-programs-are-threatened-by-proposed-budget-cuts-255763

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Hurricane disaster planning with aging parents should start now, before the storm: 5 tips

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lee Ann Rawlins Williams, Clinical Assistant Professor of Education, Health and Behavior Studies, University of North Dakota

    When I lived in Florida, I had a neighbor named Ms. Carmen. She was in her late 70s, fiercely independent and lived alone with her two dogs and one cat, which were her closest companions.

    Each hurricane season, she would anxiously ask if I would check on her when the winds began to pick up. She once told me: I’m more afraid of being forgotten than of the storm itself. Her fear wasn’t just about the weather; it was about facing it alone.

    When hurricanes hit, we often measure the damage in downed power lines, flooded roads and wind-torn homes. But some of the most serious consequences are harder to see, especially for older adults who may struggle with mobility, chronic health problems and cognitive decline.

    Emergency preparedness plans too often overlook the specific needs of elders in America’s aging population, many of whom live alone. For people like Ms. Carmen, resilience needs to start long before the storm.

    The number of older adults in the U.S. and the percentage of the population age 65 and older have been rising.
    US Census Bureau

    I study disaster preparations and response. To prepare for hurricane season, and any other disaster, I encourage families to work with their older adults now to create an emergency plan. Preparing can help ensure that older adults will be safe, able to contact relatives or others for help, and will have the medications, documents and supplies they need, as well as the peace of mind of knowing what steps to take.

    Recent hurricanes show the gaps

    In 2024, Hurricanes Helene and Milton put a spotlight on the risks to older adults.

    The storms forced thousands of people to evacuate, often to shelters with little more than food supplies and mattresses on the floor and ill-equipped for medical needs.

    Flooding isolated many rural homes, stranding older adults. Power was out for weeks in some areas. Emergency systems were overwhelmed.

    A tornado tore into a senior community in Port St. Lucie, Florida, during Milton, killing six people. Some long-term care facilities lost power and water during Helene.

    At the same time, some older adults chose to stay in homes in harm’s way for fear that they would be separated from their pets or that their homes would be vandalized.

    At least 700 people stayed in chairs or on air mattresses at River Ridge Middle/High School in New Port Richey, Fla., during Hurricane Milton.
    AP Photo/Mike Carlson

    These events are not just tragic, they are predictable. Many older adults cannot evacuate without assistance, and many evacuation centers aren’t prepared to handle their needs.

    How to prepare: 5 key steps

    Helping older adults prepare for emergencies should involve the entire family so everyone knows what to expect. The best plans are personal, practical and proactive, but they will contain some common elements.

    Here are five important steps:

    1. Prepare an emergency folder with important documents.

    Disasters can leave older adults without essential information and supplies that they need, such as prescription lists, financial records, medical devices and – importantly – contact information to reach family, friends and neighbors who could help them.

    Many older adults rely on preprogrammed phone numbers. If their phone is lost or the battery dies, they may not know how to reach friends or loved ones, so it’s useful to have a hard copy of phone numbers.

    Consider encouraging the use of medical ID bracelets or cards for those with memory loss.

    Critical documents like wills, home deeds, powers of attorney and insurance records are frequently kept in physical form and may be forgotten or lost in a sudden evacuation. Use waterproof storage that’s easy to carry, and share copies with trusted caregivers and family members in case those documents are lost.

    2. Have backup medications and equipment.

    Think about that person’s assistive devices and health needs. Having extra batteries on hand is important, as is remembering to bring chargers and personal mobility aids, such as walkers, canes, mobility scooters or wheelchairs. Do not forget that service animals support mobility, so having supplies of their food will be important during a hurricane or evacuation.

    Ask doctors to provide an emergency set of medications in case supplies run low in a disaster.

    If the person is staying in their home, prepare for at least 72 hours of self-sufficiency in case the power goes out. That means having enough bottled water, extra pet food and human food that doesn’t need refrigeration or cooking.

    3. Map evacuation routes and shelter options.

    Identify nearby shelters that will likely be able to support older adults’ mobility and cognitive challenges. If the person has pets, make a plan for them, too – many areas will have at least one pet-friendly shelter, but not all shelters will take pets.

    An older woman crosses a street flooded by torrential rain from Tropical Storm Hilary on Aug. 20, 2023, in Thousand Palms, Calif.
    AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

    Figure out how the person will get to a shelter, and have a backup plan in case their usual transportation isn’t an option. And decide where they will go and how they will get there if they can’t return home after a storm.

    If your loved one lives in a care facility, ask to see that facility’s hurricane plan.

    4. Create a multiperson check-in system.

    Don’t rely on just one caregiver or family member to check on older adults. Involve neighbors, faith communities or local services such as home-delivered meals, transportation assistance, support groups and senior centers. Redundancy is crucial when systems break down.

    5. Practice the plan.

    Go through evacuation steps in advance so everyone knows what to do. Executing the plan should be second nature, not a scramble during a disaster or crisis.

    Planning with, not just for, older adults

    Emergency planning isn’t something done for older adults – it’s something done with them.

    Elders bring not only vulnerability but also wisdom. Their preferences and autonomy will have to guide decisions for the plan to be successful in a crisis.

    That means listening to their needs, honoring their independence and making sure caregivers have realistic plans in place. It’s an important shift from just reacting to a storm to preparing with purpose.

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

    – ref. Hurricane disaster planning with aging parents should start now, before the storm: 5 tips – https://theconversation.com/hurricane-disaster-planning-with-aging-parents-should-start-now-before-the-storm-5-tips-254917

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Unprecedented cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger research that improves economic growth, national security and your life

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul Bierman, Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Vermont

    The National Science Foundation funds America’s next great innovations, including space-related research. Heritage Space/Heritage Images/Getty Images

    Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

    No matter where you live, NSF-supported research has also made your life safer. Engineering studies have reduced earthquake damage and fatalities through better building design. Improved hurricane and tornado forecasts reflect NSF investment in environmental monitoring and computer modeling of weather. NSF-supported resilience studies reduce risks and losses from wildfires.

    Using NSF funding, scientists have done research that amazes, entertains and enthralls. They have drilled through mile-thick ice sheets to understand the past, visited the wreck of the Titanic and captured images of deep space.

    NSF funding supports research to help minimize risk and harm from natural hazards, including wildfires.
    FEMA/Michael Mancino

    NSF investments have made America and American science great. At least 268 Nobel laureates received NSF grants during their careers. The foundation has partnered with agencies across the government since it was created, including those dealing with national security and space exploration. The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150% to 300% since 1950, meaning for every dollar U.S. taxpayers invested, they got back between $1.50 and $3.

    However, that funding is now at risk.

    Since January, layoffs, leadership resignations and a massive proposed reorganization have threatened the integrity and mission of the National Science Foundation. Hundreds of research grants have been terminated. The administration’s proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut NSF’s funding by 55%, an unprecedented reduction that would end federal support for science research across a wide range of discipines.

    At my own geology lab, I have seen NSF grants catalyze research and the work of dozens of students who have collected data that’s now used to reduce risks from earthquakes, floods, landslides, erosion, sea-level rise and melting glaciers.

    I have also served on advisory committees and review panels for the NSF over the past 30 years and have seen the value the foundation produces for the American people.

    American science’s greatness stemmed from war

    In the 1940s, with the advent of nuclear weapons, the space race and the intensification of the Cold War, American science and engineering expertise became increasingly critical for national defense. At the time, most basic and applied research was done by the military.

    Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who oversaw military research efforts during World War II, including development of the atomic bomb, had a different idea.

    He articulated an expansive scientific vision for the United States in Science: The Endless Frontier. The report was a blueprint for an American research juggernaut grounded in the expertise of university faculty, staff and graduate students.

    The National Science Foundation funded some of the earliest weather equipment on satellites. The gold sphere is the Navy Vanguard (SLV-3) satellite, launched in 1958 to monitor cloud cover.
    Bettmann/Getty Images

    On May 10, 1950, after five years of debate and compromise, President Harry Truman signed legislation creating the National Science Foundation and putting Bush’s vision to work. Since then, the foundation has become the leading funder of basic research in the United States.

    NSF’s mandate, then as now, was to support basic research and spread funding for science across all 50 states. Expanding America’s scientific workforce was and remains integral to American prosperity. By 1952, the foundation was awarding merit fellowships to graduate and postdoctoral scientists from every state.

    There were compromises. Control of NSF rested with presidential appointees, disappointing Bush. He wanted scientists in charge to avoid political interference with the foundation’s research agenda.

    NSF funding matters to everyone, everywhere

    Today, American tax dollars supporting science go to every state in the union.

    The states with the most NSF grants awarded between 2011 and 2024 include several that voted Republican in the 2024 election – Texas, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – and several that voted Democratic, including Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Colorado.

    More than 1,800 public and private institutions, scattered across all 50 states, receive NSF funding. The grants pay the salaries of staff, faculty and students, boosting local employment and supporting college towns and cities. For states with major research universities, those grants add up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even states with few universities each see tens of millions of dollars for research.

    As NSF grant recipients purchase lab supplies and services, those dollars support regional and national economies.

    When NSF budgets are cut and grants are terminated or never awarded, the harm trickles down and communities suffer. Initial NSF funding cuts are already rippling across the country, affecting both national and local economies in red, blue and purple states alike.

    An analysis of a February 2025 proposal that would cut about US$5.5 billion from National Institutes of Health grants estimated the ripple effect through college towns and supply chains would cost $6.1 billion in GDP, or total national productivity, and over 46,000 jobs.

    An uncertain future for American science

    America’s scientific research and training enterprise has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. Yet, as NSF celebrates its 75th birthday, the future of American science is in doubt. Funding is increasingly uncertain, and politics is driving decisions, as Bush feared 80 years ago.

    A list of grants terminated by the Trump administration, collected both from government websites and scientists themselves, shows that by early May 2025, NSF had stopped funding more than 1,400 existing grants, totaling over a billion dollars of support for research, research training and education.

    Most terminated grants focused on education – the core of science, technology and engineering workforce development critical for supplying highly skilled workers to American companies. For example, NSF provided 1,000 fewer graduate student fellowships in 2025 than in the decade before − a 50% drop in support for America’s best science students.

    American scientists are responding to NSF’s downsizing in diverse ways. Some are pushing back by challenging grant terminations. Others are preparing to leave science or academia. Some are likely to move abroad, taking offers from other nations to recruit American experts. Science organizations and six prior heads of the NSF are calling on Congress to step up and maintain funding for science research and workforce development.

    If these losses continue, the next generation of American scientists will be fewer in number and less well prepared to address the needs of a population facing the threat of more extreme weather, future pandemics and the limits to growth imposed by finite natural resources and other planetary limits.

    Investing in science and engineering is an investment in America. Diminishing NSF and the science it supports will hurt the American economy and the lives of all Americans.

    Paul Bierman receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

    – ref. Unprecedented cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger research that improves economic growth, national security and your life – https://theconversation.com/unprecedented-cuts-to-the-national-science-foundation-endanger-research-that-improves-economic-growth-national-security-and-your-life-256556

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Congress began losing power decades ago − and now it’s giving away what remains to Trump

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charlie Hunt, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

    Where did Congress go? Julia Nikhinson/Bloomberg Creative via Getty Images

    Republicans in Congress have been making behind-the-scenes efforts to pass major domestic legislation via the federal budget process. They include potential cuts to Medicaid and extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

    But even though it’s Congress’ job to pass a budget and set tax policy, most media outlets have been content to frame key elements of the legislation as being driven not by Congress but by the president.

    So the news media say that the purpose of the bill is to “deliver Trump’s agenda” or to pass the “Trump tax cuts.” Many have even adopted President Donald Trump’s trademark name for the legislation: his “big, beautiful bill.”

    Along with Casey Burgat and SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, I am co-author of a textbook titled “Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch.” In that book, it was important to us to highlight Congress’ clear role as the preeminent lawmaking body in the federal government.

    But since Trump’s inauguration, Congress has ceded huge swaths of its policymaking responsibility to the president. That makes the media’s focus on Trump unsurprising. And there’s no denying that Trump has had enormous impact during his first 100 days in office.

    During that time, Congress has been unwilling to assert itself as an equal branch of government. Beyond policymaking, Congress has been content to hand over many of its core constitutional powers to the executive branch. As a Congress expert who loves the institution and profoundly respects its constitutionally mandated role, this renunciation of responsibility has been difficult to watch.

    And yet, Congress’ path to irrelevance as a body of government did not begin in January 2025.

    It is the result of decades of erosion that created a political culture in which Congress, the first branch of government listed in the Constitution, is relegated to second-class status.

    President Donald Trump holds one of the many executive orders he has signed during his second term.
    Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images

    The Constitution puts Congress first

    The 18th-century framers of the Constitution viewed Congress as the foundation of republican governance, deliberately placing it first in Article 1 to underscore its primacy. Congress was assigned the pivotal tasks of lawmaking and budgeting because controlling government finances was seen as essential to limiting executive power and preventing abuses that the framers associated with monarchy.

    Alternatively, a weak legislature and an imperial executive were precisely what many of the founders feared. With legislative authority in the hands of Congress, power would at least be decentralized among a wide variety of elected leaders from different parts of the country, each of whom would jealously guard their own local interests.

    But Trump’s first 100 days turned the founders’ original vision on its head, leaving the “first branch” to play second fiddle.

    Like most recent presidents, Trump came in with his party in control of the presidency, the House and the Senate. Yet despite the lawmaking power that this governing trifecta can bring, the Republican majorities in Congress have mostly been irrelevant to Trump’s agenda.

    Instead, Congress has relied on Trump and the executive branch to make changes to federal policy and in many cases to reshape the federal government completely.

    Trump has signed more than 140 executive orders, a pace faster than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republican Congress has shown little interest in pushing back on any of them. Trump has also aggressively reorganized, defunded or simply deleted entire agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

    These actions have been carried out even though Congress has a clear constitutional authority over the executive branch’s budget. Again, Congress has shown little to no interest in reasserting its power, even during recent budget talks.

    Many causes, no easy solutions

    Even so, Congress’ weakening did not begin with Trump. There’s no one culprit but instead a collection of factors that have provided the ineffectual Congress of today.

    One overriding factor is a process that has unfolded over the past 50 or more years called political nationalization. American politics have become increasingly centered on national issues, parties and figures rather than more local concerns or individuals.

    This shift has elevated the importance of the president as the symbolic and practical leader of a national party agenda. Simultaneously, it weakens the role of individual members of Congress, who are now more likely to toe the party line than represent local interests.

    A participant holds a sign during a GOP town hall meeting with U.S. Reps. Celeste Maloy and Mike Kennedy on March 20, 2025, in Salt Lake City.
    AP Photo/Rick Egan

    As a result, voters focus more on presidential elections and less on congressional ones, granting the president greater influence and diminishing Congress’ independent authority.

    The more Congress polarizes among its members on a party-line basis, the less the public is likely to trust the legitimacy of their opposition to a president. Instead, congressional pushback − sometimes as extreme as impeachment − can thus be written off not as principled or substantive but as partisan or politically motivated to a greater extent than ever before.

    Congress has also been been complicit in giving away its own power. Especially when dealing with a polarized Congress, presidents increasingly steer the ship in budget negotiations, which can lead to more local priorities – the ones Congress is supposed to represent – being ignored.

    But rather than Congress staking out positions for itself, as it often did through the turn of the 21st century, political science research has shown that presidential positions on domestic policy increasingly dictate – and polarize – Congress’ own positions on policy that hasn’t traditionally been divisive, such as funding support for NASA. Congress’ positions on procedural issues, such as raising the debt ceiling or eliminating the filibuster, also increasingly depend not on bedrock principles but on who occupies the White House.

    In the realm of foreign policy, Congress has all but abandoned its constitutional power to declare war, settling instead for “authorizations” of military force that the president wants to assert. These give the commander in chief wide latitude over war powers, and both Democratic and Republican presidents have been happy to retain that power. They have used these congressional approvals to engage in extended conflicts such as the Gulf War in the early 1990s and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later.

    What’s lost with a weak Congress

    Americans lose a lot when Congress hands over such drastic power to the executive branch.

    When individual members of Congress from across the country take a back seat, their districts’ distinctly local problems are less likely to be addressed with the power and resources that Congress can bring to an issue. Important local perspectives on national issues fail to be represented in Congress.

    Even members of the same political party represent districts with vastly different economies, demographics and geography. Members are supposed to keep this in mind when legislating on these issues, but presidential control over the process makes that difficult or even impossible.

    Maybe more importantly, a weak Congress paired with what historian Arthur Schlesinger called the “Imperial Presidency” is a recipe for an unaccountable president, running wild without the constitutionally provided oversight and checks on power that the founders provided to the people through their representation by the first branch of government.

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

    – ref. Congress began losing power decades ago − and now it’s giving away what remains to Trump – https://theconversation.com/congress-began-losing-power-decades-ago-and-now-its-giving-away-what-remains-to-trump-254984

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Kenya has a bold new disability law: now to make it work

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Amani Karisa, Associate Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

    Kenya has long recognised the rights of persons with disabilities in law. The 2010 constitution guarantees access, dignity and inclusion for people living with disabilities.

    Two years earlier in 2008, Kenya ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. And Kenya’s 2003 Persons with Disabilities Act formed the legal foundation for promoting the rights and welfare of persons with disabilities.

    But these legal promises remain largely aspirational. Their provisions are rarely translated into everyday realities. Many Kenyans with disabilities still face stigma, inaccessible environments, unequal education opportunities and limited access to employment.

    Many schools remain exclusionary due to inaccessible physical infrastructure. This includes classrooms and latrines that lack ramps or hinder mobility for children with disabilities.

    Public transport is often unusable for wheelchair users.

    Employers continue to overlook applicants with disabilities. Between 2019 and 2023, for instance, persons with disabilities faced higher unemployment rates at around 10.4% against a national average of 5.2%.

    The fact that there are disputes over the number of Kenyans with disabilities is also telling. The 2019 census recorded 2.2% of the population – fewer than 1 million people – as having disabilities. This is far below the World Report on Disability’s estimates of an average of around 15%. This undercount reflects both cultural stigma and systemic gaps in how disability is understood and reported.

    As someone who has spent more than a decade researching disability in Kenya, I have seen how the promise of rights is often undercut by structural and social barriers. This has come through in my own research and that of others.

    The persistent failure to translate rights into tangible outcomes for persons with disabilities created urgency for change.

    The Kenyan government has finally acted. In May 2025, the country’s parliament passed the Persons with Disabilities Act 2025.

    The new law expands the definition of disability to encompass a broader range of impairments. This ensures more individuals are recognised and protected under the law. The law also mandates accessibility across sectors such as education, employment, healthcare and public services, requiring reasonable accommodations and prohibiting discrimination.

    In my view, the new law reflects a broader move from symbolic recognition to legal obligation. But passing a law is just the beginning. Implementation will be the real test.

    What’s been missing

    In my research, and that of others, the question of why the 2003 law did little to shift everyday exclusion has been addressed. A few things were apparent.

    First, employment quotas were suggested but never enforced. Discrimination in hiring and promotions was prohibited in theory, but was common in practice.

    Second, there has been little support for caregivers.

    Third, there was minimal access to assistive technologies (which are tools designed to help persons with disabilities perform tasks and improve their quality of life, such as mobility aids, communication devices and adaptive software).

    Fourth, children with disabilities in Kenya have faced significant barriers to education. Their enrolment and completion rates are consistently lower than those of their non-disabled peers.

    Rather than disability being the problem, it is the lack of accommodation, inclusive policies and public understanding that creates exclusion. This is a core insight of the social model of disability, which views disability as arising from the interaction between individuals and an unaccommodating society. This perspective explains that people are disabled not by their bodies but by barriers in society – like stairs without ramps or employers who won’t adapt.

    What the new law promises

    Some key changes in the new law stand out:

    • Workplace inclusion: public bodies must now ensure that at least 5% of jobs are held by persons with disabilities. This provision, although previously suggested, now comes with clearer oversight requirements. Private employers are both mandated and incentivised to create inclusive workplaces. Reasonable accommodations, such as accessible workstations or flexible hours, can be counted as deductible expenses.

    • Access to public services and spaces: the law requires that buildings, roads and services be made accessible. Hospitals must have trained sign language interpreters. Schools must adapt their admission criteria, curricula and facilities to include learners with disabilities. These requirements signal a move away from treating accessibility as optional or charitable.

    • Tax relief and registration reforms: caregivers can now qualify for tax exemptions. Additionally, persons with long-term disabilities now receive permanent registration, ending the need for repeated reassessments – a process many found tedious, involving hospital visits, missing forms, long delays and limited assessment centres.

    • Stronger institutional framework: the National Council for Persons with Disabilities has been given more robust powers, including enforcement, monitoring and management of disability-related funding. The law also recommends the use of affirming and respectful language in public communication – a subtle but essential step in reducing stigma.

    The law incorporates disability considerations into sector-specific practices. For example, the law requires justice sector actors to consider disability when arresting, detaining or trying someone.

    What needs to happen now

    The government must act swiftly to implement supporting regulations. Funding is needed to retrofit public buildings, hire staff to support individuals with disabilities, and subsidise assistive devices. Without proper budgeting, the law risks becoming another unfulfilled promise.

    Employers and institutions must do more than comply: they must transform their attitudes. Disability inclusion should be built into human resources practices, school policies and service design. Training will be key.

    Public awareness must improve. Many Kenyans still see disability through a medical or charitable lens. There need to be national campaigns on radio, TV and social media that shift public understanding toward inclusion and equality.

    Finally, persons with disabilities must be central to the law’s implementation. Inclusion must be driven by those who live the reality of exclusion. Their insights are essential to making services responsive and respectful.

    The 2025 Act is an important step. But if it is not backed by funding, political will and public education, its potential will remain unrealised.

    The real question is not whether the law is good enough, but whether Kenya’s institutions, communities and leaders are prepared to make it work for those it was designed to serve.

    Amani Karisa works for the African Population and Health Research Center. He receives funding from Gates Foundation and Echidna Giving.

    – ref. Kenya has a bold new disability law: now to make it work – https://theconversation.com/kenya-has-a-bold-new-disability-law-now-to-make-it-work-256646

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Pope Francis drew inspiration from Latin American church and its martyrs – leaving a legacy for Pope Leo

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, Associate Professor of Catholic and Latin American Studies, Wake Forest University

    A mural of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero decorates a wall in Panchimalco, El Salvador, May 21, 2015. AP Photo/Salvador Melendez

    Pope Leo XIV’s election marks a historic moment: the first pope from an English-speaking country, and the first from the United States. Even more significant than these “firsts,” I believe, is a “second”: Leo follows in Pope Francis’ footsteps as a priest shaped by the Latin American church.

    The new pontiff served the church in Peru throughout the late 1980s and ‘90s. Francis called him back to serve from 2015-2023 as bishop of the northern city of Chiclayo – where Catholics today are rejoicing over the election of one of their own, “un papa Chiclayano.”

    As a Catholic theologian, I believe the College of Cardinals’ decision to elect another pontiff with such strong ties to Latin America reaffirms the continent’s influence on the global church’s sense of mission: to be a church that defends the marginalized and stands in solidarity with the oppressed.

    This vision is embodied by the continent’s many Catholics who have given their lives for speaking out against repression, violence and poverty over the past 50 years – most famously St. Oscar Romero, whom Francis beatified in May 2015.

    Having studied Latin American martyrdom closely, I would argue that Francis’ pontificate was at least partially inspired by these martyrs’ example, forged in blood. His decision to officially recognize this form of martyrdom adds to the legacy that many Latin American Catholics are hoping Leo will continue.

    ‘Church of the poor’

    The Second Vatican Council, a series of meetings of bishops from around the world that took place between 1962-65, brought about a number of reforms in the Catholic church, including greater focus on the poor and vulnerable. During the council, a group of bishops gathered in the Catacombs of Saint Domitilla to sign a pact in which they committed themselves to renouncing wealth and privilege and becoming a “church of the poor.”

    Many of these bishops were from Latin America, and in 1968, the Latin American Bishops’ Conference met to implement the council’s reforms. The documents that emerged from this meeting in Medellín, Colombia, encouraged closeness to people living in poverty and placed the promotion of justice and peace at the heart of the church’s evangelizing mission. In particular, they emphasized the church’s call to help liberate the oppressed from unjust social structures that produce poverty and violence.

    Pope Francis, then a cardinal, kisses a man’s foot during a Mass with youth trying to overcome drug addictions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2008.
    AP Photo

    Not all Latin American bishops embraced this vision of the church’s mission. But many took the call to solidarity very seriously, denouncing economic injustices and human rights violations. These bishops and other socially committed Christians promoted causes like land reform, agricultural cooperatives, workers’ rights and access to health care and education.

    At the time, many Latin American countries were marked by vast inequalities, military dictatorships and violent political repression. These regimes, many of which were backed by the United States, often labeled any opposition as “communist” and a threat to national security.

    Some Latin American bishops – along with many priests, nuns and laypeople – paid for their faith-inspired commitments to justice and peace with their lives. Thousands of Christians were assassinated during the late 20th century because they stood up for the rights of the poor, or they spoke out against oligarchs for hoarding wealth, land and power. Others were targeted after denouncing military regimes for massacring, torturing and “disappearing” civilians.

    Within some sectors of Latin American Catholicism, these women and men are remembered as “martyrs”: people who, like Jesus of Nazareth, gave their lives for following what they saw as God’s mandate to speak the truth and practice compassion, justice and peace.

    Pope’s recognition

    During Francis’ pontificate, he officially recognized several of these Christians as martyrs, moving their cause for sainthood toward beatification and canonization. Beatification officially declares a person to be “blessed” and allows them to be venerated locally, while canonization makes them a full saint for the global church.

    Students hold up art depicting slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero as they walk to the chapel in San Salvador where he was shot and killed.
    AP Photo/Salvador Melendez

    For example, Bishop Enrique Ángel Angelelli was assassinated in 1976 for his solidarity with the poor and defense of workers’ rights during Argentina’s Dirty War – a violent campaign of state terrorism against critics of the military junta. Francis declared him a martyr in 2018. The following year, Angelelli was beatified, along with two priests and a lay leader from the same province who were all similarly martyred just weeks before.

    Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was equally committed to defending the poor of El Salvador during the years of armed conflict leading up to the Salvadoran Civil War. In his Sunday homilies, he named people who had been imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by military and paramilitary forces, and drew on the Gospel and church teaching to challenge the violence and oppression of the day.

    His promotion of human rights and his demand that the military “stop the repression” led to his assassination while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980. Francis declared Romero a martyr and beatified him in 2015, then canonized him in 2018.

    Pope Francis views an image of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero during a private audience at the Vatican in 2015.
    L’Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP

    These actions placed a stamp of approval on how leaders like Angelelli and Romero embodied the church’s mission in their own time and place. But Francis’ recognition also made a broader statement about how the church should relate to the “powers and principalities” of the world. Throughout his papacy, Francis continued these martyrs’ commitment by standing with people on the “peripheries”: washing the feet of prisoners, defending the rights of migrants and demanding care for the Earth.

    Martyrs of the Earth

    In the 21st century, care for the Earth is producing a whole new generation of martyrs like Angelelli and Romero. Land and environmental defenders in Latin America and around the world are being assassinated for their work to mitigate harm from industries like fossil fuel extraction, mining, logging, ranching and more.

    In September 2024, Francis signaled his awareness of this phenomenon when he lamented the murder of Juan Antonio López. López was a lay Catholic leader in Honduras whose faith inspired him to defend local communities, lands and rivers from open-pit iron oxide mining.

    The Latin American bishops’ conference has taken note of this resurgence in violent persecution. In December 2024, it launched a campaign called “Life is hanging on by a thread,” promoting solidarity with the work of ecological and human rights defenders like López.

    As a former vice president of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, Pope Leo XIV is likely aware of this campaign and the violence that it hopes to disarm.

    The new pope had a close relationship with Francis, whose legacy looms large. A key inspiration for that legacy, however, is the witness of Latin American Christians whose blood has been shed for justice, peace and the environment.

    Only time will tell if this new pontiff’s leadership continues their indomitable solidarity with people whom, in Francis’ words, this world has deemed to be “disposable.”

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

    – ref. Pope Francis drew inspiration from Latin American church and its martyrs – leaving a legacy for Pope Leo – https://theconversation.com/pope-francis-drew-inspiration-from-latin-american-church-and-its-martyrs-leaving-a-legacy-for-pope-leo-255582

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What Pope Leo XIV’s coat of arms and motto reveal about his dedication to the ideals of St. Augustine − an art historian explains

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Virginia Raguin, Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emerita, College of the Holy Cross

    A 17th-century stained glass image of St. Augustine. Artist Tobias Müller, 1622. Michel M. Raguin, with the permission of the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton NJ, U.S.

    Pope Leo XIV has announced his motto and coat of arms – a long-held tradition for those in the ranks of bishops, cardinals and popes. The choice of symbols and words reflects the person’s experience.

    Leo’s shield is divided diagonally: The upper half shows a white lily on a blue background, and the lower shows the emblem of the Order of St. Augustine – an order to which he belongs. His motto reads, “In Illo uno unam,” translated as “In the One, we are one,” which are words of St. Augustine from his Exposition on Psalm 127, Paragraph 2: “I understand one in the One Christ. You are therefore many, and you are one; we are many, and we are one. ”

    In choosing this motto, Leo includes the identifying symbol of Augustine, a heart pierced by an arrow.

    Coat of Arms of Pope Leo XIV.
    Photo courtesy of the Holy See Press Office

    As an art historian, I explain how Renaissance artists portrayed Augustine’s humility – and what the choice of the motto might tell us about the new pope.
    .

    The Order of St. Augustine

    Augustine lived in the late fourth century, ultimately serving as bishop of Hippo in northern Africa for 34 years. The Augustinian order was founded in 1244 after several communities of hermits living in the region of Tuscany, Italy, petitioned Pope Innocent IV to form a single order. The pope gave them the Rule of Saint Augustine as a code of living, which stated: “Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common; [do] not seek after what is vain and earthly.”

    Augustine’s status as a scholar, theologian and administrator made him a widely depicted saint. For example, he appears in a stained glass window commissioned by a pastor in 1622, in which he holds his symbol of the heart pierced with the arrow resting on a book on his lap.

    The image relates to a phrase from Augustine’s book “The Confessions”: “Thou hadst pierced our heart with thy love, and we carried thy words, as it were, thrust through our vitals.”

    In this stained-glass image, the saint is seen speaking to a child. The 1483 translation of the “Golden Legend,” a collection of saints’ lives, explains that while struggling to write his treatise “On the Trinity,” Augustine was walking at the seashore and saw a child filling a tiny pit with water.

    When the child explained that he was bringing the ocean into the pit, Augustine scolded him for being silly. The child answered that he would sooner fit all the water of the sea into the pit than Augustine could bring the mystery of the Trinity into his limited human understanding. The Trinity is the Christian concept that God is not a single person but three – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – united in a single divine and eternal nature.

    This lesson in humility became widely depicted across the centuries. In 1482, an altarpiece by the painter and sculptor Michael Pacher shows Augustine with a child at his feet holding a spoon.

    Augustine’s scholarship

    Augustine’s legacy includes not only “The Confessions,” one of the most widely read books of medieval and early modern times, and “On the Trinity,” but many others, including “The City of God,” a monumental work of over 1,000 pages.

    Fresco of St. Augustine.
    Sandro Botticelli via Wikimedia Commons

    Sandro Botticelli’s 1480 painting of Augustine in his study shows the saint searching for clarity of thought as he pauses his writing.

    Dressed simply in a long white garment and a cloak, he has set aside his bishop’s miter, an official hat – also a gesture of humility. His study is crowded with books; on the right, behind his head, a book is open to a study of geometry.

    Botticelli tries to show the saint as a scholar in ancient times by placing on the left an old and discredited celestial model that depicts the Earth at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon, planets and stars revolving around it. We, with modern knowledge, understand that despite his intelligence, Augustine cannot know everything.

    Leo has been both a scholar and pastor. He served as a professor of canon law and early Christian theology at San Carlos y San Marcelo, a seminary in Peru.

    Yet, like the founder of his order, his words at this first Mass reflected his humility when he said that his appointment as pope was “both a cross and a blessing” and spoke of the responsibility he and the cardinals have in the world.

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

    – ref. What Pope Leo XIV’s coat of arms and motto reveal about his dedication to the ideals of St. Augustine − an art historian explains – https://theconversation.com/what-pope-leo-xivs-coat-of-arms-and-motto-reveal-about-his-dedication-to-the-ideals-of-st-augustine-an-art-historian-explains-256539

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Where do cuts to USAID leave the future of foreign aid in Africa? Podcast

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

    Three months after the Trump administration made drastic cuts to its aid agency, USAID, the effects are being felt across the world, particularly in Africa.

     Donald Trump has long been a critic of foreign aid, arguing that it’s not aligned with American interests. But he is  by no means the first person to criticise the aid industry. Debates about the effectiveness of foreign aid have rumbled on for decades, taking in everything from the way development assistance is distributed, to what happens to countries which become dependent on it.

    In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Bright Simons, an African aid expert and visiting senior fellow at ODI Global, about where the decimation of USAID leaves the debate about the future of development assistance.

    Bright Simons tells The Conversation that in broad terms, USAID spending in Africa is pretty small: “It’s about US$12 billion (£9 billion) roughly, so you’re talking about less than 0.5% of GDP in Africa.”

    A lot of the aid spending on the continent was targeted at life-saving programmes in specific programmes, for example HIV programmes in Nigeria and Uganda. At the same time, some countries such as South Sudan or Rwanda rely heavily on aid. “ It’s not the same picture all across the continent, but there were specific spots that were very badly hit,” says Simons.

    The USAID cuts come amid a general reduction in overseas development assistance by 7% in 2024 compared to 2023, the first fall in five years. The UK government has also announced its intention to reduce the percentage of gross national income it spends on aid from 0.5% to 0.3% from 2027.

    No learning curve

    Simons believes the crisis in aid is bigger than Trump. He’s critical of the lack of accountability in the way aid is spent both through the western model of development spending and through the more transactional approach of countries such as Russia, India or the United Arab Emirates. He argues that policies and programmes are often put in place and promoted with little scrutiny on the ground, and weak oversight on the way they’re delivered.

    “ You don’t have a learning curve to get out of aid because you don’t know enough about what is working, what is not working, why it’s working, why it’s not working to chart a path that gets you away from that dependency,” says Simons.

    Simons suggests that aid delivered through multilateral institutions does have advantages over bilateral agreements between countries. “ In theory, there is room for that kind of accountability. Whether or not you are allowed to actually exercise it as a different matter,” he says.

    However, Simons suggests one response to the current reduction in foreign aid could be for multilateral institutions to borrow more money from capital markets and lend it on to low-income countries.

    Listen to Simons talk about the history and future of aid on The Conversation Weekly podcast. The episode also includes an introduction with Adejuwon Soyinka, West Africa editor at The Conversation Africa.

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

    Newsclips in this episode from CBS News, CBS Evening News and DW News.

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

    Bright Simons is Honorary Vice-President at IMANI, a think tank in Ghana. He is President of mPedigree, a technology social enterprise.

    – ref. Where do cuts to USAID leave the future of foreign aid in Africa? Podcast – https://theconversation.com/where-do-cuts-to-usaid-leave-the-future-of-foreign-aid-in-africa-podcast-256608

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: ‘I will not eat the bugs’: examining a right-wing narrative about scarcity and insect consumption

    Source: The Conversation – France – By D. D. Moore, Visiting Fellow, Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, European University Institute

    Noor Bin Ladin, a right-wing influencer, stridently declares “I don’t want to eat the bugs” on a talk show hosted by a former adviser to US President Donald Trump. Laurent Duplomb, a senator from the conservative Les Républicains party in France, informs his colleagues that the French would be eating “insects without their knowledge”. Bartosz Kownacki, an MP from the nationalist Law and Justice party in Poland, suggests that opposition politicians write “instead of chicken, eat a worm” on their election materials, arguing that “this is their real election programme”. Thierry Baudet, a leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy party in the Netherlands, shouts “No way! No way!” while holding up a bag of mealworms in front of protesting farmers. Politicians in Lega, a far-right party in Italy, warn that the European Union is planning to “impose” the eating of insects on citizens in the bloc – and a Lega electoral campaign includes a billboard-sized image of a person popping an enormous cricket into their mouth, next to the caption, “Let’s change Europe before it changes us.”


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    During the 2020s, commentators and politicians across the right-wing political spectrum have amplified an Internet-based conspiracy theory that elite forces are conspiring to make us all eat insects. Often rallying under the slogan “I will not eat the bugs,” right-wing and far-right figures have come out in force against human consumption of insects. Many of these people assert that the EU is planning to force bug-eating on the general public while devastating traditional agriculture and meat consumption under the guise of the European Green Deal, the bloc’s plan to eliminate greenhouse gases by 2050 and decouple economic growth from resource use. Opposing insect-eating has become a symbolic way to protest EU environmental policies, express scepticism of and hostility toward Brussels, and villainize political opponents. Closer inspection reveals that the conspiracy theory underlying such opposition has much older and more sinister resonances.

    “Spreading disinformation”

    Insect eating (entomophagy) remains a minor practice in Europe and North America, although alternative protein sources do play a role in the EU’s move toward a sustainable future. So far, the European Commission has approved frozen, dried and powdered forms of Tenebrio molitor (yellow mealworm larva), Locusta migratoria (migratory locust), Acheta domesticus (house cricket) and Alphitobius diaperinus (the lesser mealworm larva) for human consumption. But the market for insect powder in foods like bread, pasta and sports bars remains small. Although insects are common food in many parts of the world, consumers in the West, where insects are more commonly used to provide protein in animal feed, are reluctant to eat bugs for historical reasons based in ideas of uncleanliness and primitiveness. So, based on the facts, there seems to be little to no reason for statements such as those made by Rumen Petkov of Bulgaria’s ABV party, who said that EU approval of insect consumption is a “crime against Europe” and that the European Commission is “prepared to kill our European children”.

    What led to the rapid spread of this conspiracy theory? Noor Bin Ladin’s remarks give us a clue. During her talk show appearance, Bin Ladin described her words as a message for Klaus Schwab to take to his “masters”. Schwab is the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum. Early in the Covid pandemic, Schwab and the WEF produced a set of proposals titled “the Great Reset”, which called for an overhaul of various world systems to produce a stakeholder-driven capitalism that would lead to a more socially and environmentally responsible future. Conspiracists seized on and branded “the Great Reset” as a new iteration of a conspiracy theory known as the New World Order – an imagined global governance system meant to control the lives of everyone. Both the Great Reset and the New World Order lead back to much older and broader antisemitic conspiracy theories that hold that elite Jewish financiers run the world with their hands on invisible levers of power. All these narratives tap into feelings of futility and hopelessness about the future.

    US right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson called a 2023 episode of his show, which included a heavy focus on Schwab and the WEF, “Let Them Eat Bugs”, a title that gestures at the remark allegedly made by Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, when she heard about people suffering from a lack of bread before the French Revolution: “Let them eat cake”. With this title, Carlson is aiming to emphasize that the elite are hopelessly out of touch and have contempt for farmers and the average man, whom they want to force to eat bugs. Like the French bedbug scare in late 2023, right-wing alarm around insect-eating has connections to the spread of anti-EU Russian propaganda. Russian news outlets have suggested that Europeans are so poor and food deprived as a result of sanctions connected to the war in Ukraine that they have been reduced to eating insects. As the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) writes, insects are “delicious treats for actors with interest in spreading disinformation against the EU”.

    Symbols for dehumanization

    The desire to stir up fear about the minor level of European and US insect consumption is not based on the risk of rapid growth in the insect market, but on the power to arouse disgust and fear itself. Insects have long been used as symbols to stir revulsion and paint opponents as objects of physical and moral disgust. During times of political extremism, insects have featured repeatedly in efforts to distance, devalue and dehumanize minorities. Armenians were called locusts during the Armenian genocide, and Jews were compared to lice in Nazi Germany. In the period prior to the ethnic genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, some Hutus repeatedly called Tutsis “cockroaches” on public radio. The right wing’s current fetishization of insect-eating serves as a narrative to cast political opponents as morally repulsive, even if not labelling them as bugs themselves.

    For some figures on the right, insect consumption symbolizes the worst of Eurocentric liberalism – seen as a movement so void of a positive political vision that the only possible future it offers is one of impoverishment and bug-eating. They point to an elite who they claim will go on feasting on meat while forcing mealworms and fly larvae on the rest of us. It’s a potent image. At a moment in which people on the right and the left seem unable to imagine a better political future together, it becomes easier to demonize climate policy-minded leaders as a group of disgusting hypocrites plotting to create a society of contrived scarcity where the general population is reduced to eating bugs.

    Meanwhile, since 2015, scientists have been releasing papers warning that the global food system shows risks of genuine structural problems. In a future of environmental disruption, trade wars and real risks of food shortages and famine, we may need all the calories we can get – insect-based or otherwise.



    À lire aussi :
    ‘A healthy earth may be ugly’: How literary art can help us value insect conservation

    Out of curiosity, I bought a bag of cricket flour last fall. The crickets resulted in a delicious, nutty-flavoured cecina, well… crickcina. So far, none of my friends will try it. They’re missing out.

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

    – ref. ‘I will not eat the bugs’: examining a right-wing narrative about scarcity and insect consumption – https://theconversation.com/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs-examining-a-right-wing-narrative-about-scarcity-and-insect-consumption-254112

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Dishevelled, dehydrated delirium: new Aussie film The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage, is an absolute blast

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Grace Russell, Lecturer, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University

    Madman Entertainment

    Nicolas Cage has made a career from his highly entertaining scenery chewing. He follows a performance style he calls “Nouveau Shamanic” – an exaggerated form of method acting where he acts according to the character’s impulses. This allows for the wild, unpredictable outbursts his characters are known for.

    Cage films are also usually about masculinity: its worst excesses, the parameters restricting it, and what ennobling versions of it might look like.

    The Surfer, a new Australian feature film from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, leans right into masculinity as a theme.

    Our unnamed protagonist (Cage) is returning to his former Australian home from the United States. He is newly divorced, and trying to buy a beachside property to win back his family.

    He takes his teenage son (Finn Little) for a surf near the property, but they are run off by an unfriendly pack of locals.

    Returning alone to the beachside car park to make some calls, he is besieged there over the next several days by the same gang. They are led by a terrifying middle-aged Andrew Tate-esque influencer, Scally (Julian McMahon), who runs the beach like a combination of a frat bro party and wellness retreat.

    The protagonist’s fast descent into dishevelled, dehydrated delirium as the group’s hazing escalates, fuels much of the first two acts.

    Fish out of water

    It is impossible to think of an actor other than Cage who could make a character like this so enjoyable to watch.

    From the first moments, he seems pathetic: giving his uninterested teenage son metaphorical speeches about surfing, losing arguments on the phone with his broker and real estate agent, reeking of pomposity and desperation.

    The sense of a man out of his depth is compounded by his Americanness contrasting with the particular brand of Australian masculinity the locals display. Both types are brash and entitled, but with entirely different ways of expressing it.

    This is a man out of his depth.
    Madman Entertainment

    Cage’s distinctively American confidence has no resistance to the terrifying switches of Australian masculinity from friendly to teasing to violent.

    “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they hiss at him on first meeting, forcing him to retreat, cowed, to the car park, where he remains for most of the rest of the film.

    The wide-open and the claustrophobic

    What a stroke of genius it is to use this single location.

    Filmed in Yallingup, Western Australia, The Surfer beautifully captures the natural surroundings, stunning views and shimmering heat of Australian coastal summer.

    At the same time, a confined, interstitial semi-urban feature like a beachside car park feels so bleak and uninviting. The only amenities are an overpriced coffee cart, ancient payphone and a dingy toilet block.

    The beachside car park feels so bleak and uninviting.
    Madman Entertainment

    As a film setting, it is both a spectacular wide-open vista and stiflingly claustrophobic – a perfect mechanism for The Surfer’s psychological horror.

    It must have been attractive in getting the script funded as well. With such an affordable location, more of the budget would have been freed up for a big name like Cage.

    A modern Wake in Fright

    With its oppressive setting, overexposed orange and yellow light and grade, and a sweaty spiral into madness, The Surfer invites comparisons to Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 brutal depiction of Australian men and their drinking culture.

    Both take place at Christmas and feature an antagonist who enjoys confidently explaining their dubious moral worldview to everyone. However, Wake in Fright’s horror lingers because we know the culture remains even after the hero escapes it. The Surfer struggles a little more in landing the ending.

    The film’s depiction of masculinity echoes Wake In Fright.
    Madman Entertainment

    For the mean, violent, misogynistic villains to be defeated, it would be unsatisfying for Cage to stoop to their level. This means – without spoiling too much – Cage remains an oddly passive character throughout the film, while others perform the avenging actions.

    The only way the protagonist’s masculinity can be resurrected as upright, ethical and empowering is for the character to literally turn his back on the vengeance we’ve been waiting for him to deliver.

    It’s not that the film has an inarticulate grasp of its own politics, but more that the otherwise terrific script by Thomas Martin feels written into a difficult corner.

    A blast along the way

    I don’t want to imply that this ending means The Surfer isn’t an absolute blast along the way. A lot of the fun is in anticipating each dreadful humiliation – and it somehow turning out worse than you could have expected.

    A spilled coffee leads to drinking recycled wastewater which leads to chewing on a dead rat, and we still haven’t reached the lowest rung on the ladder of indignities that Cage’s character suffers.

    In less skilled hands this could feel nasty or gross, but the hallucinatory quality of Finnegan’s direction makes it feel almost sublime. And Cage’s pleading, groaning, sobbing and gibbering feel believable and relatable.

    The pathos works – and it’s pretty funny too.

    The Surfer is in cinemas from today and streaming on Stan from June 15.

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

    – ref. Dishevelled, dehydrated delirium: new Aussie film The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage, is an absolute blast – https://theconversation.com/dishevelled-dehydrated-delirium-new-aussie-film-the-surfer-starring-nicolas-cage-is-an-absolute-blast-254580

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Two lizard-like creatures crossed tracks 355 million years ago. Today, their footprints yield a major discovery

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By John Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University

    Marcin Ambrozik

    The emergence of four-legged animals known as tetrapods was a key step in the evolution of many species today – including humans.

    Our new discovery, published today in Nature, details ancient fossil footprints found in Australia that upend the early evolution timeline of all tetrapods. It also suggests major parts of the story could have played out in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana.

    This fossil trackway whispers that we have been looking for the origin of modern tetrapods in the wrong time, and perhaps the wrong place.

    The first feet on land

    Tetrapods originated a long time ago in the Devonian period, when strange lobe-finned fishes began to haul themselves out of the water, probably around 390 million years ago.

    This ancestral stock later split into two main evolutionary lines. One led to modern amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders. The other led to amniotes, whose eggs contain amniotic membranes protecting the developing foetus.

    Today, amniotes include all reptiles, birds and mammals. They are by far the most successful tetrapod group, numbering more than 27,000 species of reptiles, birds and mammals.

    They have occupied every environment on land, have conquered the air, and many returned to the water in spectacularly successful fashion. But the fossil record shows the earliest members of this amniote group were small and looked rather like lizards. How did they emerge?

    The oldest known tetrapods have always been thought to be primitive fish-like forms like Acanthostega, barely capable of moving on land.

    Acanthostega, an early tetrapod that lived about 365 million years ago, was a member of the ancestral stock that gave rise to amphibians and amniotes.
    The authors

    Most scientists agree amphibians and amniotes separated at the start of the Carboniferous period, about 355 million years ago. Later in the period, the amniote lineage split further into the ancestors of mammals and reptiles-plus-birds.

    Now, this tidy picture falls apart.

    A curious trackway

    Key to our discovery is a 35 centimetre wide sandstone slab from Taungurung country, near Mansfield in eastern Victoria.

    The slab is covered with the footprints of clawed feet that can only belong to early amniotes, most probably reptiles. It pushes back the origin of the amniotes by at least 35 million years.

    Mansfield slab, dated between 359-350 million years old, showing positions of early reptile tracks.
    The authors

    Despite huge variations in size and shape, all amniotes have certain features in common. For one, if we have limbs with fingers and toes, these are almost always tipped with claws – or nails, in the case of humans.

    In other tetrapod groups, real claws don’t occur. Even claw-like, hardened toe tips seen in some amphibians are extremely rare.

    Claws usually leave obvious marks in footprints, providing a clue to whether a fossil footprint was made by an amniote.

    Close up showing the oldest known tracks with hooked claws from Mansfield, Victoria. Left, photo; right, optical scan.
    The authors

    The oldest clawed tracks

    The previous oldest fossil record of reptiles is based on footprints and bones from North America and Europe around 318 million years ago.

    The oldest record of reptile-like tracks in Europe is from Silesia in Poland, a new discovery also revealed in our paper. They are around 328 million years old.

    However, the Australian slab is much older than that, dated to between 359 and 350 million years old. It comes from the earliest part of the Carboniferous rock outcropping along the Broken River (Berrepit in the Taungurung language of the local First Nations people).

    This area has long been known for yielding many kinds of spectacular fossil fishes that lived in lakes and large rivers. Now, for the first time, we catch a glimpse of life on the riverbank.

    Fossil hunters search the Carboniferous red sandstone in the Mansfield area of Victoria. Such outcrops recently yielded the trackways of the world’s oldest reptile.
    John Long

    Two trackways of fossil footprints cross the slab’s upper surface, one of them overstepping an isolated footprint facing the opposite direction. The surface is covered with dimples made by raindrops, recording a brief shower just before the footprints were made. This proves the creatures were moving about on dry land.

    All the footprints show claw marks, some in the form of long scratches where the foot has been dragged along.

    The shape of the feet matches that of known early reptile tracks, so we are confident the footprints belong to an amniote. Our short animation below gives a reconstruction of the ancient environment around Mansfield 355 million years ago, and shows how the tracks were made.

    A short animation showing the creature making the tracks and its scientific significance. By Flinders University and Monkeystack Productions.

    Rewriting the timeline

    This find has a massive impact on the origin timeline of all tetrapods.

    If amniotes had already evolved by the earliest Carboniferous, as our fossil shows, the last common ancestor of amniotes and amphibians has to lie much further back in time, in the Devonian period.

    We can estimate the timing of the split by comparing the relative lengths of different branches in DNA-based family trees of living tetrapods. It suggests the split took place in the late Devonian, maybe as far back as 380 million years ago.

    This implies the late Devonian world was populated not just by primitive fish-like tetrapods, and intermediate “fishapods” like the famous Tiktaalik, but also by advanced forms including close relatives of the living lineages. So why haven’t we found their bones?

    The location of our slab provides a clue.

    Big evolutionary questions

    All other records of Carboniferous amniotes have come from the northern hemisphere ancient landmass called Euramerica that incorporated present-day North America and Europe. Euramerica also produced the great majority of Devonian tetrapod fossils.

    The new Australian fossils come from Gondwana, a gigantic southern continent that also contained Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.

    In all of this vast landmass, which stretched from the southern tropics down across the South Pole, our little slab is currently the only tetrapod fossil from the earliest part of the Carboniferous.

    The Devonian record is scarcely much better. The Gondwana fossil record of early tetrapods is shockingly incomplete, with enormous gaps that could conceal – well, just about anything.

    This find now raises a big evolutionary question. Did the first modern tetrapods, our own distant ancestors, emerge in the temperate Devonian landscapes of southern Gondwana, long before they spread to the sun-baked semi-deserts and steaming swamps of equatorial Euramerica?

    It’s quite possible. Only more fieldwork, bringing to light new discoveries of Devonian and Carboniferous fossils from the old Gondwana continents, might one day answer that question.

    We acknowledge the Taungurung people of Mansfield area where this scientific work has taken place.

    John Long receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

    Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki receives funding from the Swedish Research Council and the European Research Council.

    Per Ahlberg receives funding from the European Research Council and the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

    – ref. Two lizard-like creatures crossed tracks 355 million years ago. Today, their footprints yield a major discovery – https://theconversation.com/two-lizard-like-creatures-crossed-tracks-355-million-years-ago-today-their-footprints-yield-a-major-discovery-254301

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Curious Kids: if our eyes see upside down, how does the brain flip the picture?

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Daniel Joyce, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Southern Queensland

    I heard that we see upside down, but our brain flips the image. How does it do that?

    –Jasmine, Mount Evelyn, Victoria

    Our eyes work thanks to light. Objects we can see are either sources of light themselves – like a candle or a phone screen – or light bounces off them and makes its way to our eyes.

    First, light passes through the optical components of the eyes such as the cornea, pupil and lens.

    Together, they help focus the light onto the retina that senses light, while also controlling the intensity of light to help us see well while avoiding damage to the eye.

    The function of the lens is to correctly focus light that comes from objects at different distances. This process is known as accommodation.


    Marochkina Anastasiia/Shutterstock

    While performing this important task, light passing through the lens becomes inverted. This means that light from the top of the object falls lower on the retina than light from the bottom, which falls higher on the retina.

    So, light exiting the lens to land on the retina is indeed flipped upside down. But that doesn’t mean the brain is actually flipping the picture “back”. Here’s why.

    The orientation doesn’t actually matter

    While the light being interpreted by the brain is “upside down” compared to the real world, the question is: is that actually a problem for us?

    From your own experience you can tell the answer is probably no. We seem to navigate and interact with the world just fine.

    So, where in the brain is the image flipped or rotated 180 degrees to be the “right way up” again?

    You may be surprised to learn that vision scientists reject the idea a flipping or rotation needs to happen at all. This is because of how our brains process visual information.

    The object you perceive is “encoded” by the firing of various neurons – brain cells that process information – in various locations in the brain. This pattern of firing is what encodes the information about the object you’re focusing on. That info takes into account the object’s relation to everything else in the scene, your body in the world, and your movements.

    As long as the relative encodings of these are all consistent with one another, as well as stable, there’s no need for a flip to happen at all.

    We can function with ‘upside down’ goggles!

    Several studies have looked at how we adapt to large changes in visual input by asking people to wear goggles that flip the image coming in.

    This means the image lands on the retina the “right way up”, so to speak, but upside down from what the brain has learned it should be.

    In the 1930s, two scientists in Austria performed the Innsbruck Goggle Experiments. For weeks or even months at a time, participants in these studies wore goggles that altered the way the world around them looked. This included goggles that turn the incoming image upside down.

    A person blinks while wearing an ‘invertoscope’ – goggles that turn the incoming image upside down.
    Dmitry Hoh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    As you can imagine, people wearing these goggles at first found it really difficult to get by in their day-to-day activities. They would stumble and bump into things.

    But this was temporary.

    Participants reported seeing the world upside-down for the first few days, with difficulties navigating the environment, including trying to step over ceiling lights that appeared to them as on the floor.

    Around the fifth day, however, performance seemed to improve. Things that were at first seen upside down now appeared the right way up, and this tended to improve with more time.

    In other words, with continued exposure to the upside-down world, the brain adapted to the changed input.

    More recent studies are beginning to identify which areas of the brain are involved in being able to adapt to changes in visual input, and what the limits of our ability to adapt might be.

    Adaptation may even allow “colour blind” people to see colour better than is predicted from their condition.

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

    – ref. Curious Kids: if our eyes see upside down, how does the brain flip the picture? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-if-our-eyes-see-upside-down-how-does-the-brain-flip-the-picture-254303

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Should AD stand for Alzheimer’s disease, or for Auguste Deter, the patient whose case was first described?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Donald Weaver, Professor of Chemistry and Senior Scientist of the Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network, University of Toronto

    Alzheimer’s disease is named for Alois Alheimer (left), but his patient, Auguste Deter (right), should not be overlooked. (Wikimedia Commons)

    Auguste Deter was born 175 years ago on May 16, 1850. Though the story of her life is not widely known, it should be. Through her suffering and dignity, Deter puts a much-needed human face on the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), one of the most important medical problems currently confronting humankind. Auguste Deter reminds us that AD is a disease of people, not proteins.

    Often, scientists reduce AD to a disorder of shrunken brain cells or misfolded proteins. However, AD is so much more.

    It is a disease that impairs thought processes and personal memories — the very essence of what makes each one of us an individual capable of hopes, dreams, love and being loved. AD is a very human disease and a very human struggle for individuals, their families and society as a whole. Deter is a crucial reminder of the human aspects of this devastating disease.

    ‘I have lost myself’

    Although dementia had been recognized for centuries, Deter was the first person officially diagnosed with the type of dementia now recognized as Alzheimer’s disease.

    Auguste Deter was a patient of Alois Alzheimer. His report on her case was the first description of what is now Alzheimer’s disease.
    (Wikimedia Commons)

    Born Auguste Hochmann into a working-class family, the financial hardships imposed by her father’s early death forced Deter into full-time employment as a seamstress at age 14. She continued this work until marrying Karl Deter, a railway clerk. The couple moved to Frankfurt, Germany where they lived as a happy and harmonious family with their daughter, Thekla.

    Tragically in the spring of 1901, this loving and caring 51-year-old woman began to be incapable of routine household activities. Soon, due to her progressive memory loss and intellectual impairment, she was no longer able to function on her own. She was admitted to the Frankfurt Psychiatric Hospital under the care of Dr. Alois Alzheimer.

    Alzheimer asked her many questions to which she would sometimes quietly reply “Ich habe mich verloren.” (“I have lost myself.”) Sadly, her relentless cognitive decline continued. On July 12, 1905, Alzheimer recorded that Deter’s deterioration had progressed such that she was lying on her side in a pool of urine, knees drawn up, unable to communicate. She died on April 8, 1906 from pneumonia and infected bed sores.

    Definitive features

    Alois Alzheimer.
    (Provided by U.S. National Library of Medicine)

    During the subsequent autopsy, Alzheimer identified not only Deter’s marked brain shrinkage but also localized clumps (“plaques”) of an unknown deposited substance as well as dense bundles of tangled fibres in what were once healthy brain cells.

    These latter two observations — now recognized as amyloid plaques and tau tangles — have become the diagnostic features that define the pathology of AD. In 1907, Alzheimer published a scientific paper in which he described Deter’s brain and her “new” type of dementia.

    Unfortunately, Alzheimer was unable to dedicate a long career to a more comprehensive understanding of this disease. He contracted rheumatic fever in 1912, dying of its complications three years later at age 51. Nonetheless, the Deter case report was sufficient to establish his legacy as the discoverer of Alzheimer’s disease.

    As an inquisitive psychiatrist and pathologist, Alzheimer had been interested in medicine and science, not fame. He was not seeking to name a disease after himself. In 1910, Alzheimer’s boss, the renowned German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, wrote the influential Handbook of Psychiatry – a textbook in which he named this newly identified type of dementia “Alzheimer’s Disease.” In doing so, Kraepelin’s textbook ultimately transformed Alzheimer’s name into a household word.

    Meanwhile, in Prague

    But does Alzheimer’s disease truly deserve to be called Alzheimer’s disease? There are other people who can claim contributions to the discovery of Alzheimer’s disease.

    In 1907, the same year that Alzheimer published his single case description of Deter, a Czech psychiatrist named Oskar Fischer independently published a thorough structural analysis of plaques in the brains of 12 people with dementia. Between 1910-1912, he went on to analyze plaques and pathological brain changes in another 58 cases of dementia.

    Oskar Fischer.
    (Wikimedia Commons)

    Arguably, Fischer made more important contributions than Alzheimer to the comprehensive description of the disease. Yet it is called Alzheimer’s disease, not Fischer’s disease.

    There are many reasons for this. Fischer was Jewish and subject to antisemitism. He was not at a prominent German university and did not have a powerful ally like Emil Kraepelin promoting his career. And science is, after all, a very human activity.

    Unfortunately, Fischer later became trapped in occupied Prague under the oppression of authoritarian Nazi rule. Fischer was arrested in 1941 and died in the Gestapo’s notorious Small Fortress prison on Feb. 28, 1942.

    It seemed likely that Fischer’s seminal contributions to our understanding of dementia would be lost. Thankfully in 2008, Michel Goedert of Cambridge University rediscovered Fischer’s significant contributions stored in the archives of Charles University in Prague. This has restored Fischer to his rightful position as one of the discoverers of AD and retrospectively raises questions about the correct naming attribution of AD.

    However, when considering the naming of AD, we must not forget Patient No. 1: Auguste Deter. Interestingly and fortuitously, her initials are AD. So, should AD signify Auguste Deter disease rather than Alzheimer’s disease? Should the Alzheimer-Fischer controversy be resolved by simply reassigning the AD abbreviation to Auguste Deter? Should the disease be named after its “first patient,” rather than the physician(s) who discovered it?

    Medicine has a penchant for naming signs, symptoms and diseases after the physicians who first described them. We typically tend not to name them after the afflicted person. Perhaps this is done to preserve patient confidentiality; perhaps not.

    But AD is a disease like no other. It’s very personal. It affects the memories, thoughts and emotions that define us as human beings. We must never forget that AD is a disease of people and families, not just proteins and fibrils. Deter tragically yet courageously embodies the human heartbreak of this dreadful disease.

    Deter’s contribution to the 1907 single case report study by Alzheimer was immense: Deter’s life, illness and death are the story of AD. Deter should be remembered. It was and is her disease.

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

    – ref. Should AD stand for Alzheimer’s disease, or for Auguste Deter, the patient whose case was first described? – https://theconversation.com/should-ad-stand-for-alzheimers-disease-or-for-auguste-deter-the-patient-whose-case-was-first-described-255942

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Decades of neglect: Migrant farm worker housing needs national regulatory standards

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By C. Susana Caxaj, Associate Professor, Nursing, Western University

    Housing for migrant workers in Western Canada. Many workers live in poorly maintained housing and face surveillance and harassment from employers. (Elise Hjalmarson/RAMA Okanagan)

    In today’s political climate, temporary migrants in Canada are being scapegoated for everything from rising grocery bills to the affordable housing crisis. Yet migrant workers, particularly farm workers, face a hidden housing crisis that needs urgent attention.

    Much of Canada’s ability to produce food hinges on hiring migrant agricultural workers from countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Jamaica and elsewhere. Yet, housing for migrant agricultural workers in Canada is often overcrowded, dangerous and undignified.

    Amid government inaction, our group of 29 researchers, clinicians and advocates with the Coalition for National Housing Standards for Migrant Agricultural Workers (CoNaMi), have developed a proposal for national housing standards. This work is backed by clinical experience, hundreds of interviews and surveys and migrant agricultural workers’ own advocacy.

    Inadequate housing

    When two of us — Anelyse and Susana — interviewed 151 migrants in Ontario and British Columbia as part of our research, workers described conditions of isolation, crowding, inadequate ventilation, poor maintenance and close proximity to hazards such as agrochemicals.

    Both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers struggled to access health care, groceries and social services. In addition, their phone and internet access was often unreliable.

    Some workers reported employer-imposed restrictions on leaving the property, and bans on visitors. These living conditions pose serious risks to workers.

    Similarly to research led by the Centre for Climate Justice in British Columbia, we also encountered several workers who endured significant hardships as a result of extreme weather events.

    Consistent with recent research in Nova Scotia, we found that a lack of meaningful union representation, precarious status and low wages created coercive conditions in which workers felt forced to accept poor living conditions.

    Marginalization and exploitation

    As migrant workers typically live on the farms where they work, the lines between work and home can be blurred. This living arrangement often contributes to isolation and surveillance by employers. It may also enable harassment and abuse.

    Furthermore, migrants are geographically separated from their families for months or years at a time. Research that Adam has conducted in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, Jill in Québec and Susana in Ontario and British Columbia, outlines how poor housing conditions not only threaten workers’ health and well-being, but also contribute to their marginalization and exploitation.

    Workers often describe feeling demeaned and controlled, and they wonder why Canada, a country so willing to accept their labour, is so reluctant to accept their common humanity.

    In 2024, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery has described Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, accessed by migrant agricultural workers to come to Canada, as “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery,” a statement echoed by international human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

    Yet the federal government has failed to meaningfully improve housing conditions or establish clear, enforceable and mandatory standards. This inaction persists despite years of reviews, consultations and recommendations.

    In fact, a study commissioned by the federal government to review the possibility of a national housing standard for migrant agricultural workers in 2018 called for greater consistency in housing quality assessments.

    Academic experts have long called for a national housing standard, as well as proactive and unannounced housing inspections. Other professional and labour organizations have identified the need for greater inter-jurisdictional co-ordination and attention to issues of safety, pandemic preparedness, privacy and dignity.

    Furthermore, safeguarding housing quality requires policy changes that provide meaningful status and adequate collective bargaining representation to migrant workers, as these conditions underlie their vulnerability in housing.

    In the 2020 Auditor General of Canada report, the need for national minimum accommodation requirements for migrant agricultural workers was identified. However, housing remains a key concern for these workers who have not yet benefited from such proposed recommendations.

    National housing standard

    A national housing standard for migrant agricultural workers is a crucial step towards protecting their rights and mitigating their vulnerability. These standards must include:

    1. Appropriate and enforced housing standards: Ensure robust and proactive enforcement of housing standard. Living quarters must be well-constructed, safe and dignified.

    2. Privacy, security, access and freedom: Guarantee workers’ rights to privacy, movement, access to health and social services and freedom from surveillance. Workers must have access to transportation and be able to enjoy rest, leisure and a social life.

    3. Dignified living conditions: Safeguard basic rights to comfort, storage and personal care by prescribing minimum standards and ratios for private bedrooms, common areas, laundry and cooking facilities. Workers should have private bedrooms and reliable internet access.

    4. Health and safety in housing: Protect workers from the spread of illness, extreme weather events and other hazards through proper air conditioning, ventilation and reduced occupancy ratios for bathrooms and kitchens.

    5. Co-ordinated government leadership: Prevent different jurisdictions passing the buck by mandating co-ordination, data-sharing and training among federal, provincial and municipal governments. For example, inspectors should be trauma-informed and armed with strategies to mitigate implicit bias and to anticipate barriers this group faces because of their precarious status. The federal government must lead with adequate funding and policy reform to address barriers that prevent workers from advocating for decent housing.

    The evidence is clear. Canadian governments must raise the bar from the floor, and create national standards for migrant agricultural workers’ housing.

    C. Susana Caxaj has received Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to carry out this research. Previously, her work has been funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, Vancouver Foundation and Western University. She is a co-founder and member of the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group.

    Anelyse Weiler receives funding from SSHRC and the Hari Sharma Foundation. She is a board member with the B.C. Employment Standards Coalition and is involved with the Worker Solidarity Network.

    J. Adam Perry receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    Jill Hanley receives funding from SSHRC and CIHR for her research on farmworkers. She is affiliated with the Immigrant Workers Centre and the SHERPA University Institute.

    – ref. Decades of neglect: Migrant farm worker housing needs national regulatory standards – https://theconversation.com/decades-of-neglect-migrant-farm-worker-housing-needs-national-regulatory-standards-255709

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Andor showcases the power of music to oppose tyranny – an homage to the French Resistance

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Clare V. Church, Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London

    Warning: this article contains spoilers for Andor season two, up to episode nine.

    This week, many fans are diving into the final episodes of Andor season two on Disney+. Meanwhile, others are still reeling from last week’s powerful episode.

    Episodes seven through nine of the Star Wars spin-off show depicted the tragedy of the fictional Ghorman massacre and its political fallout. Set chronologically two years before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, the episodes present the peaks of the Galactic Empire’s oppressive rule over the planet Ghorman, which culminates in a mass slaughter of peaceful Ghor protesters in the capital city’s main plaza.

    Episode eight, Who Are You?, is a poignant portrayal of propaganda, collective resistance and military force.

    A particularly emotive scene comes when Lezine (Thierry Godard) – a member of a local rebel group called the Ghorman Front – begins to sing in the midst of the Ghor’s demonstration. Soon, all members of the peaceful protest join Lezine’s chorus in an act that signals not aggression, but community.

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    The moment echoes the French Resistance’s use of music to defy Nazi rule throughout the second world war. The French Resistance was a movement of civilians and combatants who opposed the German occupation of France.

    While the episode’s parallels to Earth-side conflicts throughout historical and modern eras do not start and stop with the French Resistance, it is worth unpacking these similarities further. Doing so reveals insights into the power of art — and specifically music – in fighting tyranny.

    The political parallels between Star Wars and Andor

    The Star Wars franchise has long been analysed for its political storytelling. The original trilogy, for instance, makes connections to the French Revolution, the second world war and the Vietnam war. There are overarching themes of colonialism, fascist dictatorship and guerrilla warfare.

    Andor is no exception. Showrunner Tony Gilroy uses two 12-episode seasons to narrate the birth of a rebellion and subsequent revolution. Critics and Star Wars pundits alike have commented on the show’s parallels to historical and contemporary conflicts, with think-pieces and social-media threads comparing season two’s plot points to the America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Russo-Ukrainian war and even the conflict in Gaza.

    The Ghor sing their anthem as an act of defiance in Andor season two, episode eight.

    The Ghorman massacre has become an especially explosive talking point given its significance to the overall series. At the start of season two, it becomes clear that the Galactic empire requires a mineral – kalkite – that is unique to Ghorman to supply its “energy initiative” (the Death Star).

    The empire subsequently launches a devastating propaganda campaign to turn the galaxy against the Ghor. This is done in anticipation of eventually carrying out a genocide against the planet’s people to clear the path for unimpeded mineral extraction. In turn, it is the Ghorman massacre that prompts Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) to publicly declare her opposition to the “monstrous” Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and lead the Rebel Alliance – as seen in the films Rogue One (2016) and Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).

    In the lead-up to the Ghorman massacre, some of the Ghor initiate an underground resistance against the empire’s forces – often haphazard and disjointed, but resilient all the same. Several storytelling devices are used to evoke the spirit of the French Resistance.

    For one, Gilroy casts French actors to play many of the Ghorman Front leaders, including Ewens Abid, Thierry Godard and Caroline Vanier. Second, the Ghor language is based on a combination of French phonetics and Italian grammar. Combined with the accents of the Ghor actors, it conjures the feeling of the French language, without directly using its vocabulary.

    The costuming of the Ghor is also suggestive of second world war France, as they don trench coats and berets.

    Music as a tool against tyranny

    In the episode, the protesters sing the Ghor national anthem: We Are The Ghor! Its lyrics yield imagery of the “valley” and “highland”, as well as call upon its nationals to “raise your eyes to homeland skies”, “call your kin to come and sing”, and “tight the weave and roll the sleeve”.

    Describing the creation of the anthem, composer Nicholas Britell remarked that his and Gilroy’s goal was to “create something that felt timeless and authentic, but which could also feel like an emotional rallying cry”.

    The French national anthem, La Marseillaise, has served a similar mandate since its adoption in 1795. It was used as a political tool of resistance throughout the second world war.

    French soldiers are shown singing La Marseillaise in a scene from Casablanca (1942).

    Upon Germany’s defeat of France in 1940, the Nazi occupiers swiftly banned French citizens from singing La Marseillaise. In November 1940, however, thousands of French students and civilians marched around the Arc de Triomphe while chanting the anthem in a show of defiance. To end the display of unity, occupying forces violently dispersed the demonstration, injuring and arresting many.

    Members of the French Resistance also gained a second anthem throughout the war, titled Le Chant des Partisans, which was composed and performed by Anna Marly. Like We Are The Ghor!, the tune evokes rural landscapes, hard workers and kin, as well as issues demands to its listeners-in-arms to “sing” as one.

    There are many accounts of Le Chant being used to oppose Nazi rule. It was played, for instance, over the radio to signal an incoming message for the French Resistance. It was also reportedly hummed between members of the Maquis during sabotage operations. One account even relays the story of French fighters who whistled the song while they were forced by the Germans to dig their own graves.

    The trailer for season two of Andor.

    These examples from history and fantasy demonstrate the power of music to oppose tyranny. While in itself an act of nonviolence, singing in a group is a tool of community building – an indispensable component of overcoming authoritarianism. Tellingly, in an interview with DECIDER, Andor creator Gilroy explained that authoritarianism is always “about the destruction of community”.

    When you sing along with the crowd at a beloved artist’s concert or belt the anthem ahead of a heated sports match, it is the joy of community that is felt – a feeling of oneness among a swath of strangers. It is therefore in this musical moment – reminiscent of not just the French Resistance but of all movements that have deployed music in defiance – that the fictional realm of Andor’s Who Are You? tragically tells the truth.

    For fans, it aptly brings to bear the unshakeable capacity of singing to combat oppression, be it here on Earth, or in a galaxy, far, far away.

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

    – ref. Andor showcases the power of music to oppose tyranny – an homage to the French Resistance – https://theconversation.com/andor-showcases-the-power-of-music-to-oppose-tyranny-an-homage-to-the-french-resistance-256522

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Looking for mental health or wellness advice in a book? Check the author’s credentials first

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Joanna Pozzulo, Chancellor’s Professor, Psychology, Carleton University

    Not all the suggestions provided in self-help books are evidence-based or written by professionals with advanced training in psychology or have a medical degree. (Shutterstock)

    Self-help books are a mainstay of the non-fiction market. According to a 2022 study by BookNet Canada, self-help titles account for 17 per cent of non-fiction book sales.

    Some of these books can go on to sell millions of copies, but popularity doesn’t always equal credibility. Achieving bestseller status can reflect effective marketing campaigns, a large social media following or the appeal of personal storytelling rather than academic or clinical credentials.

    To better understand the current self-help landscape, my graduate student and I are reviewing New York Times bestsellers under the “Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous” category, which includes self-help books.

    Our preliminary analysis for April 2025 identified 22 relevant books, with only three written by authors with advanced training in psychology or medicine:

    This isn’t a new issue. A 2008 study examining 50 top-selling books directed at anxiety, depression and trauma found that more than half contained strategies that were not supported by evidence.

    Can self-help books help? It depends

    The effectiveness of a self-help book depends largely on the quality of its content and how it is used by readers.

    Books that draw on peer-reviewed research are more likely to offer reliable, evidence-based strategies for improving well-being.

    Peer review is a process in academic publishing where experts in a given field vet a research study’s quality before it’s published. This process helps ensure the research is of high quality and adheres to the standards of the discipline.



    Read more:
    Explainer: what is peer review?

    Evidence-based books are ones that rely on peer-reviewed research to support their claims and suggestions for improved well-being. Having psychological science make its way to the general public via self-help books can provide a useful resource to support well-being and self-improvement.

    In contrast, books that are based on someone’s opinion or their lived experiences have not had their ideas tested or verified. Although these books can contain useful information that were helpful to the author, they can also be problematic, as the ideas have not been empirically examined.

    Risks of non-evidence-based self-help books

    Relying on untested self-help strategies can delay people from seeking appropriate support for the challenges they face. When they turn to self-help books instead of seeking professional care, it can lead to worsening symptoms and missed opportunities for effective treatment.

    This can have serious consequences, particularly for those dealing with complex mental health challenges like anxiety, depression or trauma.

    Relying on untested self-help strategies can delay individuals from seeking appropriate support for the challenges they face.
    (Shutterstock)

    In addition, exposure to misinformation or disinformation can make matters worse. When such content circulates widely, like through best-selling books, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes or downplay the seriousness of psychological distress.

    This can perpetuate stigma and make people feel ashamed or reluctant to seek therapy, medical treatment or other professional help.



    Read more:
    Why do we fall for wellness scams? Our cultural biases and myths are often to blame

    At the same time, the booming global wellness industry has created new risks for consumers. In 2023, the wellness industry was valued at an estimated US$6.3 trillion.

    The size and growth of the industry has created fertile ground for wellness grifters to financially exploit people’s desire for better health and happiness.

    Community for science-based self-help readers

    If you’re interested in more evidence-based books for well-being and self-improvement, consider joining my Reading for Well-Being Community Book Club.

    Each month, members receive a newsletter announcing “Professor Pozzulo’s Pick” — an evidence-based book chosen by me that is focused on some dimension of well-being or self-improvement.

    The newsletter also provides access to a digital platform where my review will be posted, along with a discussion board where club members can share their thoughts about the book.

    Membership is free and sign-up is located here. You can also hear directly from the authors of the selected books through the Reading for Well-Being Podcast, which provides deeper insight into the evidence and ideas behind each book.

    Summer reading recommendations

    For readers seeking self-help books supported by research, here are four accessible and evidence-based suggestions:

    The Positive Shift: Mastering Mindset to Improve Happiness, Health, and Longevity by Psychologist Catherine A. Sanderson (2019, Published by BenBella Books).

    ‘The Positive Shift: Mastering Mindset to Improve Happiness, Health, and Longevity’ by Catherine A. Sanderson.
    (BenBella Books)

    Sanderson explains that our level of happiness, physical health and even our longevity is connected to how “we think about ourselves and our world around us.” In other words, our mindset.

    By making small changes, Sanderson shows how we can improve our happiness and physical and mental health. The book is full of straightforward, science-backed strategies to “shift your mindset.”

    One study Sanderson highlights found that people who read for more than 3.5 hours per week tended to live longer.

    Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross (2021, Published by Crown Publishing Group).

    ‘Chatter: The Voice in Our Head’ by Ethan Kross.
    (Crown Publishing Group)

    Anyone who has found themselves lying awake in the middle of the night with endless thoughts of potential doom can likely relate to this book. In Chatter, psychologist Ethan Kross examines this inner voice.

    According to Kross, by changing the dialogue we have with ourselves, we can potentially change our lives and ultimately improve our health and well-being.

    The last section of the book, titled “The Tools,” includes several evidence-based strategies to reduce the negative loops that can run in our minds.

    Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most by Cassie Holmes (2022, published by Gallery Books).

    ‘Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most’ by Cassie Holmes.
    (Gallery Books)

    Do you ever feel like you never have the time for the things you want or need to do? Management professor Cassie Holmes writes that people who are “time poor” can “feel less happy and less satisfied with life.”

    Several studies have found that when people make time to do the things they want, they feel they have more time to do the things they need.

    Holmes encourages readers to reflect on how they spend their time. Although we can’t change the amount of time we have, we can re-prioritize how we spend it, and by doing so, improve our sense of well-being and life satisfaction.

    How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman (2021, published by Portfolio).

    ‘How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be’ by Katy Milkman.
    (Portfolio)

    If you feel like you need a change or find it hard to make a change last, you might be using an ineffective strategy or approach.

    Economist Katy Milkman reviews the science of how to make behaviour change last with several evidence-based strategies to help you reach your goals.

    Each chapter examines an internal obstacle that stands between people and their goals. By the end of the book, you’ll learn how to recognize these obstacles and what you can do to overcome them.

    Joanna Pozzulo receives funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. Looking for mental health or wellness advice in a book? Check the author’s credentials first – https://theconversation.com/looking-for-mental-health-or-wellness-advice-in-a-book-check-the-authors-credentials-first-256082

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump administration moves to undo appliance efficiency standards that save consumers billions, reduce pollution and fight climate change

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By David J. Vogel, Professor Emeritus of Business Ethics and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

    Refrigerators were the target of the very first energy efficiency standards for appliances, back in 1974. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    The Trump administration has begun the process of undoing decades of regulations that improved energy efficiency in American household appliances. In a statement announcing the move, the U.S. Department of Energy said those regulations are “driving up costs and lowering quality of life for the American people.”

    The legality of this effort is problematic, however, as federal law prohibits the Department of Energy from reversing already approved appliance efficiency standards.

    And as a scholar of environmental regulations, I know those regulations were created to save energy and lower utility bills for consumers. I also know that many companies and consumers have supported federal regulation to strengthen energy efficiency standards and generally have opposed weakening them.

    The first government-set energy efficiency standards for appliances were issued by California in 1974. They were initially for refrigerators, the household appliance that used the most energy. Subsequently, several other household appliances were added. During the next decade, more states issued standards, as saving energy would help avoid the costs of constructing new power plants.

    The proliferation of state standards led the federal government to prohibit states from issuing appliance efficiency standards once the federal government had done so. The first federal standards, in 1987, applied to 13 household products, including refrigerators.

    Since then, the federal government has created standards for additional products and tightened existing ones. Those changes have progressively made home appliances and business and industrial equipment more efficient, saving consumers billions of dollars, decreasing air pollution from power plants and reducing carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change.

    Electric meters like these at a Mississippi apartment complex keep track of how much – or how little – electricity residents use.
    AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

    Broad application

    Federal data indicates that 40% of total U.S. energy consumption – and 28% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions – is attributable to household and industrial appliances, such as heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, lighting and various kinds of equipment, such as computers, printers and electric motors.

    At present, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Appliance and Equipment Standards Program covers more than 70 products that the government estimates consume about 90% of energy used in homes, 70% of energy in commercial buildings and 30% of energy used in industry. The government estimates the standards saved American consumers $105 billion just in 2024 – with a typical household saving about $576 over the expenses if there were no efficiency standards.

    Appliance energy efficiency standards now in place are cumulatively expected by the Department of Energy to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 2 billion metric tons over 30 years. That’s as much carbon dioxide as 15 million gas-powered cars would emit in that same period.

    Many federal standards, including on light bulbs, electric motors and commercial heating and cooling equipment, have been based on those previously adopted by one or more states. Federal law permits states to issue standards for products that the federal government has not yet regulated: As of 2024, 18 states had set efficiency rules for a total of 22 types of appliances, including computers and televisions.

    Additional benefits

    These appliance standards have reduced American energy use, including electricity. The existing national standards are projected to reduce overall national energy consumption by 10% between 2025 and 2035.

    Those standards also improve public health, because there is less need to build new fossil-fuel power plants or operate existing ones. As a result, power generators have been able to reduce their emissions of dangerous pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury.

    Energy efficiency standards reduce the need for fossil fuel-powered electric plants, like this one in Ohio.
    Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    A popular policy

    Making appliances more energy efficient has proved popular. A national survey released by the Consumer Federation of America in 2018 found that 71% of Americans “support the idea that the government should set and update energy efficiency standards for appliances.” Significantly, 72% of those surveyed named lowering electrical bills and 57% stated that avoiding construction of new power plants to keep electricity rates from rising were important reasons to increase appliance efficiency.

    Support remains strong: A June 2024 YouGov poll found that 60% of Americans support tougher appliance efficiency standards.

    From 1987 through 2007, more than three-quarters of national appliance energy efficiency standards were passed into law by Congress, with the rest created by administrative processes under existing laws. These legal standards received bipartisan support and were signed into law by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

    But more recently, partisanship has affected the setting of standards. Since 2008, whether standards improve or remain unchanged has depended on whether Democrats or Republicans occupied the White House.

    Political back-and-forth

    The Obama administration enacted among the most ambitious energy efficiency standards for appliances and equipment to date. New standards for commercial air conditioners and furnaces affected heating and cooling equipment for half of the square footage used by the nation’s businesses. The rules were projected to reduce energy costs to businesses by $167 billion over the life of the regulated products.

    But during the first Trump administration, improvements in existing standards came to a halt.

    When Joe Biden became president, his administration resumed issuing new standards, most notably phasing out incandescent light bulbs. The Biden administration also issued new standards for furnaces, residential water heaters, stoves, washing machines and refigerators.

    Electric induction stoves, like this one, are more energy efficient than gas stoves.
    Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

    Controversy continues

    A new Biden rule for electric motors, which are widely used in manufacturing and processing equipment, incorporated recommendations from businesses and advocacy organizations. The rule was slated to take effect in 2028 and was expected to save businesses and consumers up to $8.8 billion over a 30-year period.

    But the Trump administration has withdrawn this standard, along with others issued by the Biden administration, including for ceiling fans, dehumidifers and external power supplies. The administration has postponed the effective dates of other standards that had been finalized before Trump took office. The administration said the reversals would “slash unnecessary red tape and regulations that raise prices, reduce consumer choice, and frustrate the American people.”

    Another set of politically controversial standards Biden introduced sought to encourage consumers to switch from stoves, furnaces and water heaters that use natural gas or propane to electric ones. The electric versions of those appliances are more energy efficient, while gas cooking emits toxic chemicals into the home. Switching can be expensive, and many consumers prefer gas-powered appliances, as of course does the natural gas industry, which has opposed these federal efforts.

    And in early April 2025, Republicans in Congress used their legislative authority to overturn the regulations for natural gas water heaters. But most of the federal standards – and all of the state ones – remain in effect, at least for now.

    This article, originally published April 17, 2025, was updated on May 14, 2025, to reflect the Trump administration’s latest move on efficiency standards.

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

    – ref. Trump administration moves to undo appliance efficiency standards that save consumers billions, reduce pollution and fight climate change – https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-moves-to-undo-appliance-efficiency-standards-that-save-consumers-billions-reduce-pollution-and-fight-climate-change-253673

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: China-US trade war: the next 90 days are a big deal for Beijing as it seeks long-term solutions

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Chee Meng Tan, Assistant Professor of Business Economics, University of Nottingham

    Washington and Beijing have finally agreed a pause in their escalating trade war. US and Chinese officials announced in Geneva this week that US tariffs on Chinese goods would fall to 30%, while Chinese tariffs on US products would drop back to 10%.

    But the real battle to determine the fate of future US-Sino relations will be in negotiations that take place in the next 90 days. As both sides jostle to protect respective national interests, a win is possible for China. But that probably hinges on whether Donald Trump sees what’s on offer as a win for him as well.

    The 90-day deal to deescalate tariffs, which begins on May 14, includes significant concessions, and shows a willingness from both sides to negotiate.

    In early April, US tariffs on Chinese products had soared to 145%, while Beijing imposed a 125% tariff on US imports. US supermarkets had begun to warn of imminent stock shortages.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    Donald Trump was quick to claim a significant win from Monday’s deal, but so did China.

    Was this really a win for either side? So far the only progress is the roll back of tariffs to levels before the trade war intensified in April 2025.

    But for China, the latest tariff reduction has provided much needed, if short term, economic relief, even if no one knows what will happen after 90 days. The Chinese stock market rallied immediately after the announcement. China is attempting to repair its ailing economy fuelled by a real estate crisis that began in 2021. So, Beijing needs more triumphs of this sort, as it realises that fiscal stimulus may be ineffective in the face of overwhelming tariffs.

    So, what measures should Beijing take to ensure that US tariffs remain low, if not lower?

    Before the trade war between the US and China began in July 2018, tariffs imposed by Washington on Beijing and vice versa were relatively low. In January 2018, US tariffs on Chinese exports stood at 3.1%, while Chinese tariffs on US exports were at 8%. While the current 10% Chinese tariffs on US goods isn’t far from the pre-trade war level, the same cannot be said of US tariffs on Chinese goods, which stand at 30%.

    What’s a big win for China?

    For Beijing, a big win would be a return of the pre-trade war tariffs or the absence of tariffs entirely. But either outcome is highly unlikely.

    A major obstacle is Trump’s need for a political win. In early April this year, the US president has harshly criticised foreign nations for having “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered” the US. To address this problem, the US has imposed a minimum tariff of 10% on all nations sending exports to the US. And if Washington were to reduce tariffs on Chinese products to under 10%, then he would be expected to do the same with the rest of the world.

    Even this 90-day deal with China could be seen as capitulation by Trump, who was already under pressure from the US stock market and business leaders to roll back the high tariffs on Chinese goods. But revising baseline tariffs downwards to below 10% for the rest of the world would be seen as an even greater cop out.

    This could eat into Trump’s political capital and harm the Republican party’s chances at midterm elections scheduled for 2026. All of which seems unlikely.

    Details of the US and China trade war pause start to be revealed.

    What China hopes is for future US tariffs to get back to around 10%. This represents a massive improvement from the previous 145% imposed by the White House in April this year. But for Washington to save face and claim a believable victory of its own to reduce tariffs, Beijing needs to offer something in return.

    Sticking points

    One significant issue affecting US-Sino relations is the drug fentanyl. According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fentanyl, which is responsible for tens of thousands of US deaths each year, comes primarily from China and Mexico.

    Washington expects Beijing to do more to stem the flow of the drug and chemicals used to make the drug from flowing into the US. To push China to take action on this, the US imposed a 30% tariff on China instead of the baseline 10% it has put on all other nations.

    Beijing sees things differently and claimed that Washington is engaging in a “smear campaign” and aims to “shift blame” on China for not doing enough when the country has some of the strictest drug laws in the world.

    Trump sees the fentanyl problem as a national security issue, and says China needs to provide sufficient concessions in stemming the outflow of the drug so that the White House can justify the lowering of tariffs below the existing 30%.

    But China can do more to secure lower tariffs. As part of the present trade deal, China has agreed to lift its export ban of critical minerals to the US. This is a crucial for the US as these items are essential in manufacturing advanced weaponry.

    If Beijing can guarantee the flow of critical minerals to the US, and assure its support for US agriculture, an important political support base for Trump, then it is likely that a Trump administration would lower, and more importantly, maintain these tariffs in the foreseeable future.

    China probably will want to hedge its bets. It needs to engage with the US and lower US tariffs as much as possible, but will want to look at other options, rather than relying on an unpredictable Trump. It will look to increase its trade with other significant regional players such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an economic bloc that promotes economic growth among its member nations.

    Ultimately, China needs policy continuity from Washington. Without it, any plans that it has in recovering its sluggish economy won’t work.

    But like any good trader, Trump will likely find it difficult to pass up a good deal, especially when the US has to deal with its own economic problems. So if Beijing can find a way to make a deal that works and brings a symbolic win for both sides, it is likely to get Trump’s attention.

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

    – ref. China-US trade war: the next 90 days are a big deal for Beijing as it seeks long-term solutions – https://theconversation.com/china-us-trade-war-the-next-90-days-are-a-big-deal-for-beijing-as-it-seeks-long-term-solutions-256535

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Peter Sullivan murder conviction quashed after 38 years in jail – it would be a mistake to see his case as a bizarre, one-off

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Brian Thornton, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, University of Winchester

    Peter Sullivan has had his conviction for the murder of Diane Sindall quashed. He is not the Beast of Birkenhead. He is an innocent man who got ensnared in a malfunctioning system that then took 38 years to admit its mistake.

    He was wrongly convicted in 1987 for the brutal attack on the part-time pub worker. The 21-year-old was beaten to death and sexually assaulted as she walked home after a shift in Bebington, Merseyside.

    Sullivan is now 68 and has lost the best years of his life. Remarkably, in a statement read by his lawyer after his conviction was overturned he said he was “not angry, not bitter”. He said he had experienced horrors but would not dwell on them: “I’ve got to make the most of what is left of the existence I am granted in this world.”

    Given he’s the victim of the longest miscarriage of justice experienced by a living inmate in the UK, no one would begrudge Sullivan that.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    But it would be a mistake to see his case as a bizarre, one-off. In March I wrote in detail about how the English criminal justice system continually betrays victims of injustice – from cases like the Birmingham six and the Guildford four to the hundreds of victims of the Post Office scandal.

    There are also immediate parallels to be made with two other miscarriage of justice cases – Victor Nealon and Andrew Malkinson.



    Read more:
    Convicting the innocent: how a rotten system ensures miscarriages of justice will continue

    The Sullivan, Malkinson, Nealon cases were all exposed as miscarriages of justice thanks to new DNA evidence, but only after a reluctant and incurious appeal system was dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to new forensic testing.

    Malkinson was wrongly convicted of rape and spent 17 years in prison. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) twice rejected his submissions that he was innocent, and he was only cleared when his own lawyers tracked down DNA evidence that proved his innocence.

    Nealon who was wrongfully convicted of attempted rape spent an additional ten years in prison because the CCRC refused to carry out DNA tests that would have proved his innocence. He applied to the CCRC twice but was rejected both times.

    In the Sullivan case, the CCRC feels it deserves credit for ordering the retesting that led to his exoneration, and it does. But it’s worth noting that he applied to the CCRC in 2021 and it took until now for him to be freed.

    No compensation

    Justice delayed is justice denied and all three men spent unnecessary years of their lives behind bars thanks to a sluggish and often inept appeals system.

    It took decades, but Sullivan is now a free man. He leaves prison with £89 in his pocket, and that’s it. There will be no automatic compensation, no system that eases him back into ordinary life.

    When Victor Nealon was released after 17 years in prison, he would have been homeless if it were not for the kindness of a journalist who allowed him to sleep on his couch. Nealon has never received compensation. After multiple rejections he and Sam Hallam, another miscarriage of justice victim who was accused of murder, took their claims for compensation all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). They lost.

    The judges at the ECHR concluded that it was virtually impossible for victims of miscarriage of justice to receive compensation in the UK, noting that 93% of people who applied for compensation were rejected. The two men have never seen a penny of compensation.

    But it appears that Malkinson may be one of the lucky 7% who do. It has been reported that the Ministry of Justice is to pay him “a significant sum” and no one in their right mind would object to Malkinson receiving compensation. He is an innocent man who spent 17 wasted years in prison.

    Hallam, Nealon and so many more are also innocent but have been refused compensation. Why?

    It is difficult to come to any other conclusion than Malkinson is being compensated because of the media coverage his case attracted. Malkinson is a very impressive person – erudite, thoughtful and reasonable – someone capable of guest editing the Today programme. His case, along with his criticisms, threw the CCRC into crisis and led to the resignation of its chair. But not everyone can be Andrew Malkinson, and they shouldn’t have to be.

    Sullivan is a very different person. “He’s a very quiet, private man,” his lawyer told the BBC. He has so far shunned the media and it’s clear that he will not have the same high profile as Malkinson. His story will fade as the news agenda moves on and there will be a danger that the lessons from this case will be ignored or forgotten.

    For example, Sullivan’s case is a reminder that there are still people in prison who were jailed based on false confessions, and these cases should be reviewed urgently.

    And the project announced by the CCRC to identify cases where new forensic testing could provide fresh evidence needs to happen urgently. As Chris Henley KC, the lawyer who led a review into the CCRC’s handling of the Malkinson case, said, more miscarriages of justice cases are “inevitable” and so it is better to identify them as quickly as possible. No need for more innocent people to languish unnecessarily in prison.

    Ultimately, the main lesson for the criminal justice system to learn is humility.
    If a plane crashes, accident investigators will painstakingly piece the wreckage back together to identify what went wrong. If there is an infectious outbreak, medical experts will urgently seek out the source. They do this so that they can find out what went wrong and avoid future tragedies.

    But somehow the criminal justice system appears to feel it is above this approach, despite the fact that Peter Sullivan was failed by the police, by the legal system, courts and the Court of Appeal. As Henley said: “I think that there is a fundamental problem in relation to our appeal system generally, that it just won’t face up to the fact that mistakes can be made. It stubbornly wants to stick to the original flawed conviction.”

    But first and foremost, Peter Sullivan must receive the compensation he deserves. He was wronged and the state should swiftly and fairly do what it can to make that right.

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

    – ref. Peter Sullivan murder conviction quashed after 38 years in jail – it would be a mistake to see his case as a bizarre, one-off – https://theconversation.com/peter-sullivan-murder-conviction-quashed-after-38-years-in-jail-it-would-be-a-mistake-to-see-his-case-as-a-bizarre-one-off-256723

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Universities and social care depend on immigration. The UK government’s plans could be an economic own goal

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tom Montgomery, Lecturer in Work and Organisations, University of Stirling

    James Jiao/Shutterstock

    The recent launch of plans to reform the UK’s immigration system reflects the government’s effort to regain the initiative on this issue. But looking at the finer detail of migration to the UK shows restrictions introduced by the previous government, particularly around visas for social care workers and international students, have already led to fewer people arriving in the UK.

    What’s more, these latest proposals risk worsening crises in these key sectors. In adult social care and higher education, accelerating the decline in the numbers of migrants could create, rather than solve, problems for the government.

    The government argues there is a need to move away from the reliance on migrant workers in the UK’s adult social care sector. It has announced the closure of a visa route to new applications.

    But in its new white paper laying out its policy changes, the government acknowledges that following the tightening of the health and care worker visa route (particularly in terms of bringing dependants to the UK) the number of these visas granted for both main applicants and dependants fell by 68% in 2024 compared to the previous year. This means that, even before any new restrictions, fewer workers were arriving to plug the staffing shortages in the sector.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    Keir Starmer’s government rightly points out that there have been longstanding issues of recruitment and retention in the social care sector across the UK. After all, it is often associated with poor pay and conditions.

    The government also highlights initiatives to address worker shortages, such as the independent commission into adult social care as well as proposed fair pay agreements. But care sector bodies such as Care England say the measures will not arrive in time and that international recruitment is being cut off before a solution is in place.

    Trade unions in the sector, including Unison, have also highlighted how migrant workers have been crucial for the sustainability of delivering care across the UK.

    Pay remains stubbornly low in the social care sector.
    Pressmaster/Shutterstock

    This points to the potential destabilising effect the white paper may have for a sector already in crisis. Attracting UK citizens to work in social care will also be difficult considering the stubbornly low pay for what can be a challenging job.

    Added to this, opportunities for pay progression are often limited. Care workers in England with five or more years’ experience are on average earning only around 10p more per hour than those with less than a year of experience. Research also indicates how attracting young people to a career in care is particularly difficult.

    The crisis in higher education

    Just as Starmer could blame the crisis in social care on the previous government, the same could be said for the emergency that is engulfing higher education.

    Over the past 15 years there has been a clear shift in the balance of funding for universities away from government grants and towards income from fees. Fee income from international students has been declining, especially since January 2024 in part due a tightening of restrictions by the previous government, such as students bringing family members with them.

    Debates around funding in the sector are taking place against the backdrop of institutions across the UK facing budget deficits and announcements of thousands of redundancies.

    The UK sector is clearly in a fragile state, and dependent on income from overseas students. But the government has indicated it wants to tighten requirements for recruiting international students and reduce students’ ability to remain in the UK after their studies to 18 months.

    It is also exploring a levy on UK higher education providers’ income from international students. These moves were said to be in response to the “misuse and exploitation” of student visas.

    These new measures have understandably caused alarm in the sector. Many institutions are still trying to convince students from around the world that the UK should be their destination for study, particularly when political developments may have made the US less attractive.

    Representatives such as the sector body Universities UK have asked the government to consider the damage a levy could do to the appeal of the UK higher education market. The University and College Union has also warned that moves to deter international students could lead to UK “universities going under”.

    In these ways, the white paper may have sought to see off political challenge, but it could instead expose the government to risk. The restrictions proposed in the white paper in relation to social care and higher education could easily worsen the crises in these sectors.

    Thousands of redundancies in the higher education sector and the shrinking of these institutions could also have a huge negative effect on local economies across the UK given the economic benefits that universities bring.

    And the measures will also have implications for Wales and Scotland, both due to hold elections next year. Recent polling indicates that support for pro-independence parties is surging, as Plaid Cymru and the SNP position themselves as the counterweight to further restrictions on immigration

    The immigration white paper has been an effort by the prime minister and his advisers to seize short-term political advantage. In the long term it could prove to be an economic own goal.

    Tom Montgomery works in higher education. He has conducted research on issues of social care, migration and labour markets that has been funded by the European Commission.

    – ref. Universities and social care depend on immigration. The UK government’s plans could be an economic own goal – https://theconversation.com/universities-and-social-care-depend-on-immigration-the-uk-governments-plans-could-be-an-economic-own-goal-256707

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Who is Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought and what is his influence on Trump?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dafydd Townley, Teaching Fellow in US politics and international security, University of Portsmouth

    While Elon Musk has clearly been a major influence on the Trump administration, the less well known, but arguably more influential, power behind the presidency is Russell (usually Russ) Vought. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – the nerve centre of the administration’s sweeping changes.

    Vought is also rumoured to be about to take over running the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from Musk.

    Unlike Musk, Vought acts mostly outside the media spotlight. He is fully committed to a radical overhaul of the way the US presidency works – and his deep religious convictions have led him to believe there should be more Christianity embedded in government and public life.

    He has vowed to “be the person that crushes the deep state”, and was part of the first Trump administration, where he held the position of OMB deputy director – and, briefly, director.

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    Vought worked with Trump in his first
    term on executive order 13957, which aimed to reclassify thousands of policy jobs within the federal government. This was designed to allow the White House to quickly change who was employed in these roles.

    This was subsequently revoked by the Biden administration. But Trump issued a similar executive order 14171 in January, which will implement quicker hiring and firing procedures. The Office of Personnel Management estimates that this could affect 50,000 federal roles.

    In an interview with conservative commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, Vought said that this was necessary for the White House to “retain control” of the agencies under its command. Without it, he claimed, ideological “opponents” within the agencies had the power to diminish the efficiency of White House initiatives. And his role as head of the OMB, he argued, was “to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state”.

    During the Biden presidency, Vought was one of the main authors – credited as the key architect – of the Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025, widely seen as the blueprint for Trump’s second term of office. The 900-page document, whose full title is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, was a major talking point during last year’s presidential election campaign.

    Throughout the campaign, Trump strenuously denied Democrat accusations of having any connection to Project 2025. But a large number of his appointees contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s publication, and numerous Project 2025’s recommendations have quickly been put into action. These include Trump’s high trade tariffs and Doge’s cost-cutting initiatives.

    Russ Vought talking to Tucker Carlson.

    During his confirmation hearing in the US Senate, Vought reiterated his belief that the White House has authority over federal spending, not Congress. This contradicts article I, section 8, of the US Constitution, which grants Congress the power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the country.

    For the majority of constitutional experts, the executive (the president) may propose a budget, but it is Congress that authorises it.



    Read more:
    How Project 2025 became the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term

    Concerned by this, Democrats on the Senate budget committee attempted a boycott of Vought’s confirmation vote, which failed when all 11 Repubican members voted in favour. And when the call came on the Senate floor to confirm his appointment, all 47 Democratic senators held an all-night debate in protest.

    Democrat and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has called Vought the “most radical nominee” with “the most extreme agenda” and said that Americans needed to understand the danger he poses to them in their daily lives.

    Vought’s involvement in Project 2025

    When asked to compare the Trump administration’s policies to Project 2025, Paul Dans, who was the director of Project 2025 until he stepped down during the Trump campaign, said that the administration’s policies were “beyond my wildest dreams”. According to one website tracking the agenda, of the 313 suggested policy objectives in Project 2025, 101 have been implemented, while another 64 are in progress.

    A significant number of Project 2025’s recommendations have been implemented by the Elon Musk-led Doge. And Vought has been described by one journalist as “the glue between Musk and the Republicans”.

    Vought and Musk have forged a strange but effective relationship in executing Doge’s cost-cutting initiatives. According to reports quoting former Trump administration officials, Musk’s Doge has used data to identify what he considers to be overspending while and Vought’s OMB has confirmed Doge’s findings recommending how to deal with them.

    “What’s needed is a specific theory about the case and what can be done,” Vought said. It was part of an effort to help the government “balance its books”, he added.

    When asked by Tucker Carlson what he thought of Doge, Vought replied: “I think they’re bringing an exhilarating rush … of creativity, outside the box thinking, comfortability with risk and leverage.”

    The process to crush the so-called “deep state” conducted by Maga Republicans in Congress and Doge in the White House has been expertly coordinated by Vought. As one reporter wrote, he has experience of working on Capitol Hill and is on good terms with the Freedom Caucus who are the group of conservative Republicans that advocates for limited government, fiscal restraint and strict adherence to a constitutional, right-wing agenda.

    After the caucus was instrumental in defining the terms of support for Mike MCarthy as Speaker of the House in 2023, Vought called the members of Freedom House “the lions that have been through battle and won.” He knows the capabilities of the OMB – and is just as anti-establishment as Musk.

    According to independent researchers tracking Project 2025, a number of departments still have more than half of the project’s objectives to be completed. The administration will need to work quickly, however.

    Historically, the party that occupies the White House fares badly in the midterms. The Republicans could lose control of the House or the Senate, both of which they currently control. Should this happen, the administration may find it more difficult to implement the changes they wish.

    But it is highly unlikely that this will deter Vought and his drive for reforms of presidential powers. He, along with the majority of the Trump White House, believe in the unitary executive theory. This essentially argues that the president has control over all executive branch officials and operations, and that Congress cannot limit that control, even through legislation.

    If Vought does carry on and Congress challenges his decisions, the issue could end up in the Supreme Court – a court dominated by Trump appointees. Any judgment made by the court would be seismic in its importance of future interpretations of the constitution and where power really lies in the federal government.

    For Vought and other Project 2025 authors in the administration, a ruling in their favour would be vindication of their work.

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

    – ref. Who is Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought and what is his influence on Trump? – https://theconversation.com/who-is-project-2025-co-author-russ-vought-and-what-is-his-influence-on-trump-255134

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Forget chatbots: research suggests reading can help combat loneliness and boost the brain

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, University of Cambridge

    Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

    Loneliness has become such a widespread problem that Silicon Valley billionaires are now highlighting it to market AI companions, with Mark Zuckerberg recently stating “the average American has fewer than three friends”.

    This actually echoes what the World Health Organization has called a crisis of social isolation and loneliness. They report that around 25% of older adults are socially isolated and 5%-15% of adolescents are lonely. But a variety of research – including our own – suggests reading may be a much better solution than chatbots.

    Human interaction is no doubt hugely important. In a study we published in 2023, we found that it only takes around five close friends for children and adolescents to thrive, giving them better brain structure, cognition, academic performance and mental health.

    Having fewer than five close friends may not provide enough social contact. But larger numbers are less likely to be close friends. The dilemma of technology frequently means that despite some people having vast numbers of friends on social media, they are not close friends and so do not provide the social support needed.

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    Similarly, chatbots may not provide the type of face-to-face social interaction that people need to flourish. During the pandemic lockdowns, a study found that face-to-face communication was far more beneficial for mental health than digital communication.

    But how can reading help us to feel less lonely and have better wellbeing?

    A recent survey from The Queen’s Reading Room, the charity and book club of Queen Camilla, and other surveys, have found that reading fiction and other books significantly reduces feelings of loneliness and improves wellbeing.

    Another charity, The Reader, conducted a survey of approximately 2,000 participants and found that this was especially true among young adults. Fifty-nine percent of those aged 18-34 said reading made them feel more connected to others and 56% felt less alone during the pandemic.

    Another survey, in conjunction with the University of Liverpool, of over 4,000 participants found that reading offers powerful benefits, serving as a top method for reducing stress. In addition, participants reported that reading encouraged personal growth, such as improving health, picking up hobbies and boosting empathy, with 64% of readers having a better understanding others’ feelings.

    Reading and the brain

    Indeed, scientific research looking at book clubs and shared reading back this up, finding notable emotional and social benefits of reading. For example, students reported greater connection (42.9%) to others, deeper understanding of others’ experiences and beliefs (61.2%) and reduced loneliness (14.3%) as a result of reading.

    The surveys above all rely on people reporting how they feel, rather than an objective measure. But there are also findings from objective measures of the brain, including neuroimaging. A systematic review of 11 intervention studies showed that shared reading among older adults improved wellbeing and helped alleviate loneliness and social isolation.

    One way in which reading may help reduce loneliness is by enhancing our social cognition, which is the ability to understand and connect with others.

    There are plenty of cognitive benefits from reading, in addition to social connectedness.
    aniascamera/Shutterstock

    A neuroimaging study of young adults found that reading fiction, particularly passages with social content, activated areas of the brain involved in social behaviour and emotional understanding, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. This brain region was also linked to the stronger social cognition seen in frequent fiction readers, suggesting a neural pathway through which reading fosters greater social connectedness.

    Importantly, reading may also reduce the risk of dementia. One study of 469 people aged 75 and over, with no dementia at baseline, were followed up for 5.1 years. Among leisure activities such as playing board games, playing musical instruments and dancing, reading was associated with a 35% reduced risk of dementia.

    A number of studies have similarly shown that engaging in cognitively stimulating activities, such as reading, can slow cognitive decline and reduce the risk of dementia.

    Our own research also showed the benefits of reading for pleasure early in life. In a large sample of over 10,000 children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, we found that those children who read for pleasure early in life had better brain structure, cognition, academic achievement, longer sleep duration and better mental health – including lower symptoms of inattention, stress and depression – when adolescents. Importantly, they also had less screen time and better social interactions.

    So, while AI and chatbots can enhance our lives in many ways, they are not a solution to everything. We know that while technology has many benefits, it has also produced many unforeseen problems. Let’s solve problems of loneliness and social isolation through reading and book clubs. Reading is also a great way to improve brain structure, cognition and wellbeing.

    We recently gave a talk about this topic for the British Neuroscience Association, in association with The Queen’s Reading Room. We would like to thank the Queen’s Reading Room CEO, Vicki Perrin for her input and support.

    Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Lundbeck Foundation. Her research work is conducted within the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Mental Health and Neurodegeneration Themes. She consults for Cambridge Cognition.

    We recently gave a talk about this topic for the British Neuroscience Association, in association with The Queen’s Reading Room. We would like to thank the Queen’s Reading Room CEO, Vicki Perrin for her input and support. Christelle Langley receives funding from the Wellcome Trust. Her research work is conducted within the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Mental Health and Neurodegeneration Themes.

    – ref. Forget chatbots: research suggests reading can help combat loneliness and boost the brain – https://theconversation.com/forget-chatbots-research-suggests-reading-can-help-combat-loneliness-and-boost-the-brain-256613

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why spring 2025 is so dry

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

    April showers bring May flowers according to an old English saying.

    This phrase, which might have originated in a verse written by poet Thomas Tusser in 1557, harks back to a time when most people depended on rough rules that were borne of practical experience to know when to plant crops. “Such weather lore was the only forecast available”, says meteorologist Rob Thompson at the University of Reading.



    Read more:
    ‘April showers’ – a rainfall scientist explains what they are and why they are becoming more intense

    UK farmers waited in vain for showers this April. The unusually dry month gave lie to the centuries-old expression, which hints at a climate that was generally more obedient to familiar rhythms. The heating of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean, predominantly caused by the mass burning of fossil fuels, has changed that. What we can expect in each season is no longer so assured.

    So, how do we keep our bearings on a warming planet?

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

    Forecasting chaos

    Forecasters have an enormous challenge in predicting how the weather in each season will change, and in communicating the role of climate change.

    “Overall, we can be confident that climate change is bringing warmer conditions in all seasons,” say atmospheric scientists Simon H. Lee and Matthew Patterson at the University of St Andrews. Europe in particular has been a hotspot for warming, with temperatures rising at roughly double the global average.

    Patterson suspects that this has already warped our perceptions of what a “normal” season feels like. When a month arrives with temperatures closer to the long-term average for instance, like June 2024, people tend to experience it as unusually cold.



    Read more:
    Average months now feel cold thanks to climate change

    “Scientists also have strong evidence to suggest that drought conditions will become more common,” Lee and Patterson continue.

    The UK has had roughly half the rainfall it would usually expect for March and April, and spring 2025 is on track to be the country’s driest on record. Some of the latest research on Earth’s water cycle predicts that these dry bouts will get drier, while wet ones will get wetter, and that the switch from drought to deluge will be more sudden (“weather whiplash”, as some have called it).



    Read more:
    Landmark new research shows how global warming is messing with our rainfall

    This doesn’t fully explain the UK’s record-warm and dry spring, however. There are also “weather blocks” to factor in.

    “A blocking event is a disruption to the usual weather patterns of Earth’s middle latitudes,” explains Tim Woollings, a professor in physical climate science at the University of Oxford. In this part of the world it’s the jet stream, a river of air high in the atmosphere, that typically sets the agenda by driving transient weather over the British Isles from the Atlantic.

    Since the beginning of March, a zone of high pressure has rested above the UK and blocked the jet stream like a boulder in a river, Lee and Patterson say. The weather has effectively remained “stuck”. This phenomenon is responsible for a lot of extreme weather in the middle latitudes, as blocks prevent relief from heatwaves or cold snaps, Woollings adds.



    Read more:
    How weather ‘blocks’ have triggered more extreme heatwaves and floods across Europe

    There isn’t conclusive evidence to suggest these blocks are becoming more common as the climate warms according to Lee and Patterson. But one thing is clear: the climate is incredibly complex – and our continuing intervention in it is reckless.

    High-temperature haiku

    Seasons are our living world’s accommodation of the variation in day length, temperature and weather during the year.

    What we perceive as seasonal features, like the shedding of leaves, the arrival and departure of migratory animals, are the adaptations species have made to the average set of conditions that have remained within a particular range for several thousands of years.

    Changes in Earth’s orbit and spin axis gradually influenced the climate and seasons over millennia. More recently, fossil fuel burning has been the dominant influence.

    “As such, humanity is currently on the path to compressing millions of years of temperature change into just a couple of centuries,” say ancient climate experts Dan Lunt (University of Bristol) and Darrell Kaufman (Northern Arizona University).

    The seasonal signals we once thought of as immutable are changing to match these changing conditions. It’s too much, too fast for most species to deal with – including our own.



    Read more:
    Humanity is compressing millions of years of natural change into just a few centuries

    To reorient around a rapidly changing climate, we could do as Tusser did six centuries ago, and write poetry.

    Haiku is perhaps our most useful cultural barometer of climate change. These poems, which originated in 17th-century Japan, comprise three short lines and usually include a reference to the season in which they were composed.

    “A successful haiku could be described as a half-finished poem,” say lecturer in publishing Jasmin Kirkbride (University of East Anglia) and creative writing PhD candidate Paul Chambers (University of Bristol). The listener must complete the scene in their head by linking it with an intense moment of perception from their own life, in which “the vast is perceived in one thing”.



    Read more:
    Haiku has captured the essence of seasons for centuries – new poems contain a trace of climate change

    As seasons have shifted, so have their markers in haiku. Snowdrops, once a feature of February haiku, now appear close to Christmas. The language used to describe certain species has altered too, the pair say, to become “soaked in grief”. Butterflies that once formed “clouds” in earlier haiku, for example, are now “lone survivors… pushing against time”.

    Kirkbride and Chambers urge a new generation of poets to continue recording these changes in haiku: “The vast climate crisis is upon us, and we should write about it.”

    – ref. Why spring 2025 is so dry – https://theconversation.com/why-spring-2025-is-so-dry-256709

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why are Turkey and the PKK turning to peace – and can it last?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pinar Dinc, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and Researcher, Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University

    Negotiations to end more than 40 years of conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) have taken on a concrete dimension. On May 12, two months after the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, wrote a letter in which he called on the group to lay down its arms, it has announced it will disband.

    The PKK, which has been fighting for greater Kurdish rights and autonomy, has outlined several conditions it views as essential for it to dissolve. It insists that Öcalan lead and direct the peace process, that the right to democratic politics in Turkey is recognised, and that the group is given solid legal guarantees.

    On the one hand, there seems to be great longing for peace between Turkey and the PKK. This has been evidenced by the positive reactions to the PKK’s statement both nationally and internationally.

    Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the PKK’s disengagement with terror had opened “the doors of a new era in every area, namely strengthening politics and democratic capacity”.

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    However, there is also scepticism. Turkey views the peace process very differently from the Kurds, referring to it as part of the government’s “terror-free Turkey” initiative. The Kurdish movement has instead adopted the title of Öcalan’s February letter, “Call for Peace and Democratic Society”.

    Many also see Erdoğan’s willingness to resolve the Kurdish issue as a political maneuver by the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). Positioning itself as the party that ended decades of “terror” at the hands of the PKK would allow the AKP to consolidate its hold on power.

    But, notwithstanding this, there are clear reasons for both the Turkish state and the PKK to come to the negotiating table now. One of the leading reasons is the changing geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East.

    In late 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in Syria and the country was subsequently taken over by Islamist militants. Iran’s influence has also been weakened following the collapse of parts of its regional proxy network, notably Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and, most recently, the Houthis in Yemen.

    Israel, meanwhile, is continuing its war in Gaza. And it has intensified its military operations in Syria, particularly near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, alongside open expressions of support for Syria’s Druze religous communities.

    At the same time, Donald Trump has returned to the White House and reopened the door to dialogue with Iran over its nuclear programme. The region’s politics are being reshaped, and leaders across the Middle East are repositioning themselves accordingly.

    For the PKK and its broader political base, a peace process with Turkey offers a pathway to equal citizenship, democratic participation and long-term legitimacy for Kurds in the Middle East after nearly a century of struggle.

    This was signalled by the Kurdish National Conference in April 2025. The conference, which was attended by different Kurdish parties and organisations, highlighted the importance of strategic coordination among Kurds in the region.

    For Turkey, peace with the PKK now would further reduce a weakened Iran’s ability to project power westward. Some groups suspected of being affiliated with the PKK, such as the Sinjar Resistance Units in northern Iraq, have been indirectly supported by Iran.

    Turkey’s handling of the PKK conflict and the broader Kurdish issue has also often complicated its engagement with the west. For example, human rights groups have accused Turkey of allowing the Syrian National Army (a coalition of armed groups in northern Syria) to act with impunity against Kurdish civilians in areas outside its control.

    This has created friction in Turkey’s diplomatic outreach to the US and Europe. By addressing the longstanding Kurdish issue, Ankara could lay the groundwork for more stable relations with the west. These relations are particularly important now as Turkey is looking to take an increasingly key role in European security.

    It is serving as a mediator in negotiations to end the Ukraine war. And Erdoğan has even offered to host direct talks between the Ukrainian president, Volodymr Zelensky, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Istanbul.

    Bumpy road ahead

    The PKK’s dissolution will not guarantee peace in Turkey. The Kurdish people expect equal citizenship and the end the government’s practice of removing elected mayors and replacing them with state-appointed trustees.

    They also demand the release of political prisoners and reforms to Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws, which critics say are frequently used to suppress dissent. These issues will be discussed in parliament over the coming days, with talks on a new constitution expected to take place in the autumn.

    The negotiations will not be simple. The Kurds have been persistently labelled as rebels, traitors and terrorists since the beginning of the Turkish republic in 1923. It will not be easy to change entrenched opinions overnight.

    Özgür Özel, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), has emphasised the importance of resolving the Kurdish issue peacefully and democratically. But it is not clear whether his views reflect those of his supporter base and Turkish society more broadly.

    Turkey must be further democratised to give the peace process a greater chance of success. The nation’s vibrant civil society currently operates under intense pressure from the state. Giving it more of a voice will help bring Turkey’s deeply divided society together.

    It is always difficult – if not impossible – to make predictions about the future when it comes to Middle Eastern politics. However, a new balance is being established in the Middle East, and in this new balance very different players have to sit at the same table.

    Pinar Dinc is the principal investigator of the ECO-Syria project, which receives funding from the Strategic Research Area: The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden.

    – ref. Why are Turkey and the PKK turning to peace – and can it last? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-turkey-and-the-pkk-turning-to-peace-and-can-it-last-256527

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –