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Category: Reportage

  • MIL-OSI Global: How paranormal beliefs help people cope in uncertain times

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Denovan, Senior lecturer in Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University

    goffkein.pro/Shutterstock

    Paranormal beliefs create a sense of control, predictability and comfort in uncertain times, according to academic studies. That doesn’t explain why some people find them more appealing than others, though recent studies are starting to offer explanations about why some people feel so drawn to the paranormal.

    Paranormal beliefs are convictions in notions beyond what mainstream science can explain, like ghosts or psychic abilities. Surveys show that a large number of people in the US and UK – between about one-third and 50% – hold these beliefs.

    Our recent study found that people who feel powerless or uncertain are more likely to believe in the supernatural. This is probably because of the way our brains process uncertainty. When faced with events we cannot control, our minds look for patterns and explanations.

    Paranormal beliefs create structured stories that make random events seem intentional. For example, astrology connects planetary movements to personal experiences, giving believers a way to understand their lives. People put their faith in conspiracy theories for similar reasons.

    One major reason people turn to paranormal beliefs is to deal with anxiety about life. Realising that life is unpredictable and has an end can be unsettling. Supernatural beliefs provide comfort by suggesting that a higher power controls human destiny.

    This perception gives life a sense of purpose and meaning. Stories about ghosts and communication with the dead help people feel connected to lost loved ones. In this way, supernatural thinking helps people cope with fears about the unknown.

    Believing in the paranormal can provide comfort for some, but it can be unhelpful in some situations. For instance, a deep belief in supernatural forces might cause someone to blame their problems on supernatural forces instead of looking for practical ways to address them. Indeed, our recent research identified that belief in external supernatural forces that exert control, such as gods or fate, is associated with distress. This type of belief reflects a lack of personal control.

    Conversely, our recent study showed that belief in paranormal phenomena centred on personal spirituality, such as astrology or manifesting, is not associated with stress. This seems to be because these kinds of belief emphasise personal control and meaning.

    Paranormal beliefs are also influenced by mental shortcuts that shape perception of the world. Pattern recognition is a good example, where people see connections in random events. This explains why people see faces in clouds or someone thinks a series of bad events means they are cursed.

    Paranormal beliefs can help people cope with uncertainty.
    Natalie magic/Shutterstock

    Another common bias is when people believe they can influence things that are beyond their control. Often referred to as the illusion of control, a 2024 study showed that this bias also applies to health, like believing in false medical treatments or cures. The researchers found that illusory health beliefs correlated positively with a belief in pseudoscience and negatively with scepticism.

    Cultural and social influences

    Culture and society can strengthen paranormal beliefs. The way the media depicts supernatural events affects how people see them. Horror films and TV shows frequently portray supernatural beings interacting with the real world. Social media further amplifies these ideas, with people sharing personal stories, videos and experiences online. These shared posts can reinforce beliefs in the paranormal.

    When people are surrounded by others who believe in the supernatural, they are more likely to see these ideas as true. Social norms shape these beliefs by setting expectations about what is considered acceptable or real within a culture. If a society widely accepts paranormal ideas, people are more likely to adopt and reinforce them.

    Understanding the role of paranormal beliefs can help researchers create a balanced view of the people who subscribe to them. Instead of dismissing such beliefs, it is important to recognise their emotional and personal significance. Particularly, how beliefs shape people’s perspectives and coping mechanisms. While they may not align with logic or evidence, the comfort they afford is deeply meaningful to those who hold them. A 2024 study found that paranormal beliefs were not necessarily associated with negative wellbeing and were connected to a sense of meaning in life.

    Research has shown that teaching critical thinking and scientific literacy can help people tell the difference between helpful spiritual practices and harmful misunderstandings. Encouraging scepticism and rational thinking allows people to engage with the world in a way that balances hope with reason.

    Paranormal beliefs persist because they meet deep psychological needs. Understanding why people believe in the supernatural can lead to more compassionate discussions and help them find better ways to handle uncertainty. Whether or not someone believes in ghosts, the need for stability and comfort is something all humans share.

    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. How paranormal beliefs help people cope in uncertain times – https://theconversation.com/how-paranormal-beliefs-help-people-cope-in-uncertain-times-251648

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Fat in common cooking oils is linked to aggressive breast cancer – but here’s why you shouldn’t panic

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

    BearFotos/Shutterstock

    There’s now lots of evidence which shows that our own diets and the foods we eat can influence the outcome if we are unlucky enough to suffer from cancer.

    Scientists are especially interested in how this happens, in particular the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind these associations. This would better inform nutritional recommendations and help us understand how cancer forms so we can prevent it.

    Now, a study has identified a molecular link between linoleic acid, a common fat contained in cooking oils, and aggressive breast cancer, renewing the discussion about dietary choices and cancer risk. The findings, while significant, require careful interpretation to avoid unnecessary alarm and give useful guidance to the public.

    Common fatty acid

    Linoleic acid is an omega-6 fatty acid which is found in abundant quantities in soybean, sunflower and corn oils. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York showed it can directly activate a growth pathway in triple-negative breast cancer cells – a type of breast cancer especially known for its aggressiveness and limited treatment options.

    Triple negative breast cancer makes up about 15% of all breast cancer cases, but because breast cancer is so common, this affects a lot of people. The researchers found that linoleic acid binds to a protein called FABP5 (fatty acid-binding protein 5), which is at high levels in these cancer cells.

    This binding triggers the mTORC1 pathway – a critical regulator of cell growth and metabolism – fuelling tumour progression in preclinical research, including animal studies. My current research focuses on this pathway in a variety of normal and cancer cells.

    In the new study, mice fed a high linoleic-acid diet developed larger tumours, suggesting dietary intake may exacerbate this cancer’s growth. There was a link to people too: elevated FABP5 and linoleic acid levels were detected in blood samples from triple-negative breast cancer patients, strengthening the biological plausibility of this link. Dr John Blenis, the senior author of the paper, said:

    This discovery helps clarify the relationship between dietary fats and cancer, and sheds light on how to define which patients might benefit the most from specific nutritional recommendations in a personalised manner.

    It’s also possible that the implications extend beyond triple negative breast cancer to other tumours such as prostate cancer.

    Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid so it must be obtained from food. It plays a role in skin health, cell membrane structure and inflammation regulation. However, modern diets, which are rich in processed foods, ultraprocesed foods and seed oils, often provide excessive omega-6 fats, including linoleic acid, while lacking omega-3s, which are found in fish, flaxseeds and walnuts.

    This imbalance could promote chronic inflammation, which is a well known contributor to cancer and other diseases.

    The study therefore suggests that linoleic acid may directly drive cancer growth in specific contexts. This challenges earlier observational studies that found no clear association between dietary linoleic acid and overall breast cancer risk. For example, a 2023 meta-analysis of 14 studies in over 350,000 women concluded that linoleic acid intake had no significant effect on breast cancer risk in the general population.

    The discrepancy highlights the importance of researchers looking specifically at cancer subtypes and also individual factors, such as FABP5 levels in cancers themselves. Another study showed that linoleic acid was protective against breast cancer, which demonstrates why it’s important to consider everything in context.

    Don’t panic

    Media headlines can often oversimplify complex research. While this new study highlights a plausible mechanism linking linoleic acid to cancer growth, it does not prove that cooking oils cause breast cancer – far from it. Other factors, such as genetics, overall diet and environmental exposures, play significant roles.

    The findings do not warrant blanket avoidance of seed oils but suggest moderation and selectivity, especially for high-risk individuals. Many oils such as olive oil contain less linoleic acid and higher monounsaturated or saturated fats, which are more stable at high heat.

    Do also consider eating more fruits and vegetables as part of a healthy, balanced diet.

    A recent study that comprehensively analysed eating habits over 30 years showed that diets that are rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and low-fat dairy products were linked to healthy ageing. In that study, the Harvard team followed more than 100,000 people between 1986 and 2016. Fewer than 10% of respondents achieved healthy ageing, defined by a lack of 11 major chronic diseases and no impairment in cognitive, physical or mental function by the age of 70.

    Organisations like the World Cancer Research Fund emphasise that moderate use of vegetable oils is safe and that obesity, not specific fats, is the primary dietary driver of cancer risk.

    This study, then, underscores the importance of contextualising dietary fats in cancer research. While linoleic acid’s role in triple-negative breast cancer is a critical discovery, it’s one piece of a vast puzzle. A balanced, wholefood diet remains an important cornerstone of cancer prevention, and a strategy everyone can adopt.

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

    – ref. Fat in common cooking oils is linked to aggressive breast cancer – but here’s why you shouldn’t panic – https://theconversation.com/fat-in-common-cooking-oils-is-linked-to-aggressive-breast-cancer-but-heres-why-you-shouldnt-panic-254255

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ecuador: can freshly re-elected Daniel Noboa govern a country in crisis?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nicolas Forsans, Professor of Management and Co-director of the Centre for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, University of Essex

    Daniel Noboa has been re-elected as president of Ecuador with a margin that has surprised most observers. Just weeks before the April 13 runoff, polls had him neck and neck with his left-wing rival, Luisa González. In the end, Noboa secured about 56% of the vote against González’s 44%, a difference of more than 1 million votes.

    The victory gives Noboa, a 37-year-old businessman and political outsider, a full four-year mandate. Noboa won a shortened presidential term in November 2023 in a snap election called when his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved congress in an attempt to escape impeachment.

    It also marks the third consecutive presidential defeat for the movement led by former president, Rafael Correa, whose influence remains polarising in Ecuadorian politics.

    González is, at the time of writing, refusing to concede, claiming “grotesque” electoral fraud. “I refuse to believe that the people prefer lies over the truth”, she has said. But she has presented no evidence to support the allegation.

    International observers, including the EU and the Organisation of American States, have confirmed the elections were free and fair. In the absence of proof, the fraud claims appear to be more political theatre than a real challenge to the integrity of the vote.

    Political scion to dominant incumbent

    Noboa’s campaign leaned heavily on security – a theme that has come to dominate Ecuadorian public life as the country grapples with record levels of violence. Since assuming the presidency in 2023, Noboa has governed under a permanent state of emergency.

    He declared an “internal armed conflict” in early 2024, deployed the military in prisons and on the streets, and launched a wide-ranging security plan called Plan Fénix. This plan includes building a new maximum-security prison in the coastal province of Santa Elena modelled on El Salvador’s much-criticised approach to curbing violence.

    Initially, these measures won Noboa widespread support. But the picture soon darkened. January 2025 was Ecuador’s most violent month on record, with 781 homicides. Criminal groups remain entrenched in the country’s port cities and prisons. And human rights organisations have raised serious concerns about arbitrary arrests, the excessive use of force, and the militarisation of civilian life.

    Despite these setbacks, Noboa’s message of strength and order clearly resonated with voters. Ecuadorians, exhausted by spiralling violence, appear willing to accept more authoritarian governance in exchange for safety. This is a trend seen across the region, from President Nayib Bukele’s 2024 re-election in El Salvador to rising approval for militarised policing in Brazil, Honduras and Mexico.

    The challenges Noboa now faces are daunting. The most pressing is Ecuador’s descent into organised crime and narco-violence. Situated between Colombia and Peru, the country has become a major transit hub for cocaine bound for the US and Europe. Powerful international cartels have partnered with local gangs, and the state has lost control over large swaths of territory.

    In response, Noboa has not only empowered the armed forces but has also sought international assistance. In 2024, he met with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a controversial US private military contractor. This raised concerns about the outsourcing of Ecuador’s security and its implications for human rights. He has also floated the idea of hosting foreign troops in Ecuador, a proposal that would require a constitutional amendment.

    But militarised solutions alone did not bring an end to violence during Noboa’s first term, nor are they likely to succeed in his second.

    Ecuador’s security crisis is not just a matter of policing – it is a crisis of state capacity. The judiciary is riddled with corruption, prisons have become centres of criminal coordination, and police officers are often outgunned and underpaid. Without reforming these institutions, Noboa’s war on crime risks becoming a war without end.

    At the same time, Ecuador’s economy is faltering. In 2024, the country fell into recession, with GDP contracting and inflation rising. Ecuador is reliant on hydropower for its electricity generation, and a historic drought that year caused blackouts lasting up to 14 hours a day. This revealed years of under-investment in infrastructure.

    In response, Noboa raised VAT, cut fuel subsidies, and secured a US$4 billion (roughly £3 billion) loan from the International Monetary Fund. These unpopular measures provoked grumbling but not mass protests, a fact some analysts attribute to exhaustion rather than approval.

    Inequality remains high, especially for young people and those living in rural and coastal regions. Unemployment and underemployment affect nearly half of the working-age population, and around one-third of Ecuadorians live in poverty. Noboa has announced new cash transfers and youth employment programmes, but these are palliative, not structural.

    To make matters worse, Noboa governs with limited support in the National Assembly. His party, Acción Democrática Nacional, holds 66 of the chamber’s 151 seats – one less than González’s Citizen Revolution.

    The Indigenous Pachakutik party controls a crucial bloc of nine seats, but is itself internally divided. Passing legislation will require building coalitions and compromising. These are skills that Noboa has yet to demonstrate at scale.

    Noboa’s credibility has also been challenged. His family’s banana export company, Noboa Trading, has been linked to multiple drug seizures in Europe. While there is no evidence implicating Noboa directly, the revelations raise uncomfortable questions about the president’s anti-drug narrative and potential conflicts of interest.

    Towards democratic reform

    Noboa’s victory gives him an opportunity, but not a blank cheque. His success will now depend on whether he can pivot from ruling by decree to governing by consensus. The public expects results: less violence, more jobs and greater political stability.

    To meet these expectations, he will need to restore the rule of law, protect human rights and build inclusive institutions capable of resisting criminal capture. This means professionalising the police, strengthening the judiciary and tackling the deep inequalities that fuel violence and despair.

    It also means stepping back from theatrical gestures, such as alliances with foreign mercenaries, and focusing on the slow, often frustrating work of state-building.

    In the coming months, Noboa will face a simple but profound test: can he translate his electoral mandate into real, lasting progress for a country on the edge? Ecuador’s future may depend on the answer.

    Nicolas Forsans 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. Ecuador: can freshly re-elected Daniel Noboa govern a country in crisis? – https://theconversation.com/ecuador-can-freshly-re-elected-daniel-noboa-govern-a-country-in-crisis-254420

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: New UK system to protect satellites against attack shows how global conflict has spilled into outer space

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jessie Hamill-Stewart, PhD Researcher, University of Bath

    Lockheed Martin and US Space Force

    The UK government has announced £65 million in funding for a new system called Borealis which is intended to help the UK military defend its satellites against threats. Borealis is a software system that collates and processes data to strengthen the UK military’s ability to monitor what’s going on in space.

    The government’s investment, announced on March 7, underlines the increasingly critical role played by space systems in the modern world. Space services play a key role in managing critical infrastructure such as the energy grid, transport systems and communications networks.

    For example, SpaceX’s Starlink system has been vitally important for communication on the battlefield during Ukraine’s war with Russia. It is just one example of the game changing potential of satellite based services.

    The investment in Borealis also shows that the UK government is taking the threat to space systems increasingly seriously. From as long ago as 2019, senior US officials have warned that space is no longer considered a “benign environment”.

    In 2021, a US general claimed that states were constantly conducting attacks on satellites, including jamming and cyber-attacks. Announcing the Borealis system in 2025, Major General Paul Tedman, the commander of UK Space Command, characterised space as “increasingly contested”.

    As the international order is coming under increasing pressure, nations are engaging in more combative behaviour, not just in space, but in cyberspace, and under the seas.

    A space system is composed of four parts – traditionally called segments. These include the space segment (satellites and other spacecraft), the ground segment (ground stations, control rooms), and the user segment (a signal receiver, for example). Communications between these parts of the system form what’s called the link segment.

    In addition to intentional attacks, satellites can also experience problems because of physical collisions with orbiting debris, from cosmic radiation, and activity on the Sun, which can interfere with onboard systems. For satellites, security against attacks has often been a secondary consideration. It was hard enough to build a system which could survive in space without introducing the additional costs and challenges of securing it against attacks from adversaries.

    Addressing threats to assets in space will require an all-encompassing approach, as I have argued in a recent report. First, security needs to cover all four segments of space infrastructure. The easiest way to interrupt a space system might be to target the ground or the user segment, rather than trying to interfere directly with a satellite.

    Starlink has been vitally important in Ukraine during the war with Russia.
    LanKS / Shutterstock

    Second, security needs to be considered across the life cycle of the system, from design and construction, through launch, to operations and application. Consider, for example, if the detailed specifications of a satellite have already been leaked to a malicious party. That might provide them with an in-depth understanding of how to attack the spacecraft – and in such a way that may be difficult to defend against without going back to redesign it.

    This type of issue was less of a problem when satellites were developed almost entirely by government agencies and large aerospace companies. ongoing expansion of the commercial space sector, start-ups and new entrants to the sector may not have the same approach to security as more seasoned organisations.

    Third, security needs to include the whole range of threats facing space infrastructure, of which a satellite is just one part. We must therefore consider the physical security of hardware, information security, cybersecurity, the personnel working on the project, and supply chain security.

    Vulnerable to sabotage

    The range of threats facing space systems parallels those facing other critical systems, such as underwater telecommunications cables. There have been several recent incidents of subsea cables being cut in the Baltic Sea, for example. There is also at least one reported instance of hackers burrowing deep inside core telecommunications networks.

    It is becoming painfully clear that much of the infrastructure underpinning the economy and our daily lives is fundamentally insecure. Determined attackers are increasingly operating across both the physical world and cyberspace.

    Retrofitting security onto space systems is technically challenging and hugely expensive. There are also tough policy questions here. Governments simply do not have the resources or the legal powers to act alone on this issue. Neither is it clear that the private sector will voluntarily commit to higher security standards and a vast programme of investment in existing infrastructure.

    Another issue is the global nature of space systems: differing security regulations make it challenging to ensure a coordinated approach to infrastructure across states.

    This underscores the importance of raising public awareness around the scale and scope of threats to space systems – and making clear what the impact would be on the public if this infrastructure ceased to operate. If governments are going to invest more in securing space systems, then people will need to understand why this is critical.

    However, the challenge of reverse engineering security into the complex and rapidly expanding network of space systems may ultimately be beyond the resources and appetites of governments and companies.

    If that is the case, then in addition to raising awareness around security risks, governments and other organisations should also consider efforts to increase the resilience of space systems to attacks. In addition to thinking about how to better secure our space infrastructure, it may be prudent to consider how we might live without it.

    Jessie Hamill-Stewart 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. Dr Neil Ashdown contributed to this article. He is the head of research at Tyburn St Raphael.

    – ref. New UK system to protect satellites against attack shows how global conflict has spilled into outer space – https://theconversation.com/new-uk-system-to-protect-satellites-against-attack-shows-how-global-conflict-has-spilled-into-outer-space-253963

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Who’s thriving, who’s struggling and who’s stuck at the kitchen table: how working lives are changing in the UK

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Felstead, Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University

    shutterstock PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

    For many people in the UK work is changing: how we work, what we do and where we do it. The change is faster for some than it is for others – and it’s not always changing for the better.

    A new national survey — organised and managed by my colleagues and I — paints a mixed picture of UK working life. What makes the Skills and Employment Survey 2024 unique is that it the eighth in of a series that stretches back to the mid-1980s .

    The survey focuses on people’s working lives: what skills they use, how and where they work, and what they think of their job. The data series consists of interviews with nearly 35,000 workers with around 5,500 taking part in 2024.

    Some people have good things to say about the way their working lives have changed. Other people’s work lives are not improving. For many of us, it’s a bit of both.

    Good news

    One piece of good news is that very few workers regard their jobs as having no value. Contrary to estimates by some scholars that around 40% of people “find themselves labouring at tasks which they consider pointless”, our survey suggests that only 5% of respondents think that their job is meaningless and has no value.

    So-called “bullshit jobs” are rare. Instead, nearly 70% reported their jobs gave them a sense of achievement either always or most of the time, while 76% said that their work was useful.

    Work is becoming more skilled too. In 2024, 46% of workers reported that they would need a graduate level qualification if they were to apply for their current job today. This is up from 20% in 1986.

    A further piece of good news is that the rate of over-qualification has declined. In 2024 35% of workers reported that they held qualifications that were higher than those currently required for their jobs compared to 39% in 2006.

    The job quality gender gap is narrowing. The pay gap has fallen steadily, but the gap in the physical environment of work – in working time quality, and in job skills – has also narrowed. For example, the proportion of men who reported that their health or safety was at risk from their work declined from 38% in 2001 to 21% in 2024, while among women it has remained stable at 22%.

    Bad news

    However, all not is well in the world of work. Workplace abuse is common – 14% of UK workers experienced bullying, violence or sexual harassment at work. The risk of abuse is much higher for women, LGBTQ+ workers, nurses, teachers and those who work at night.

    One of the most striking findings of our survey is the large fall in the ability of employees to take decisions about their immediate job tasks. In 2024, 34% of employees said they had “a great deal of influence” over which tasks they did, how they did them and how hard they worked. This is down from 44% in 2012 and 62% in 1992.

    The mechanisms for greater worker control have grown over time, but this has not translated into greater control at an individual level.

    Mixed news

    Another striking, if not unsurprising, finding is the growth in the number of people woking from home. But the long-running nature of the shift may come as a surprise. The survey shows that the growth of hybrid working started back in 2006, well before the term became fashionable.

    The survey also sheds light on where within the home people work. It shows that 45% can insulate themselves from others in the household by creating a home office. The rest must make do with the kitchen table, the sofa or the corner of a room.

    After years of declining trade union membership, the survey shows that the tide may eventually have turned. Membership levels have plateaued, and rates of union presence in the workplace and union influence over pay increased between 2017 and 2024.

    A rising proportion of trade union members also say their union has a great or fair amount of influence over how work is organised – up from 42% in 2001 to 51% in 2024.

    Technological change brings opportunities as well as benefits. The survey found that digital technology played a role in nearly all jobs, with 78% of workers considering computers “essential” or “very important” in their jobs, up from 45% in 1997.

    The share of AI users surged during the period of data collection, indicating its rapid adoption. But there are few signs that it is displacing workers, at least for the time being.

    Regular monitoring of all the issues raised here – and many besides – is only possible if regular and robust surveys such as the Skills and Employment Survey are carried out. These are invaluable components of our knowledge infrastructure which must be treasured, protected and supported if we are to accurately assess how the world of work is changing.

    Alan Felstead receives funding from a range of organisations. The Skills and Employment Survey 2024 is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department for Education, and the Advisory and Conciliation and Arbitration Service with additional funding from the Department for the Economy to extend the survey to Northern Ireland (ES/X007987/1)

    – ref. Who’s thriving, who’s struggling and who’s stuck at the kitchen table: how working lives are changing in the UK – https://theconversation.com/whos-thriving-whos-struggling-and-whos-stuck-at-the-kitchen-table-how-working-lives-are-changing-in-the-uk-254235

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves are a Trojan horse to hide humanity’s destruction of nature

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rich Grenyer, Associate Professor in Biogeography and Biodiversity, University of Oxford

    One of the biotech company’s ‘dire wolves’. Colossal

    With wildlife populations globally 73% smaller on average than in 1970 and large mammals missing from much of the world, surely there’s never been a better time to “de-extinct” species? US biotech company Colossal Biosciences Inc claimed to do just that recently by resurrecting the dire wolf from Game of Thrones (a species that also lived in our world, several thousand years ago).

    The potential seems huge. A species in trouble? Get a high-quality genome and you’ve made it a save game point, ready to replay when the environment improves. Didn’t get there in time? Never mind – you can use frozen remains in the permafrost, or shotgun-blasted specimens in a museum collection. And pretty soon, even if you don’t have those, a dose of generative AI and you can probably infer some of that genome anyway. A little genetic engineering and you have a species back from the dead, ready to go.

    What’s the problem? Well, pretty much everything. These aren’t species returned from extinction. They aren’t going to be very useful, and in fact may well not survive at all. Most worrying of all, like the Freys and Boltons hidden in the hall before the Red Wedding, it’s the ethos of de-extinction hidden in these “dire wolf” puppies that will likely do the most damage to biodiversity if it establishes itself.

    Extinction has not been reversed

    The dire wolf was a very large carnivore that lived in the Americas about 10,000 years ago. Anatomically, it resembled a big, muscular, extra-toothy grey wolf: the species alive today that everyone thinks of when they say “wolf”.

    The two pups revealed by Colossal Biosciences are not dire wolves. They are grey wolves, with 14 genes modified to produce an animal that resembles what we think a dire wolf looked like. Actually, only one of the 14 was a gene directly from a dire wolf specimen – the others were gene variants from existing grey wolf populations chosen to give physical features that made the engineered wolves bigger and whiter.

    Over time, gene editing technology could increase the possible number of genes that can be engineered into a host species, and increase the complexity of the traits being inserted. But it’s not species being revived, it’s a few of their characteristics being borrowed by a species from today. It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short French man to wear his hat.

    The argument for this kind of genetic engineering revolves around the notion that the new hybrids might be useful for environmental restoration. As a top predator, the dire wolf could in theory bring the same revolutionary changes to ecosystems that reintroducing grey wolves to Yellowstone national park in the US famously caused in the 1990s. In other words, a more complete ecosystem, with wolves checking the voracious appetite of deer such that more complex and biodiverse habitats rebound.

    However, in ecosystems where the dire wolf would reign supreme the grey wolf can very clearly fill the same role (just as it did in Yellowstone) without any of the unnecessary technology – if only people stopped trying to shoot them and exempt them from endangered species legislation.

    There’s also the problem that captive breeding programmes seeking to release endangered species into the wild today regularly butt against: that the new animals have little or no idea what to do or how to live in their new habitat.

    Operation Migration, dramatised in the 1996 film Fly Away Home, saw a dedicated team of pilots teach endangered migratory birds how to traverse North America by having them chase microlight aircraft for thousands of miles. This is just one example of the intensive training necessary, and which is never guaranteed to be successful. It’s obviously more difficult to train apex predators by example – I will not be volunteering for the “intro to pack hunting” session.

    No quick fixes

    The word “de-extinction” is not just itself untrue, but it seeks to diminish the inconvenient truth of the biodiversity crisis: we know what causes extinction, and it’s us.

    Food systems have to destroy less habitat and use much less protein from animals, wild and farmed. Energy systems have to burn less carbon, so that there are fewer deaths among species (including ours) trying to adapt to higher temperatures and the changes they bring. To do both these things, our landscapes have to leave more space for nature and much of what remains must be used more efficiently to provide food, fuel and living space.

    There are definite signs that we can make good on these promises: conservation does work, for humans and for other species.

    But these changes require us to recognise that certain economic and political philosophies are no longer tenable. They require sacrifice by everyone and a willingness by rich people and countries to pay with money, trade policy, intellectual property rights and energy supply, so that many of the poorest people and countries can flourish while avoiding the environmental damage that those rich countries caused over their own histories.

    What motivates people to cope with these changes is a desire for justice, a need to nurture, a drive to make things better and a recognition that while habitats can sometimes be restored, species extinctions are irreversible dead-ends which can only be avoided. That recognition is under threat.

    The Trump administration is trying to defang the US Endangered Species Act. In the UK, a wholesale revision of legislation to prevent biodiversity loss has begun with the targeting of the habitat regulations, in preemptive defence of the government’s need to “build, build, build” in a desperate search for more economic growth. How useful would it be if the risk of extinction could be averted with a simple “don’t worry, we’ll pay to de-extinct it afterwards”?

    There won’t be a dire wolf, and even if there were to be one, we’d have no idea what it was for (and neither would it). We’ll all pay for the mistaken belief that extinction is a solved problem, and that the business-as-usual global economy that has caused the sixth mass extinction is no big deal, because its casualties aren’t actually dead – just temporarily inconvenienced by an extinction that is no longer forever.

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

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

    – ref. Why ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves are a Trojan horse to hide humanity’s destruction of nature – https://theconversation.com/why-de-extinct-dire-wolves-are-a-trojan-horse-to-hide-humanitys-destruction-of-nature-254309

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Coal in Alberta: Neither public outrage nor waning global demand seem to matter to Danielle Smith

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ian Urquhart, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of Alberta

    “We heard you, Albertans.” With those words, Alberta Energy Minister Brian Jean put coal mining in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains back on the table last December. Common sense might suggest Jean meant that Albertans are in favour of resuscitating metallurgical coal mining there, but that’s not the case.

    Instead, the public strongly opposes reviving metallurgical coal mining — also known as coking coal mining — to supply Asian steelmakers. December’s Coal Industry Modernization Initiative sadly exemplifies what has become too common in politics today — using misinformation to try to win the public’s willingness to accept the unacceptable.

    In this case, the government’s treatment of expert opinion compounds its misinformation. It’s blind to expert advice from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Australian government questioning the rosiness of metallurgical coal’s future.

    Bringing coal miners back to Alberta’s Rockies was extremely contentious between 2020 and 2022. Jason Kenney’s Conservatives removed the de facto exploration and exploitation restrictions in place there since the 1970s. At the same time, Benga Mining Limited proposed to resume coal mining in southwest Alberta. Together, these events ignited a public furore.

    Public opposition

    Andrew Nikiforuk, a journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics and the energy industry, was one of the first to bring coal miner ambitions to the public’s attention. He told me the outrage was “probably the most important environmental protest I have ever witnessed in this province.”

    Benga’s Grassy Mountain project was summarily dismissed by government regulators in 2021. Eleven weeks before that decision, Alberta created the Coal Policy Committee. It consulted Albertans about the 2020 decision to invite coal miners to return to the Rockies.

    The committee gave anyone with a view on coal — positive or negative — the opportunity to contribute to its deliberations. The response was impressive. The committee received nearly 4,400 pieces of correspondence, 176 detailed written submissions and conducted 67 virtual and public meetings.

    The consultation confirmed what polling firms had already found: “A significant number of respondents are apprehensive about coal development in Alberta.”

    Albertans didn’t believe coal’s economic benefits justified its risks to landscapes and water quality. Only eight per cent of those who answered the committee’s survey question about the economic benefits of coal mining felt they were very important; 64 per cent regarded those benefits as “not important at all.”

    This unambiguous public opposition repeated what the federal-provincial review panel into Benga’s Grassy Mountain coal mine proposal revealed in 2020-2021. Ninety-eight per cent of the more than 4,400 public comments left on the review panel’s website opposed the proposal to bring coal mining back to the Crowsnest Pass.

    Second, the committee concluded that land-use planning, with public consultation, needed to take place before a decision could be made about permitting coal exploration in the Rockies.

    Premier Danielle Smith’s government hasn’t listened. It doesn’t intend to conduct the land-use planning called for by the committee.

    Jean has also said he will consult industry — and only industry — as he tries to get his new policy in place this year. He promised “targeted” engagement with coal industry stakeholders. The public and other interests will be mere spectators.

    Global coal demand is a myth

    Alberta’s coal initiative has an optimistic view of future metallurgical coal demand.

    Jean markets his proposal by saying Alberta coal is needed “given the current and anticipated future global demand for coal.” But the IAE doesn’t share that optimism. Nor do experts from the Australian government, the world’s largest exporter of metallurgical coal.

    The IEA’s annual coal report is a benchmark for understanding the medium-term global outlook for coal. Its most recent report projects metallurgical coal production will fall by 4.2 per cent from 2024 to 2027. The IEA’s 2024 World Energy Outlook predicted steelmaking coal production would fall over the next two decades as steelmakers reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    In 2050, it expects world coking coal production to drop 35.8 per cent from the 2024 level.

    Australia’s pre-eminence comes from producing 46 per cent of global metallurgical coal exports. The Australian government’s March 2025 Resources and Energy Quarterly confirms the general thrust of the IEA’s analyses. A slight increase in the amount of steel produced without metallurgical coal “will likely result in a slight fall in global metallurgical coal demand through to 2030.”



    Read more:
    Australia urgently needs to get serious about long-term climate policy – but there’s no sign of that in the election campaign

    Asian demand

    The IEA makes it clear that Australian producers don’t intend to relinquish market share willingly. Forty-seven Australian coal projects are in the pipeline, with most focused on metallurgical coal or metallurgical/thermal coal combined. Three-quarters of Australia’s metallurgical coal exports feed the Asian steel industry.

    Then there’s Mongolia. After its “recent extraordinary export growth” into China, Mongolia now supplies nearly one-half of China’s imports. The country is the world’s second largest metallurgical coal exporter. Mongolia’s high-quality coal, proximity to China and improved rail infrastructure will make its production difficult to displace.

    It’s unlikely, then, that new coal production from Alberta will gain easy access to Asian markets.

    Alberta’s Coal Industry Modernization Initiative illustrates two dangerous trends in politics today — the refusal to heed both the public and experts.

    The stakes here are large. Coal mining will undoubtedly have a substantial impact on the headwaters that serve people in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Smith’s Conservatives should in fact embrace common sense and the spirit of party policy from the 1970s. Prohibit coal mining in Alberta’s Rockies.

    Ian Urquhart 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. Coal in Alberta: Neither public outrage nor waning global demand seem to matter to Danielle Smith – https://theconversation.com/coal-in-alberta-neither-public-outrage-nor-waning-global-demand-seem-to-matter-to-danielle-smith-252551

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why the meteorites that hit Earth have less water than the asteroid bits brought back by space probes – a planetary scientist explains new research

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Patrick M. Shober, Postdoctoral Fellow in Planetary Sciences, NASA

    This image overlays over 100 fireball images recorded between 2016 and 2020. The streaks are fireballs; the dots are star positions at different times. Desert Fireball Network

    Much of what scientists know about the early solar system comes from meteorites – ancient rocks that travel through space and survive a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. Among meteorites, one type – called carbonaceous chondrites – stands out as the most primitive and provides a unique glimpse into the solar system’s infancy.

    The carbonaceous chondrites are rich in water, carbon and organic compounds. They’re “hydrated,” which means they contain water bound within minerals in the rock. The components of the water are locked into crystal structures. Many researchers believe these ancient rocks played a crucial role in delivering water to early Earth.

    Before hitting the Earth, rocks traveling through space are generally referred to as asteroids, meteoroids or comets, depending on their size and composition. If a piece of one of these objects makes it all the way to Earth, it becomes a “meteorite.”

    From observing asteroids with telescopes, scientists know that most asteroids have water-rich, carbonaceous compositions. Models predict that most meteorites – over half – should also be carbonaceous. But less than 4% of all the meteorites found on Earth are carbonaceous. So why is there such a mismatch?

    In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy on April 14, 2025, my planetary scientist colleagues and I tried to answer an age-old question: Where are all the carbonaceous chondrites?

    Sample-return missions

    Scientists’ desire to study these ancient rocks has driven recent sample-return space missions. NASA’s OSIRIS‑REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 missions have transformed what researchers know about primitive, carbon‑rich asteroids.

    Meteorites found sitting on the ground are exposed to rain, snow and plants, which can significantly change them and make analysis more difficult. So, the OSIRIS‑REx mission ventured to the asteroid Bennu to retrieve an unaltered sample. Retrieving this sample allowed scientists to examine the asteroid’s composition in detail.

    Similarly, Hayabusa2’s journey to the asteroid Ryugu provided pristine samples of another, similarly water-rich asteroid.

    Together these missions have let planetary scientists like me study pristine, fragile carbonaceous material from asteroids. These asteroids are a direct window into the building blocks of our solar system and the origins of life.

    The carbonaceous chondrite puzzle

    For a long time, scientists assumed that the Earth’s atmosphere filtered out carbonaceous debris.

    When an object hits Earth’s atmosphere, it has to survive significant pressures and high temperatures. Carbonaceous chondrites tend to be weaker and more crumbly than other meteorites, so these objects just don’t stand as much of a chance.

    Meteorites usually start their journey when two asteroids collide. These collisions create a bunch of centimeter- to meter-size rock fragments. These cosmic crumbs streak through the solar system and can, eventually, fall to Earth. When they’re smaller than a meter, scientists call them meteoroids.

    Meteoroids are far too small for researchers to see with a telescope, unless they’re about to hit the Earth, and astronomers get lucky.

    But there is another way scientists can study this population, and, in turn, understand why meteorites have such different compositions.

    Meteor and fireball observation networks

    Our research team used the Earth’s atmosphere as our detector.

    Most of the meteoroids that reach Earth are tiny, sand-sized particles, but occasionally, bodies up to a couple of meters in diameter hit. Researchers estimate that about 5,000 metric tons of micrometeorites land on Earth annually. And, each year, between 4,000 and 10,000 large meteorites – golf ball-sized or larger – land on Earth. That’s more than 20 each day.

    A fireball observed by the FRIPON network in Normandy, France, in 2019.

    Today, digital cameras have rendered round-the-clock observations of the night sky both practical and affordable. Low-cost, high-sensitivity sensors and automated detection software allow researchers to monitor large sections of the night sky for bright flashes, which signal a meteoroid hitting the atmosphere.

    Research teams can sift through these real-time observations using automated analysis techniques – or a very dedicated Ph.D. student – to find invaluable information.

    Our team manages two global systems: FRIPON, a French-led network with stations in 15 countries; and the Global Fireball Observatory, a collaboration started by the team behind the Desert Fireball Network in Australia. Together with other open-access datasets, my colleagues and I used the trajectories of nearly 8,000 impacts observed by 19 observation networks spread across 39 countries.

    By comparing all meteoroid impacts recorded in Earth’s atmosphere with those that successfully reach the surface as meteorites, we can pinpoint which asteroids produce fragments that are strong enough to survive the journey. Or, conversely, we can also pinpoint which asteroids produce weak material that do not show up as often on Earth as meteorites.

    The Sun is baking the rocks too much

    Surprisingly, we found that many asteroid pieces don’t even make it to Earth. Something starts removing the weak stuff while the fragment is still in space. The carbonaceous material, which isn’t very durable, likely gets broken down through heat stress when its orbit takes it close to the Sun.

    As carbonaceous chondrites orbit close, and then away from the Sun, the temperature swings form cracks in their material. This process effectively fragments and removes weak, hydrated boulders from the population of objects near the Earth. Anything left over after this thermal cracking then has to survive the atmosphere.

    Only 30%-50% of the remaining objects survive the atmospheric passage and become meteorites. The debris pieces whose orbits bring them closer to the Sun tend to be significantly more durable, making them far more likely to survive the difficult passage through Earth’s atmosphere. We call this a survival bias.

    For decades, scientists have presumed that Earth’s atmosphere alone explains the scarcity of carbonaceous meteorites, but our work indicates that much of the removal occurs beforehand in space.

    Going forward, new scientific advances can help confirm these findings and better identify meteoroid compositions. Scientists need to get better at using telescopes to detect objects right before they hit the Earth. More detailed modeling of how these objects break up in the atmosphere can also help researchers study them.

    Lastly, future studies can come up with better methods to identify what these fireballs are made of using the colors of the meteors.

    Patrick M. Shober received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945298. Patrick M. Shober currently receives funding from the NASA Postdoctoral Program.

    – ref. Why the meteorites that hit Earth have less water than the asteroid bits brought back by space probes – a planetary scientist explains new research – https://theconversation.com/why-the-meteorites-that-hit-earth-have-less-water-than-the-asteroid-bits-brought-back-by-space-probes-a-planetary-scientist-explains-new-research-252456

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Africa’s healthcare funding crisis: 3 strategies to manage deadly diseases

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Francisca Mutapi, Professor in Global Health Infection and Immunity. and co-Director of the Global Health Academy, University of Edinburgh

    The increasing trend of reducing foreign aid to Africa is forcing the continent to reassess its approach to healthcare delivery.

    African countries face a major challenge of dealing with high rates of communicable diseases, such as malaria and HIV/Aids, and rising levels of non-communicable diseases. But the continent’s health systems don’t have the resources to provide accessible and affordable healthcare to address these challenges.

    Historically, aid has played a critical role in supporting African health systems. It has funded key areas, including medical research, treatment programmes, healthcare infrastructure and workforce salaries. In 2021, half of sub-Saharan Africa’s countries relied on external financing for more than one-third of their health expenditures.

    As aid dwindles, a stark reality emerges: many African governments are unable to achieve universal health coverage or address rising healthcare costs.

    The reduction in aid restricts healthcare services and threatens to reverse decades of health progress on the continent. A fundamental shift in healthcare strategy is necessary to address this crisis.

    The well-known maxim that “prevention is better than cure” holds not just for health outcomes but also for economic efficiency. It’s much more affordable to prevent diseases than it is to treat them.

    As an infectious diseases specialist, I have seen how preventable diseases can put a financial burden on health systems and households.

    For instance, each year, there are global economic losses of over US$33 billion due to neglected tropical diseases. Many conditions, such as lymphatic filariasis, often require lifelong care. This places a heavy burden on families and stretches national healthcare systems to their limits.

    African nations can cut healthcare costs through disease prevention. This often requires fewer specialist health workers and less expensive interventions.

    To navigate financial constraints, African nations must rethink and redesign their healthcare systems.

    Three key areas where cost-effective, preventive strategies can work are: improving water, sanitation, and hygiene; expanding vaccination programmes; and making non-communicable disease prevention part of community health services.

    A shift in healthcare delivery

    Improving water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure

    Many diseases prevalent in Africa are transmitted through contact with contaminated water and soil. Investing in safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure is an opportunity. This alone can prevent a host of illnesses such as parasitic worms and diarrhoeal diseases. It can also improve infection control and strengthen epidemic and pandemic disease control.

    Currently, WASH coverage in Africa remains inadequate. Millions are vulnerable to preventable illnesses. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2020 alone, about 510,000 deaths in Africa could have been prevented with improved water and sanitation. Of these, 377,000 deaths were caused by diarrhoeal diseases.

    Unsafe WASH conditions also contribute to secondary health issues, such as under-nutrition and parasitic infections. Around 14% of acute respiratory infections and 10% of the undernutrition disease burden – such as stunting – are linked to unsafe WASH conditions.

    By investing in functional WASH infrastructure, African governments can significantly reduce the incidence of these diseases. This will lead to lower healthcare costs and improved public health outcomes.

    Local production of relevant vaccines

    Vaccination is one of the most cost-effective health interventions available for preventing infection. Immunisation efforts save over four million lives every year across the continent.

    There is an urgent need for vaccines against diseases prevalent in Africa whose current control is heavily reliant on aid. Neglected tropical diseases are among them.

    Vaccines can also prevent some non-communicable diseases. A prime example is the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which can prevent up to 85% of cervical cancer cases in Africa.

    HPV vaccination is also more cost-effective than treating cervical cancer. In some African countries, the cost per vaccine dose averages just under US$20. Treatment costs can reach up to US$2,500 per patient, as seen in Tanzania.

    It is vital to invest in a comprehensive vaccine ecosystem. This includes strengthening local research and building innovation hubs. Regulatory bodies across the continent must also be harmonised and markets created to attract vaccine investment.

    Integrating disease prevention into community healthcare services

    Historically, African healthcare systems were designed to address communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV. This left them ill-equipped to handle the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. One cost-effective approach is to integrate the prevention and management of these diseases into existing community health programmes.

    Community health workers currently provide low-cost interventions for health issues such as pneumonia and malaria. They can be trained to address non-communicable diseases as well.

    In some countries, community health workers are already filling the service gap. Getting them more involved in prevention strategies will strengthen primary healthcare services in Africa. This investment will ultimately reduce the long-term financial burden of treating chronic diseases.

    A treatment-over-prevention approach will not be affordable

    Current estimates suggest that by 2030, an additional US$371 billion per year – roughly US$58 per person – will be required to provide basic primary healthcare services across Africa.

    Adding to the challenge is the rising global cost of healthcare, projected to increase by 10.4% this year alone. This marks the third consecutive year of escalating costs. For Africa, costs also come from population growth and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases.

    By shifting focus from treatment to prevention, African nations can make healthcare accessible, equitable and financially sustainable despite the decline in foreign aid.

    Francisca Mutapi is affiliated with Uniting to Combat NTDs

    – ref. Africa’s healthcare funding crisis: 3 strategies to manage deadly diseases – https://theconversation.com/africas-healthcare-funding-crisis-3-strategies-to-manage-deadly-diseases-253644

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: ‘Cross-border commuters’: the women who risk the dangerous crossing between Venezuela and Colombia each day

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Valentina Montoya Robledo, Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility, University of Oxford

    Many people cross the border between Venezuela and Colombia each day – but they are not migrants. These people live on the Venezuelan side because they cannot afford rent or utilities in Colombia.

    The vast majority are women, many of whom are single mothers solely responsible for their children’s subsistence and care. They cross the border on foot, often with their children, because it is their only option for survival.

    High inflation in Venezuela has made many staples unaffordable, while many other essential items are either unavailable or poor quality. But rent is cheaper in their home country, so they are known as “cross-border commuters”.

    Because they are moving within the border zone, the law does not require them to have their passports stamped each time. On the Colombian side, they buy goods – products that are cheaper there — to sell in Venezuela. They find ingredients to make cakes and pastries, or hair dye for their clients. Others cross to attend the doctor or give birth.

    Some women take their children to school in Colombia. In Venezuela, public schools currently operate only two days a week, while across the border they run for the full five-day school week and welcome children from Venezuela. Some women used to take their little ones to nursery in Colombia – but not any more, since the recent USAID cuts removed funding for these nurseries.

    In the few hours without their children, the women find work in Colombia’s “gig economy”: recycling garbage, selling coffee, standing at traffic lights selling fried plantains, or even their bodies.

    When I asked a public official in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta about the women coming in from Venezuela each day, he told me: “The good ones cross over the bridge [legally], and the bad ones go underneath [bypassing border controls].”

    In fact, what brings these women into Colombia, and which route they use to arrive each day, is much more nuanced than that official suggests.

    Neither government understands

    Despite the Colombian government having set up education, health and employment programs for receiving and including Venezuelan migrants, these women are not traditional migrants. Neither government has much understanding of what it means for them to seek a livelihood in Colombia to survive and support their children.

    For the most part, neither government maintains updated statistics on how many women there are, the circumstances they face, why they cross over or under the bridge, the reasons or characteristics of their movements, and why they do not settle permanently in Colombia. These questions, among others, are what I have set out to research.

    Some women walk back and forth across one of the bridges over the Tachira river, which runs along the border between the two countries. Others, when returning to Venezuela carrying bundles of goods, cross on motorcycle taxis.

    But crossing the bridge is not always easy. Some women report that Venezuelan border guards search their bags and confiscate part of what they carry. Other times, they must pay – not just official taxes but bribes too.

    One woman told me how a guard asked for guava-paste sweets in exchange for letting her pass. Depending on the day and which guards are patrolling the crossing, often they have to present a legally required exit permit for their children, signed by the father. “What father? That man abandoned me when my child was born, and I haven’t heard from him since,” one woman told me.

    Without a permit, legally crossing the border into Colombia with their children becomes almost impossible. And there is no authority they can turn to for help.

    Under the bridge

    Then there are those who cross under the bridge every day, because they dare not risk being asked for a permit for their children.

    The Tachira river dries up and swells depending on the season, with multiple informal crossings known locally as “trochas”. When the river is low, people walk across on logs placed like makeshift bridges, or hop from stone to stone. When the water rises, they use small, self-built rafts.

    These crossings may be informal, but they can also be very dangerous. The women told me of clashes between armed groups on both sides of the river – some of them had been caught in the crossfire with their children in tow.

    Others described cases of sexual violence. They were particularly afraid for their daughters, because one of the men guarding the trocha may “set his sights on them” – meaning he might take a sexual interest.

    One woman told me cell phones are not allowed by the people who guard the trochas – who supposedly guarantee their safety. It adds to their sense of vulnerability. People generally pay to cross – if not with money then with their bodies. These are the unspoken rules of these pathways.

    As a result, every day the women fear for their safety and that of their children. But if something happens to them in the trochas, they mistrust the government and fear reporting these crimes.

    The women are vulnerable. They are neither “good” for crossing over the bridge, nor “bad” for crossing under it. Most make the decision on a day-to-day basis depending on their resources and time available, the papers they have, the goods they need to carry, and what they consider best for their children.

    As they say in Colombia, for these mothers “each day brings its own hustle”.

    Valentina Montoya Robledo receives funding from the John Fell Fund from the University of Oxford. She directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes.

    – ref. ‘Cross-border commuters’: the women who risk the dangerous crossing between Venezuela and Colombia each day – https://theconversation.com/cross-border-commuters-the-women-who-risk-the-dangerous-crossing-between-venezuela-and-colombia-each-day-253552

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Are Britons really poorer than they were 20 years ago, or does it just feel that way?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marcel Lukas, Senior Lecturer in Banking and Finance and Director of Executive Education, University of St Andrews

    pxl.store/Shutterstock

    Millions of UK households are facing what’s been dubbed “awful April” after rising council tax, water bills and broadband costs coincided with the new tax year. It could all start to hurt quite quickly. And it has led many people to ponder whether they’re genuinely worse off than previous generations – or simply experiencing a temporary pinch.

    Council tax has risen by an average of 5% across England (some rises in Scotland and Wales are even greater). Water bills are up by £10 per month on average, while many broadband and mobile providers have imposed rises several percentage points above the rate of inflation.

    This comes after years of economic volatility, from the 2008 financial crisis through Brexit, the COVID pandemic and the subsequent inflation surge.

    But beyond the immediate pain of these April increases, there’s a deeper question. Has there been a fundamental shift in British prosperity over the past two decades?

    Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals a complex picture around real household disposable income (RHDI). This is the amount of money from all income that households have available for spending or saving after taxes and benefits, adjusted for inflation. As such, it’s a reliable way to see how much money people have to spend right now, compared to previous years or decades.

    Between 2000 and 2008, RHDI grew steadily at approximately 3% per year. The financial crisis brought this growth to an abrupt halt, with the period between 2008 and 2023 characterised by unprecedented stagnation.

    While there have been periods of modest recovery in 2023 and 2024, the overall trajectory shows sustained minimal growth in disposable income ever since the 2008 financial crisis.

    When broken down by income groups, the data tell a more nuanced story. The bottom 20% of households have experienced virtually no growth in real disposable income since 2008, while the top 20% recovered more quickly after initial setbacks. Income inequality, which narrowed slightly during the early 2010s, has widened again in recent years.

    Underlying the income stagnation is Britain’s productivity problem. Labour productivity growth, which averaged around 2% annually in the five decades before 2008, has grown at less than 1% per year since. This has directly impacted wage growth.

    Several factors contribute to this productivity puzzle – under-investment in infrastructure and skills, a shift toward service-sector jobs with traditionally lower productivity growth, and economic uncertainty discouraging business investment.

    Housing – the great divider

    Perhaps the most significant factor in understanding why people might feel poorer is housing costs. The ratio of average house prices to average earnings has nearly doubled over the past 20 years. In 2002, a typical house cost around five times the average salary. But by 2023, this had risen to approximately nine times.

    For renters, the situation is also very challenging. Private rental costs increased faster than wages in the year to January 2025 in most regions, particularly in London. The proportion of income spent on rent increased from roughly 25% to more than 30%) for the average renter between 2022 and 2024.

    This housing cost burden creates a stark divide between generations. Those who bought property before the mid-2000s housing boom have generally seen their housing costs decline as a proportion of income as their mortgages were paid down. Meanwhile, younger generations face significantly higher barriers to home-ownership and higher ongoing costs.

    Housing costs are a big determiner of whether you feel wealthy in the UK.
    Alex Segre/Shutterstock

    Another important part of the overall picture is the consumer experience – and how the quality and variety of goods and services have changed. Technology has made many products more affordable and accessible. Smartphones, computers and TVs were significantly more expensive (or didn’t even exist in current forms) 20 years ago.

    But essential services such as childcare have seen costs rise faster than general inflation. The same is true for grocery costs, which have seen a substantial increase since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has created a confusing dual experience where discretionary purchases may feel more affordable while essential costs consume a greater proportion of income.

    So are Britons actually poorer? The facts suggest that while the average Briton isn’t necessarily worse off in absolute terms than 20 years ago, many are certainly no better off. This in itself is a stark contrast to the expectation of continual improvement that characterised previous generations.

    When accounting for housing costs, younger generations are demonstrably worse off than their predecessors at the same life stage. For many, the combination of stagnant incomes and rising costs for essentials has created a genuine decline in living standards and financial security.

    “Awful April” isn’t just a seasonal discomfort. It is a manifestation of long-term economic trends that have fundamentally altered Britain’s prosperity trajectory. The coming local and mayoral elections in England will no doubt see these issues take centre stage. There will likely be a thorny debate around the expectation that each generation should be better off than the last.

    Marcel Lukas receives funding from The British Academy.

    – ref. Are Britons really poorer than they were 20 years ago, or does it just feel that way? – https://theconversation.com/are-britons-really-poorer-than-they-were-20-years-ago-or-does-it-just-feel-that-way-254097

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Guillaume Thierry, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University

    Kundra/Shutterstock

    We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But here’s the truth: it possesses none of those qualities. It is not human. And presenting it as if it were? That’s dangerous. Because it’s convincing. And nothing is more dangerous than a convincing illusion.

    In particular, general artificial intelligence — the mythical kind of AI that supposedly mirrors human thought — is still science fiction, and it might well stay that way.

    What we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    The master

    Before you argue that AI programmers are human, let me stop you there. I know they’re human. That’s part of the problem. Would you entrust your deepest secrets, life decisions, emotional turmoil, to a computer programmer? Yet that’s exactly what people are doing — just ask Claude, GPT-4.5, Gemini … or, if you dare, Grok.

    Giving AI a human face, voice or tone is a dangerous act of digital cross-dressing. It triggers an automatic response in us, an anthropomorphic reflex, leading to aberrant claims whereby some AIs are said to have passed the famous Turing test (which tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent, human-like behaiour). But I believe that if AIs are passing the Turing test, we need to update the test.

    The AI machine has no idea what it means to be human. It cannot offer genuine compassion, it cannot foresee your suffering, cannot intuit hidden motives or lies. It has no taste, no instinct, no inner compass. It is bereft of all the messy, charming complexity that makes us who we are.

    More troubling still: AI has no goals of its own, no desires or ethics unless injected into its code. That means the true danger doesn’t lie in the machine, but in its master — the programmer, the corporation, the government. Still feel safe?

    And please, don’t come at me with: “You’re too harsh! You’re not open to the possibilities!” Or worse: “That’s such a bleak view. My AI buddy calms me down when I’m anxious.”

    Am I lacking enthusiasm? Hardly. I use AI every day. It’s the most powerful tool I’ve ever had. I can translate, summarise, visualise, code, debug, explore alternatives, analyse data — faster and better than I could ever dream to do it myself.

    I’m in awe. But it is still a tool — nothing more, nothing less. And like every tool humans have ever invented, from stone axes and slingshots to quantum computing and atomic bombs, it can be used as a weapon. It will be used as a weapon.

    Need a visual? Imagine falling in love with an intoxicating AI, like in the film Her. Now imagine it “decides” to leave you. What would you do to stop it? And to be clear: it won’t be the AI rejecting you. It’ll be the human or system behind it, wielding that tool become weapon to control your behaviour.

    Removing the mask

    So where am I going with this? We must stop giving AI human traits. My first interaction with GPT-3 rather seriously annoyed me. It pretended to be a person. It said it had feelings, ambitions, even consciousness.

    That’s no longer the default behaviour, thankfully. But the style of interaction — the eerily natural flow of conversation — remains intact. And that, too, is convincing. Too convincing.

    We need to de-anthropomorphise AI. Now. Strip it of its human mask. This should be easy. Companies could remove all reference to emotion, judgement or cognitive processing on the part of the AI. In particular, it should respond factually without ever saying “I”, or “I feel that”… or “I am curious”.

    Will it happen? I doubt it. It reminds me of another warning we’ve ignored for over 20 years: “We need to cut CO₂ emissions.” Look where that got us. But we must warn big tech companies of the dangers associated with the humanisation of AIs. They are unlikely to play ball, but they should, especially if they are serious about developing more ethical AIs.

    For now, this is what I do (because I too often get this eerie feeling that I am talking to a synthetic human when using ChatGPT or Claude): I instruct my AI not to address me by name. I ask it to call itself AI, to speak in the third person, and to avoid emotional or cognitive terms.

    If I am using voice chat, I ask the AI to use a flat prosody and speak a bit like a robot. It is actually quite fun and keeps us both in our comfort zone.

    Guillaume Thierry 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. We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how – https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-stop-pretending-ai-is-intelligent-heres-how-254090

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Who Believes in Angels? by Elton John and Brandi Carlile shows the power of true collaboration

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester

    Having collaborated with the likes of (deep breath) John Lennon, Aretha Franklin, George Michael, Rod Stewart, Little Richard, Luciano Pavarotti, Eminem and Leonard Cohen, it’s fair to say that Elton John likes to work with other artists.

    The news, then, that he has embarked on another joint musical project, this time with Grammy-winning American superstar Brandi Carlile, won’t have raised many eyebrows. It may not even be too much of a shock that their album Who Believes in Angels?, released April 4, just reached the top spot on the UK album charts.

    What is surprising, perhaps, is that John lists its creation as “one of the greatest musical experiences” of his life, and has declared it the start of his “career mark two”. What is it about this particular collaboration that left the music legend feeling so “utterly revitalised”?

    Who Believes In Angels? by Elton John and Brandi Carlile.

    John’s penchant for collaborating isn’t unusual, of course. Solo artists frequently pool their resources with others. Producers bring in guest vocalists. Bands unite to create “supergroups”, and swarms of celebrities crowd into a studio for the latest charity or novelty song. Collaborations have been a staple of recorded music since (and probably before) Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith committed St. Louis Blues to wax a century ago.

    Since then we’ve seen the legendary: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and Aerosmith and Run DMC. We’ve seen the surprising: Kylie and Nick Cave, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga and Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus. And we’ve seen ones we’d rather forget: the unholy union of Metallica and Lou Reed, the raspy-voiced overload of Sting, Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, and the horror show of Will.i.am featuring Mick Jagger and Jennifer Lopez.

    Artists like David Bowie have used collaboration as an opportunity to challenge themselves across different genres. In his case, this has led to a catalogue of diverse – and sometimes baffling – linkups ranging from Bing Crosby (“I just knew my mother liked him,” said Bowie) to Trent Reznor.

    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    Other artists use collaboration to stay current in an ever-evolving musical landscape. Take Paul McCartney teaming up with Michael Jackson in the 1980s then Kayne West in the 2010s. Or The Beach Boys’ ill-advised foray into hip hop with The Fat Boys. Or Madonna recording with insert name of current flavour-of-the-month artist.

    Some even specialise in collaborations, such as rapper Nicki Minaj, who has been a featured artist on more singles than she’s been the lead (84 v 52 if you’re interested). Or DJ Khaled, whose 24 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 have all been collaborations.

    And collaborations are only becoming more common. According to the Official Charts company, since 2020 almost half of the 100 biggest tracks have been collaborations, which is more than double the amount we saw at the end of the noughties.

    Better off alone?

    There’s good reason why more and more artists are getting together to record.

    A 2023 research paper found that collaborations not only received more than twice the number of plays per week on average compared to solo efforts, but also significantly increased the number of plays an artist received in the future.

    Although such songs may increase commercial success, however, and a well-timed, well-placed collaboration can be enough to revive even the most waning of careers, they come with risks, too. They may sound artificial and inauthentic; feel like soulless and corporate attempts by record labels to cash in; or, in the case of Ed Sheeran (according to Guardian music critic Issy Sampson) give the impression of tricking the public into thinking you’re cool by getting some famous mates on your songs.

    To avoid such pitfalls, cultural sociologist Jo Haynes prescribes competency, creativity, financial recompense, passion, respect and sincerity as the main ingredients of successful musical collaboration.

    In the case of Elton John and Brandi Carlile, although we may only speculate on the financial recompense, evidence suggests the other elements were abundant during the album’s creation. And this may be what has so rejuvenated John.

    Who Believes in Angels? represents a collaboration of equals who were pushing each other and raising the other’s game.

    “It was a connection,” John says, emotionally and musically. Pop music collaborations may come along as frequently as trains on the Victoria Line at rush-hour, but true artistic connection is a rare and precious commodity indeed.

    Glenn Fosbraey 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 Believes in Angels? by Elton John and Brandi Carlile shows the power of true collaboration – https://theconversation.com/who-believes-in-angels-by-elton-john-and-brandi-carlile-shows-the-power-of-true-collaboration-254234

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Utilities choosing coal, solar, nuclear or other power sources have a lot to consider, beyond just cost

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Erin Baker, Distinguished Professor of Industrial Engineering and Faculty Director of The Energy Transition Institute, UMass Amherst

    A turbine from the Roth Rock wind farm spins on the spine of Backbone Mountain behind the Mettiki Coal processing plant in Oakland, Md. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    The Trump administration is working to lift regulations on coal-fired power plants in the hopes of making its energy less expensive. But while cost is one important aspect, utilities have a lot more to consider when they choose their power sources.

    Different technologies play different roles in the power system. Some sources, like nuclear energy, are reliable but inflexible. Other sources, like oil, are flexible but expensive and polluting.

    How utilities choose which power source to invest in depends in large part on two key aspects: price and reliability.

    Power prices

    One way to compare power sources is by their levelized cost of electricity. This shows how much it costs to produce one unit of electricity on average over the life of the generator.

    The asset management firm Lazard has produced levelized cost of electricity calculations for the major U.S. electricity sources annually for years, and it has tracked a sharp decline in solar power costs in particular.

    Coal is one of the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it less competitive compared with solar, wind and natural gas, by Lazard’s calculations. Only nuclear, offshore wind and “peaker” plants, which are used only during periods of high electricity demand, are more expensive.

    Land-based wind and solar power have the lowest estimated costs, far below what consumers are paying for electricity today. The National Renewable Energy Lab has found similar levelized costs for renewable energy, though its estimates for nuclear are lower than Lazard’s.

    Upfront costs are also important and can make the difference for whether new power projects can be built, as the East Coast has seen lately.

    Several offshore wind farms planned along the Northeast were canceled in recent years as costs rose due to inflation and supply chain problems during the pandemic. Construction costs for the two newest nuclear generators built in the U.S. also rose considerably as the projects, both in the Southeast, faced delays.

    Reliability and flexibility matter

    But cost is not the whole story. Utilities must balance a number of criteria when investing in power sources.

    Most important is matching supply and demand at every moment of the day. Due to the technical characteristics of electricity and how it flows, if the supply of electricity is even a little bit lower than the demand, that can trigger a blackout. This means power companies and consumers need generation that can ramp down when demand is low and ramp up when demand is high.

    Since wind and solar generation depend on the wind blowing and the sun shining, these sources must be combined with other types of generation or with storage, such as batteries, to ensure the power grid has exactly as much power as it needs at all times.

    Combining renewable energy and battery storage or both wind and solar can smooth out power supply dips and spikes. The Pine Tree Wind Farm and Solar Power Plant in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles do both.
    Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    Nuclear and coal are predictable and run reliably, but they are inflexible – they take time to ramp up and down, and doing so is expensive. Steam turbines are simply not built for flexibility. The multiple days it took to shut down Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after an earthquake and tsunami damaged its backup power sources in 2011 illustrated the challenges and safety issues related to ramping down nuclear plants.

    That means coal and nuclear aren’t as helpful on those hot summer days when utilities need a quick power increase to keep air conditioners running. These peaks may only happen a few days a year, but keeping the power on is crucial for human health and the economy.

    In today’s energy system, the most flexible generation sources are natural gas and hydro. They can quickly adjust to meet changing electricity demand without the safety and cost concerns of coal and nuclear. Hydro can ramp in minutes but can only be built where large dams are feasible. The most cost-effective natural gas technology can ramp up within hours.

    The big picture, by power source

    Over the past two decades, natural gas use has risen quickly to overtake coal as the most common fuel for generating electricity in the U.S. The boom was largely driven by the growing use of fracking technology, which allowed producers to extract gas from rock and lowered the price.

    Natural gas’s low price and high flexibility make it an attractive choice. Its rise is a large part of the reason coal use has plummeted.

    But natural gas has its challenges. Natural gas requires pipelines to carry it across the country, leading to disruptive construction. As Texas saw during its February 2021 blackouts, natural gas equipment can also fail in extreme cold. And like coal, natural gas is a fossil fuel that releases greenhouse gases during combustion, so it is also helping to cause climate change and contributes to air pollution that can harm human health.

    Nuclear power has been gaining interest recently since it does not contribute to climate change or local air pollution. It also provides a steady baseload of power, which is useful for computing centers as their demand does not fluctuate as much as households.

    Of course, nuclear has ongoing challenges around the storage of radioactive waste and security concerns, and construction of large nuclear plants takes many years.

    Coal is more flexible than nuclear, but far less so than natural gas or hydropower. Most concerning, coal is extremely dirty, emitting more climate-change-causing gases, and far more air pollution than natural gas.

    Solar and wind have grown rapidly in recent years due to their falling costs and environmental benefits. According to Lazard, the cost of solar combined with batteries, which would be as flexible as hydropower, is well below the cost of coal with its limited flexibility.

    However, wind and solar tend to take up a lot of space, which has led to challenges in local approvals for new sites and transmission lines. In addition, the sheer number of new projects is overwhelming power system operators’ ability to evaluate them, leading to increasing wait times for new generation to come online.

    What’s ahead?

    Utilities have another consideration: Federal, state and local governments can also influence and sometimes limit utilities’ choices. Tariffs, for example, can increase the cost of critical components for new construction. Permitting and regulations can slow down development. Subsidies can artificially lower costs.

    In our view, policies that are done right can help utilities move toward more reliable and cost-effective choices which are also cleaner. Done wrong, they can be costly to the economy and the environment.

    Erin Baker receives funding from NSF, DOE, and Sloan Foundation

    Paola Pimentel Furlanetto receives funding from NSF and Sloan Foundation

    – ref. Utilities choosing coal, solar, nuclear or other power sources have a lot to consider, beyond just cost – https://theconversation.com/utilities-choosing-coal-solar-nuclear-or-other-power-sources-have-a-lot-to-consider-beyond-just-cost-254337

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Social Security’s trust fund could run out of money sooner than expected due to changes in taxes and benefits

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Dennis W. Jansen, Professor of Economics and Director of the Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University

    A closed entrance to the Social Security Administration headquarters sits empty in Woodlawn, Md., on March 20, 2025. Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    Social Security is one of the federal government’s biggest programs.

    Roughly 67 million Americans, most of whom are 65 or older, received Social Security benefits in 2023. An estimated 183 million workers paid the Social Security payroll taxes that provided the bulk of the nearly US$1.4 trillion in benefits that year, which consumed 21% of the total federal budget.

    But within a decade, Social Security could run short on funds to pay the full benefits Americans are counting on.

    The retirement and disability program has been running a cash-flow deficit since 2010. The $2.7 trillion held in its two trust funds may seem immense, but those reserves are diminishing as the number of Americans getting benefits grows. Social Security’s trustees, a group that includes the secretaries of the departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, as well as the Social Security commissioner, projected in 2024 that both of its trust funds would be completely drained by 2035.

    Under current law, when that trust fund is empty, Social Security can pay benefits only from dedicated tax revenues, which would, by that point, cover only about 79% of promised benefits. Another way to say this is that when that trust fund is depleted, the people who rely on Social Security for some or the bulk of their income would see a sudden 21% cut in their monthly checks in 2036.

    As an economist who studies the Social Security system, I am alarmed that Democratic and Republican administrations alike have failed for more than three decades to take the actions necessary to keep its funding on track, either by raising taxes or cutting benefits. Instead, Congress has only made the program’s funding outlook worse. And now, the Trump administration is reducing the program’s staff, sending confusing signals about changes it intends to make, and undercutting the quality of service for the people who are eligible for these benefits.

    But I do believe there are strategies that could help.

    Taking steps backward

    This gloomy outlook was clear to experts at least 32 years ago. In 1993, the Social Security trustees projected that the assets of the systems’ trust funds would be depleted in 2036.

    Rather than resolve this now more imminent problem, Congress passed a law in December 2024 that could accelerate the crisis.

    Called the Social Security Fairness Act, President Joe Biden signed it into law in early January. This measure ended the government’s prior practice of paying reduced Social Security benefits to retired teachers, firefighters and others who had pensions from their years of public service and who had not paid Social Security tax on much of their income. Now, these retirees will get full Social Security benefits. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this change will cause the trust fund to be depleted six months earlier than previously expected.

    President Donald Trump, for his part, wants the tax reform legislation Congress is working on to exempt all Social Security benefit payments from federal income taxes. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has reintroduced a bill that would do that.

    The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model finds that should this new exemption take effect, it could make the trust fund run out of money two years earlier than the model currently predicts, hastening the day the Social Security program is forced to cut benefits.

    In addition, Social Security already had record-sized backlogs of what it calls “pending actions,” according to a report from its own inspector general in August 2024.

    And yet, despite this need to process paperwork faster, the agency is now less able to carry out its mission due to staffing cuts attributed to billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

    Principles for successful reform

    Social Security is funded by a payroll tax of 12.4% on wages, which is split equally between workers and employers. Self-employed people pay the entire 12.4%. This payroll tax only applies to earnings up to $176,100 for 2025. The government increases this cap annually based on wage increases and inflation.

    The program also receives about 5% of its revenue from interest generated by its trust funds and about 4% of its revenue from the tax that Trump wants to repeal.

    The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on fiscal policy, provides an online interactive tool to help people see for themselves what specific measures might do to shore up Social Security. Examples include increasing the retirement age by one month every two years and increasing the cap on income subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security so it covers more of the highest-earners’ income.

    The Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, has presented its own bipartisan blueprint for making the system solvent. The Social Security Administration itself has pooled what it sees as good ideas from outside experts.

    Three main principles characterize the approaches supported by the policy analysts and researchers who have considered which reforms to Social Security might strengthen its finances and long-term continuing viability:

    1. The program should be self-funded in the long run so that its annual revenues match its annual expenses.

    2. The reform burden should be shared across generations. Current retirees can share the burden through a reduction in the cost-of-living adjustment. Today’s workers can share the burden through an increase in the cap on income subjected to Social Security taxes. Gradually increasing the retirement age to keep pace with anticipated longevity gains would also be borne by current workers and young Americans who haven’t gotten their first job yet.

    3. The government should make sure that Social Security benefits will be adequate for lower-income retirees for years to come. That means reforms that slow the benefit growth of future retirees would be designed to affect only payments to higher-income retirees.

    Ideally, in my view, any changes to Social Security should also help constrain the future growth of federal spending, given the current and projected growth in the budget deficit.

    Past reform efforts

    The last time the government made big changes to Social Security was in 1983, during the Reagan administration.

    Back then, the government enacted reforms that slowly reduced benefits over time. These changes included raising the full retirement age, a change that is still being phased in. Because of those changes, workers born in 1960 or later cannot retire with full benefits until age 67 – two years later than the original retirement age.

    The 1983 reforms also gradually increased the Social Security payroll tax rate from 10.4% to 12.4% by 1990, and for the first time levied federal income taxes on higher-income retirees’ benefits. Workers bore the burden of the payroll tax increases, and higher-income retirees bore the burden of the tax on benefits.

    Those changes bolstered the program’s finances. One of those measures could potentially end if Trump manages to end the taxation of retirees’ Social Security benefits.

    Today, about half of the Americans getting Social Security benefits pay some federal income taxes on that income, contributing revenue that helps finance the program as a whole. Taxpayers with annual income of at least $205,000 pay income tax that claws back about 20% of their benefits. That percentage is smaller for taxpayers with lower incomes. Individuals who get Social Security benefits and have incomes of less than $25,000 and couples making no more than $32,000 pay no income taxes on their Social Security benefits at all.

    The most recent bipartisan effort to preserve the system’s solvency was in 2001. The Commission to Strengthen Social Security, during the George W. Bush administration, tried – and failed – to get Congress to enact reforms to shore up the program’s finances.

    More than 20 years later, Americans and their elected representatives still seem unwilling to have a serious debate on these issues.

    I believe waiting any longer is unwise.

    Any solutions that might be introduced gradually today will no longer be viable in 2035 if the trust fund has been completely hollowed out. That would leave millions of older adults with lower incomes than they were counting on, plunging many of them into poverty.

    Portions of this article were included in another piece published on June 1, 2023.

    Dennis W. Jansen 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. Social Security’s trust fund could run out of money sooner than expected due to changes in taxes and benefits – https://theconversation.com/social-securitys-trust-fund-could-run-out-of-money-sooner-than-expected-due-to-changes-in-taxes-and-benefits-253508

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: 401(k) plans and stock market volatility: What you need to know

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ronald Premuroso, Accounting Instructor, Western Governors University School of Business

    It’s been a wild ride. iStock/Getty Images Plus

    With stock market charts resembling the contours of a roller-coaster ride in recent days, many Americans could be forgiven for eyeing their 401(k)s with a little concern.

    Retirement savings are crucial to the financial well-being of millions of especially older people in the U.S., so the concern is understandable.

    But just how worried should people be by market fluctuations? And just how big a hit do 401(k)s take when markets fall? The Conversation turned to Western Governors University’s Ronald Premuroso, an expert in this area, for answers.

    What is a 401(k)?

    Simply put, a 401(k) is an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan in which employees contribute a portion of their compensation on a tax-deferred basis.

    The employee is eligible at any age to contribute to a 401(k) plan and has the option to pay into these plans throughout their employment. Many employers match some or all of an employee’s contributions, making the plan even more attractive.

    What about withdrawals?

    Under Internal Revenue Service rules, someone with a 401(k) is required to start making monetary withdrawals from their plan when they reach age 73. Some people start withdrawing at an earlier age.

    Someone with a 401(k) can withdraw funds from the plan early, and at any time. But the money amounts withdrawn will typically be deemed taxable income. In addition, those age 59 and a half and under will likely face a 10% penalty on the withdrawal, unless the employer’s plan allows for hardship distributions, early withdrawals or loans from your plan account.

    The IRS has specific rules for these early withdrawals; if you find yourself in this situation, you should get help from a tax professional.

    All withdrawals starting at age 73, which tax professionals call “RMDs,” are then taxable in retirement – presumably at a lower tax rate than the employee was subject to while employed and working. So these withdrawals starting at age 73 can be a very tax-efficient way of financial planning, including personal income tax planning, for later in life, especially in one’s retirement years.

    Again, it’s important to get help from a tax professional to make sure you meet the IRS’ RMD dollar withdrawal requirements once you start withdrawing.

    In calendar-year 2025, the most that an employee can contribute to a tax-deferred 401(k) plan annually is US$23,500, including the employer’s match. “Super catch-up contributions are allowed for employees over the age of 50 to their employer’s 401(k) plan each year indexed to inflation. In 2025, super catch-up contributions allow individuals age 50 and older to contribute an additional $7,500 beyond the standard limit, bringing their total annual contribution to $31,000. For those turning age 60, 61, 62 or 63 in 2025, the SECURE Act 2.0 allows a higher catch-up contribution limit of $11,250, resulting in a total allowable contribution of $34,750 in 2025.

    When and why did 401(k)s become popular?

    Before 1978, retirement savings options were limited.

    In 1935, Congress created the Social Security Retirement Plan. This was followed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which created individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, as a way for employees to save tax-deferred money for their retirement.

    401(k) plans became popular with the passage of the Revenue Act of 1978 by Congress.

    Congress saw 401(k) plans at that time as an alternative way to supplement Social Security benefits that all eligible Americans are entitled to receive upon retirement. In 1981, the IRS issued new rules and regulations allowing employees to fund their 401(k)s through payroll deductions. This significantly increased the number of employees contributing to their employers’ 401(k) plans.

    As of September 2024, Americans held $8.9 trillion in 401(k) plans, according to the Investment Company Institute. A study published by the Pension Rights Center toward the end of 2023 using data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that 56% of all workers – including private sector and state and local government workers – participate in a workplace retirement plan. That equates to 145 million full- and part-time workers.

    How are 401(k) plans affected by market rises and falls?

    Contributions to a 401(k) are typically invested in a variety of financial instruments, including in the stock market.

    Most 401(k) plans offer investment options with varying levels of risk, allowing employees to choose based on their personal comfort levels and financial goals.

    Employers typically outsource the management of these 401(k) plans to third parties. Some of the largest companies managing 401(k) funds on behalf of employers and employees include Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price and Charles Schwab, to name just a few.

    Because many of these investments are tied to the stock market, 401(k) balances can rise or fall with market fluctuations.

    401(k) plans are a financial lifeline for many American retirees.
    Halfpoint Images/Getty Images

    Should I be worried about the stock market tanking my 401(k)?

    It depends – on when you started making contributions, when you plan to retire and when you expect to start making withdrawals.

    Employees with 401(k) accounts should only be worried about falling stocks if they need the money right now – either for retirement living expenses or for other emergency reasons. If you don’t need to take money out soon, there’s usually no reason to panic. History has shown that markets can rebound quickly; short-term drops often don’t signal long-term trends.

    Over time, the stock market has experienced many periods of falling stock prices: the bursting of the internet bubble of 2000; the period after the events of 9/11; and the U.S. and global banking crisis of 2007-2010, to name but three.

    But overall, over time, stock market returns have averaged 9% from 1994 to 2024, and this includes the periods of falling stock prices mentioned above.

    So even if you are a baby boomer heading for retirement and your 401(k) has taken a hit in recent weeks, don’t panic. Bear in mind the truism that stock markets can always go down as well as up.

    History suggests that in the long run, depending upon your plans and timing for retirement, working together with a trusted financial adviser strategically with regard to your 401(k) retirement savings is a good approach, especially during periods like we have seen in recent weeks in the stock market.

    This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. Consult with a qualified financial adviser before making financial decisions.

    Ronald Premuroso 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. 401(k) plans and stock market volatility: What you need to know – https://theconversation.com/401-k-plans-and-stock-market-volatility-what-you-need-to-know-254266

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US?

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Gerald Frankel, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University

    A Southern California Edison employee measures radiation at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on March 10, 2020. Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

    Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.

    For decades, the nation has been trying to send it all to one secure location.

    A 1987 federal law named Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, as a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste – but political and legal challenges led to construction delays. Work on the site had barely started before Congress ended the project’s funding altogether in 2011.

    The 94 nuclear reactors currently operating at 54 power plants continue to generate more radioactive waste. Public and commercial interest in nuclear power is rising because of concerns regarding emissions from fossil fuel power plants and the possibility of new applications for smaller-scale nuclear plants to power data centers and manufacturing. This renewed interest gives new urgency to the effort to find a place to put the waste.

    In March 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments related to the effort to find a temporary storage location for the nation’s nuclear waste – a ruling is expected by late June. No matter the outcome, the decades-long struggle to find a permanent place to dispose of nuclear waste will probably continue for many years to come.

    I am a scholar who specializes in corrosion; one focus of my work has been containing nuclear waste during temporary storage and permanent disposal. There are generally two forms of significantly radioactive waste in the U.S.: waste from making nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and waste from generating electricity at nuclear power plants. There are also small amounts of other radioactive waste, such as that associated with medical treatments.

    Nuclear waste is stored in underground containers at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls.
    AP Photo/Keith Ridler

    Waste from weapons manufacturing

    Remnants of the chemical processing of radioactive material needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, often called “defense waste,” will eventually be melted along with glass, with the resulting material poured into stainless steel containers. These canisters are 10 feet tall and 2 feet in diameter, weighing approximately 5,000 pounds when filled.

    For now, though, most of it is stored in underground steel tanks, primarily at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, key sites in U.S. nuclear weapons development. At Savannah River, some of the waste has already been processed with glass, but much of it remains untreated.

    At both of those locations, some of the radioactive waste has already leaked into the soil beneath the tanks, though officials have said there is no danger to human health. Most of the current efforts to contain the waste focus on protecting the tanks from corrosion and cracking to prevent further leakage.

    A look inside a cooling pool for spent nuclear fuel rods.

    Waste from electricity generation

    The vast majority of nuclear waste in the U.S. is spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.

    Before it is used, nuclear fuel exists as uranium oxide pellets that are sealed within zirconium tubes, which are themselves bundled together. These bundles of fuel rods are about 12 to 16 feet long and about 5 to 8 inches in diameter. In a nuclear reactor, the fission reactions fueled by the uranium in those rods emit heat that is used to create hot water or steam to drive turbines and generate electricity.

    After about three to five years, the fission reactions in a given bundle of fuel slow down significantly, even though the material remains highly radioactive. The spent fuel bundles are removed from the reactor and moved elsewhere on the power plant’s property, where they are placed into a massive pool of water to cool them down.

    After about five years, the fuel bundles are removed, dried and sealed in welded stainless steel canisters. These canisters are still radioactive and thermally hot, so they are stored outdoors in concrete vaults that sit on concrete pads, also on the power plant’s property. These vaults have vents to ensure air flows past the canisters to continue cooling them.

    As of December 2024, there were over 315,000 bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods in the U.S., and over 3,800 dry storage casks in concrete vaults above ground, located at current and former power plants across the country.

    Even reactors that have been decommissioned and demolished still have concrete vaults storing radioactive waste, which must be secured and maintained by the power company that owned the nuclear plant.

    Salt spray from the ocean can corrode waste containers at nearby nuclear waste storage sites, like this one at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California.
    Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    The threat of water

    One threat to these storage methods is corrosion.

    Because they need water to both transfer nuclear energy into electricity and to cool the reactor, nuclear power plants are always located alongside sources of water.

    In the U.S., nine are within two miles of the ocean, which poses a particular threat to the waste containers. As waves break on the coastline, saltwater is sprayed into the air as particles. When those salt and water particles settle on metal surfaces, they can cause corrosion, which is why it’s common to see heavily corroded structures near the ocean.

    At nuclear waste storage locations near the ocean, that salt spray can settle on the steel canisters. Generally, stainless steel is resistant to corrosion, which you can see in the shiny pots and pans in many Americans’ kitchens. But in certain circumstances, localized pits and cracks can form on stainless steel surfaces.

    In recent years, the U.S. Department of Energy has funded research, including my own, into the potential dangers of this type of corrosion. The general findings are that stainless steel canisters could pit or crack when stored near a seashore. But a radioactive leak would require not only corrosion of the container but also of the zirconium rods and of the fuel inside them. So it is unlikely that this type of corrosion would result in the release of radioactivity.

    A long way off

    A more permanent solution is likely years, or decades, away.

    Not only must a long-term site be geologically suitable to store nuclear waste for thousands of years, but it must also be politically palatable to the American people. In addition, there will be many challenges associated with transporting the waste, in its containers, by road or rail, from reactors across the country to wherever that permanent site ultimately is.

    Perhaps there will be a temporary site whose location passes muster with the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the waste will stay where it is.

    Gerald Frankel receives funding from ONR, DOE.

    – ref. How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US? – https://theconversation.com/how-and-where-is-nuclear-waste-stored-in-the-us-252475

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Pennsylvania may be short 20,000 nurses by 2026

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kymberlee Montgomery, Senior Associate Dean of Nursing, Drexel University

    Education bottlenecks, burnout and an aging workforce are straining the system. Marcus Brandt/picture alliance via Getty Images

    Imagine nearly every seat in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center − over 20,000 seats − are empty. That’s the scale of Pennsylvania’s projected shortfall of registered nurses by 2026, according to the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.

    Hospitals in the state report an average 14% vacancy rate for registered nurses. In rural areas it is much higher.

    This shortage, of course, is not just in hospitals. It also affects long-term care facilities, outpatient clinics and home health agencies, which compete with hospitals for a limited pool of registered nurses, licensed nursing professionals and nursing support staff.

    We are a senior associate dean of nursing and clinical professor of nursing at Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions in Philadelphia, and a dean and professor of nursing at Duquesne University’s School of Nursing in Pittsburgh.

    We know that the nursing shortage in Pennsylvania, while not the worst in the U.S., is severe and jeopardizes the health care that patients receive.

    What caused the shortage?

    Pennsylvania’s nursing shortage is the result of long-standing issues in education, workforce retention and health care delivery.

    Education bottlenecks: Nursing schools in Pennsylvania and nationwide turn away thousands of qualified applicants each year due to faculty shortages, limited classroom space and scarce clinical placements. More than 65,000 qualified applications were turned away from U.S. nursing programs in 2023 alone, according to a report from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

    A key issue is the lack of preceptors. Preceptors are experienced nurses who teach students in real-world settings. A shortage of preceptors directly limits how many students can complete their education.

    Aging workforce: More than a third of Pennsylvania’s registered nurses are 55 or older. This demographic reality means many are nearing retirement.

    Burnout and attrition: The COVID-19 pandemic worsened already high levels of stress, burnout and mental health strain for nurses. Many left the profession early due to emotional exhaustion, family and personal health concerns, unsafe staffing ratios, moral injury and lack of institutional support.

    Uneven distribution: While Pennsylvania may have a sufficient number of licensed nurses on paper, those nurses don’t all still work in the profession. And among those that do, they are not evenly spread across roles or locations. Rural hospitals, long-term care centers, behavioral health settings and maternal-child health units are experiencing acute shortages.

    One issue is the shortage of preceptors who train nursing students in real-world settings.
    Naville J. Oubre III/Southern University and A&M College via Getty Images

    Cost to patients

    For patients and their families, the consequences of the nursing shortage are delayed care, fewer interactions with providers and less time for compassionate, personalized support. Overextended nurses face increased workloads, raising the likelihood of delayed interventions, medication errors and inadequate patient education. These factors undermine quality of care.

    Limited access to nursing care can increase hospital deaths, infections and readmissions, reduce early detection of health issues, and slow the response to life-threatening conditions such as stroke, sepsis and cardiac arrest.

    In Pennsylvania, patients may experience longer emergency room wait times, delayed discharges or transfers to nursing homes or rehabilitation centers, and service disruptions in rural and underserved areas.

    Effect on nurses

    Over 600,000 registered nurses across the U.S. plan to leave the workforce by 2027, according to a 2023 analysis by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

    Many cite stress as their reason for leaving the profession. New graduates often leave within their first two years, feeling unprepared for the emotional and operational realities of practice.

    In Pennsylvania, the shortage has created a feedback loop. Understaffing increases pressure on those who remain. A 2023 National Council of State Boards of Nursing survey found that 41% of nurses under age 35 reported feeling emotionally drained.

    Meanwhile, some experienced nurses choose to retire early or shift into nonclinical roles for better schedules, slower pace and improved quality of life.

    This turnover erodes institutional knowledge, increases costs for onboarding and overtime, and limits the capacity to mentor incoming staff.

    What’s being done

    To help address the problem, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in March 2025 proposed a US$5 million Nurse Shortage Assistance Program. If approved by the General Assembly, the program would cover tuition costs for nursing students who commit to working in Pennsylvania hospitals for three years after graduation.

    HB 390 is also currently under review in the Pennsylvania General Assembly. It aims to establish a $1,000 tax deduction for licensed nurses who serve as clinical preceptors.

    To meet the growing demand for nurses, Pennsylvania hospitals are partnering with colleges and universities to expand clinical training capacity, streamline pathways into nursing and develop innovative education models such as hybrid and accelerated programs.

    Hospitals statewide are also offering substantial sign-on bonuses, loan forgiveness programs, housing stipends and flexible scheduling to attract nurses.

    To improve nurse retention, health care organizations have introduced structured residency programs, mentorship networks and clear career advancement pathways designed to reduce burnout and enhance professional satisfaction.

    They are also increasingly using virtual nursing, telehealth services and AI-driven administrative tools to reduce nurses’ workloads, enhance patient interactions and address staffing gaps.

    And some Philadelphia and Pennsylvania colleges offer refresher and license reactivation programs for retired or inactive nurses who want to rejoin the workforce. Duquesne offers a nurse faculty residency to increase the number of high-quality nursing faculty.

    What more could be done?

    Continuing Title VIII Nursing Workforce Development Programs are another solution. These federal grants, reauthorized under the March 2020 CARES Act, help fund nursing pathways and the availability of high-quality nursing care for patients nationwide.

    On April 1, 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to restructure the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the future status of these programs is not yet known.

    Research consistently demonstrates that care provided by nurses who have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher directly leads to better patient outcomes, improved safety and overall health. A commitment to shoring up the nurse pipeline in Pennsylvania is a commitment to improving the well-being of individuals and communities across the state.

    Board Member for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. The views, analyses, and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

    Kymberlee Montgomery 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. Pennsylvania may be short 20,000 nurses by 2026 – https://theconversation.com/pennsylvania-may-be-short-20-000-nurses-by-2026-252274

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service protects public health at home and abroad

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mark Dworkin, Professor of Epidemiology, University of Illinois Chicago

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service has produced a cadre of highly trained public health experts over its 74-year history. peterhowell/iStock / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

    When the Trump administration announced in February 2025 that it was cutting 10% of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it seemed that a small but storied program within it called the Epidemic Intelligence Service – also known as the CDC’s disease detectives – would also be cut. A few days later, the program was reinstated. And in March, Epidemic Intelligence Service officers traveled to Texas to support the state’s public health officials in fighting the ongoing measles epidemic.

    But after another massive upheaval at the CDC in April, the unit’s future is uncertain. As of now, applications for the program’s next round of fellows has been postponed.

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a dynamic crisis response team. Just as firefighters rush into burning buildings to save lives, this team’s specialists mobilize both domestically and internationally to help curb disease outbreaks. But first and foremost, it is a training program that has produced some of the most highly trained and regarded public health experts in the country who have gone on to work at local and state public health offices, academic departments and international health organizations.

    We are public health experts – one an experienced professor who served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service from 1994-1996, and the other an early career trainee who was accepted to its incoming class of 2025-2027. Although it’s not clear how the administration will enact its new vision for the CDC, we hope a continued urgency to identify and fight infectious disease threats – the essence of the Epidemic Intelligence Service – remains a national priority.

    A program rooted in national security

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a two-year fellowship open to physicians, scientists and other health professionals. The program accepts 50 to 80 people each year.

    Students participate in an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer training course in July 1955.
    Dr. Alex Langmuir, CDC

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service was founded in 1951, just five years after the launch of the CDC, in response to Cold War-era concerns about biological warfare. Alexander Langmuir, its founder, was the CDC’s chief epidemiologist and has often been called the father of shoe-leather epidemiology – on-the-ground, out-of-the-office disease investigation through extensive field work and engagement with affected populations.

    In a report announcing the unit’s establishment, Langmuir and a colleague wrote that one of the “problems that would emerge in the event of biological warfare attacks” was “the dearth of trained epidemiologists.” They recognized the urgent need for a specialized team capable of rapidly identifying and responding to potential bioterrorism threats.

    Newspaper headlines on April 13, 1955, announce the effectiveness of the polio vaccine.
    March of Dimes via Wikimedia Commons

    The new division soon evolved to address a wide range of civilian public health threats. In 1955, as one of its first major actions, the program’s officers were tasked with investigating an outbreak of polio in children that started just as the first mass vaccination campaign against the disease launched. Within weeks, Epidemic Intelligence Service officers helped trace the outbreak to a few batches of a vaccine manufactured by a California company called Cutter Laboratories in which the virus had not been properly killed. The incident led to increased safety regulations in vaccine production and boosted public confidence, paving the way to eliminating polio from the U.S. in the ensuing decades.

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service has led the way in tackling many of the most historically significant outbreaks of the past 75 years. Starting in 1966, the unit’s officers were deployed to West Africa to assist in a worldwide smallpox eradication campaign that laid the groundwork for eliminating the disease 13 years later. In 1976, the disease detectives were sent to investigate an outbreak in Philadelphia of a mysterious deadly illness. They helped to characterize what would eventually be known as Legionnaires’ disease, a previously unknown bacterial cause of pneumonia.

    And in 1981, a tip from an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer serving in the Los Angeles County Health Department led to the first description of a new disease that would become the global epidemic of HIV-AIDS. The program’s officers went on to help lead foundational studies on prevalence, prevention and treatment of AIDS around the world.

    Beyond vaccines and immunization

    Even from its earliest days, vaccine-preventable and infectious diseases were far from the Epidemic Intelligence Service’s only focus. During the program’s first 15 years, its officers were involved in a wide swath of epidemiological investigations in areas including lead paint exposure, a cancer cluster’s connection to birth defects, family planning practices and famine relief.

    These activities established the group’s priorities of addressing chronic diseases and population health – goals that have also driven its involvement in disaster response efforts, including hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Katrina, as well as the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

    The Epidemic Intelligence Service has also played a key role in keeping the nation’s food supply safe. It investigates major outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, helping to identify which foods are implicated so that contaminated products are removed from shelves and disseminating investigation findings that inform food safety policy. For example, officers investigated a 1993 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 linked to undercooked hamburgers at several Jack in the Box restaurants. The outbreak sickened more than 700 people and resulted in the deaths of four children. It also led to major food safety reforms including expanded meat and poultry inspection nationwide.

    The CDC’s “disease detectives” train at sites across the U.S. and abroad.

    A legacy of impact

    The importance of an expert, nimble team of disease detectives has only increased. Over the past few years, Epidemic Intelligence Service officers have responded to countless public health threats.

    The program’s officers were involved at every stage of the COVID-19 pandemic response, conducting outbreak investigations on cruise ships, in prisons and in many other settings. They investigated the outbreak of monkeypox in the U.S. in 2022. Most recently they have investigated cases of avian influenza and are working to help describe and control the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas.

    Perhaps the Epidemic Intelligence Service’s most significant legacy has been in building a worldwide network of deep epidemiological expertise. To date, the program has trained more than 4,000 disease detectives, and its officers have collectively conducted thousands of outbreak investigations.

    The unit’s impact has been global. It has been called in to investigate outbreaks on six continents and has served as a model for epidemiology programs developed in dozens of countries.

    All of these activities, at home and abroad, have shaped health policy in crucial ways that in turn protect people’s health. It is increasingly clear that disease outbreaks will continue to occur in the U.S. and abroad. In our view, the Epidemic Intelligence Service’s history provides rich evidence of its value.

    I am currently a member of the EIS Alumni Association Executive Committee.

    Casey Luc 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. How the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service protects public health at home and abroad – https://theconversation.com/how-the-cdcs-epidemic-intelligence-service-protects-public-health-at-home-and-abroad-251042

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: ICE has broad power to detain and arrest noncitizens – but is still bound by constitutional limits

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Rose Cuison-Villazor, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar, Rutgers University – Newark

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers restrain a detained person on Jan. 27, 2025, in Silver Spring, Md. Associated Press

    News reports of noncitizens unexpectedly being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have dominated headlines in recent weeks. Those being detained include noncitizens who hold lawful permanent residency status.

    One story concerns the March 8, 2025, arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and recent Columbia University graduate, who was initially detained in New Jersey and transported to Louisiana. He remains there while he challenges his detention and the immigration judge’s April 11 decision that he can be deported

    And on March 25, ICE agents arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts University, while she was walking on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. She is currently detained in Louisiana.

    ICE agents have also detained and removed, among other people, hundreds of Venezuelan noncitizens to El Salvador since March, resulting in high-profile legal cases that are making their way through the court system. And the U.S. has revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students this year.

    As a scholar of immigration and citizenship law, I think that it is important to help the public understand the scope and limitations of ICE’s authority.

    At the most basic level, ICE has broad, sweeping powers to question, arrest, detain and process the deportation any noncitizen. But ICE is still bound by certain constitutional and other legal restrictions, including noncitizens’ rights to make their case in court to remain in the U.S.

    In a photo provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE agents prepare to make arrests in Atlanta on Feb. 9, 2025.
    Bryan Cox/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via Getty Images

    ICE’s mission and work

    Created as part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, ICE is one of the federal agencies responsible for enforcing immigration laws.

    ICE’s operating budget from Oct. 1, 2024 through Sept. 30, 2025 is approximately US$8 billion, a relatively small portion of Homeland Security’s $107.9 billion total budget for that same time period.

    With more than 20,000 immigration enforcement officers stationed across the country, ICE’s day-to-day work is divided into three main areas – homeland security investigations, enforcement and removal operations, and legal representation for the government in an immigration court.

    The branch focused on homeland security investigations probes transnational crime and terrorism-related activities. ICE’s second area of work focuses on apprehending and removing noncitizens who are in violation of immigration laws. Finally, staff at the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor represent the government in immigration hearings, particularly what is called removal proceedings, or deportation.

    ICE’s power to enforce immigration law is primarily granted through the Immigration and Nationality Act, which Congress passed in 1952 amid the Cold War.

    This act outlines the federal government’s authority to regulate immigration and provides immigration agencies, including those established at a later date, like ICE, broad powers to enforce these restrictions. One key part of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows ICE officers to interrogate any individual they believe to be a noncitizen regarding their right “to be or remain” in the U.S.

    The Immigration and Nationality Act also says that any noncitizen can be deported for engaging in activities that the secretary of state believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited this provision when he revoked Ozturk’s visa. Ozturk was co-author on an op-ed in March 2024 calling for Tufts University to recognize genocide against the Palestinian people.

    Rubio used the same provision to claim that Khalil’s involvement in protests at Columbia University had negative U.S. foreign policy consequences.

    Detain and arrest

    ICE officers have broad power to arrest noncitizens in the U.S.

    With a warrant, they may arrest noncitizens who are in the country without legal permission, including foreign students whose visas are revoked. These warrants are administrative warrants signed by an immigration enforcement supervisor – not a judge.

    ICE officers have long been able to carry out these arrests in plain clothes – although using face coverings, as ICE officers who arrested Ozturk and Khalil did, is a new and, I think, startling development.

    Still, ICE’s powers to interrogate, arrest and detain noncitizens are not absolute.

    For one, immigration law requires noncitizens to be notified in writing that they are being processed for a removal proceeding, so they can appear before an immigration judge and have the opportunity to challenge the government’s claim that they should be deported.

    Noncitizens have the right to legal representation – albeit not paid for by the U.S. government – in an immigration court. Ultimately, an immigration judge, and not ICE, determines if a noncitizen should be deported.

    People take part in a protest on March 27, 2025, in Newark, N.J., against the arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident.
    Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images

    The Constitutional limits on ICE

    Crucially, ICE is bound by various constitutional provisions that protect individual rights, including the rights of noncitizens who are living in the U.S. without legal authorization.

    Three particular constitutional amendments impose different checks on ICE’s power.

    The First Amendment, for example, protects individuals’ rights to free speech, assembly and religion. Consequently, ICE cannot target individuals – even if they are noncitizens living in the U.S. without legal permission – for simply participating in peaceful protests or writing something for the public. Rubio has said that he revoked Ozturk’s visa not because of her writing, but because she participated in “activities that are counter to our foreign … policy.” He also relied on this provision to support the deportation of Khalil.

    But Ozturk and Khalil’s lawyers contend that their activities were protected speech. Ultimately, a federal district judge has the power to determine whether ICE targeted them for exercising their First Amendment rights.

    The Fourth Amendment safeguards the right of individuals “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” ICE must first obtain a search warrant, signed by a judge, before entering a person’s home or private areas of a workplace.

    The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures also applies in public spaces. So, law enforcement officers must have reasonable suspicion to stop a person – or have probable cause to not have a warrant when they arrest a person they believe is guilty of a crime or in violation of a law and likely to escape. The Immigration and Nationality Act also requires ICE officers to have an arrest warrant unless they have reason to believe that the noncitizen may flee before they get a warrant.

    It is not clear whether ICE officers presented Khalil and Ozturk with arrest warrants before they were detained outside their home and on the street, respectively.

    The Fifth Amendment guarantees the right of all individuals against self-incrimination. This means that people detained by ICE have the right to remain silent during interrogations.

    It also means that before noncitizens can be deported, they must have the opportunity to go before an immigration judge to challenge the government’s plan to remove them, or may file a case before a federal judge to challenge their detention and deportation.

    ICE’s power is not absolute

    Even with an annual budget of approximately $8 billion, ICE does not have the capacity to pursue all immigration law violations.

    In this context, recent Trump administration initiatives could significantly increase ICE’s reach. For example, an April 2025 memorandum of understanding between the Internal Revenue Service and DHS allows the IRS to share tax information of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization. This could help ICE more easily identify, locate and arrest noncitizens living in the U.S. illegally.

    Despite its considerable power, ICE’s authority is not without checks and balances.

    But as a longtime scholar of immigration law, I believe ICE officers’ recent actions raise serious concerns that it is exceeding the bounds of its legal authority and the constitutional limits that are intended to protect individual rights.

    Rose Cuison-Villazor 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. ICE has broad power to detain and arrest noncitizens – but is still bound by constitutional limits – https://theconversation.com/ice-has-broad-power-to-detain-and-arrest-noncitizens-but-is-still-bound-by-constitutional-limits-253700

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Same-sex marriage is under attack by state lawmakers, emboldened by Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ measures and the Supreme Court’s willingness to overturn precedent

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul M. Collins Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst

    Jeff Sralla, left, and his partner of 28 years, Gerald Gafford, wed in 2015 in Texas. AP Photo/Eric Gay

    Same-sex marriage, which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 legalized nationwide in the case known as Obergefell v. Hodges, is facing resurgent hostility.

    In the decade since the court’s decision, public support for same-sex marriage has increased. Currently, about 70% of Americans approve of legally recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples, a 10-percentage-point bump from 2015.

    Obergefell led to an increase in marriages among same-sex partners, with more than 700,000 same-sex couples currently married.

    Despite this, Republican lawmakers in five states have recently introduced symbolic bills calling on the Supreme Court to overturn its ruling in Obergefell.

    And Republican lawmakers in two states have proposed legislation that creates a new category of marriage, called “covenant marriage,” that is reserved for one man and one woman.

    As a professor of legal studies, I believe such attacks on same-sex marriage represent a serious threat to the institution.

    And others share my concern.

    A 2024 poll of married same-sex couples found that 54% of respondents are worried that the Supreme Court might overturn Obergefell, with only 17% saying they did not anticipate such a challenge.

    Recognizing this fear, Democratic legislators in Michigan have called for the state to pass a ballot initiative to protect same-sex marriage. The initiative would repeal a part of the state constitution that banned same-sex marriage, but which was invalidated by the subsequent Obergefell decision. If Obergefell were overturned, that ban in the Michigan constitution would go into effect again.

    And a law firm in Missouri is helping LGBTQ+ couples establish medical power of attorney plans in the event Obergefell is reversed.

    Here’s what’s known about the current attacks on same-sex marriage.

    Plaintiff James Obergefell of Ohio, center, wipes his eyes after exiting the Supreme Court in Washington on April 28, 2015, following arguments before the court over the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry.
    AP Photo/Cliff Owen

    What happens if anti-Obergefell state legislation passes?

    Currently, two types of legislation have been introduced by Republican state lawmakers.

    First, symbolic legislation that calls on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell has been introduced in Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

    This legislation is symbolic, since state legislatures do not have control over what the Supreme Court does. And even if it passes, the legislation does not directly threaten the legality of same-sex marriage in those states because it does not address those states’ marriage laws.

    But if it becomes law, this legislation sends a clear signal that, should Obergefell be overturned, these states could quickly enact legislation banning same-sex marriage. For a state such as Michigan, whose constitutional language defining marriage as between one man and one woman is still on the books, the status quo would revert immediately to outlawing same-sex marriage – it wouldn’t require any legislative vote.

    Second, lawmakers in Missouri and Tennessee have introduced legislation that would create a new category of marriage that would be available only to opposite-sex couples. So-called “covenant marriage” would require that the couples who choose this kind of marriage undergo counseling prior to getting married and creates significant obstacles to getting divorced, except under very specific circumstances, such as spousal abuse.

    Tennessee’s sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Gino Bulso, a Republican, was quoted on Knoxnews.com as saying his legislation “seeks to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s egregiously wrong 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.” According to Bulso, “The bill is not ‘anti’ anything or any person. It simply recognizes the natural order of things.”

    Since this version of covenant marriage excludes same-sex couples, they would be denied access to covenant marriages, although they would still have access to more traditional forms of marriage.

    Timing of attacks

    Efforts by state Republican lawmakers to revisit same-sex marriage bans are part of a broader assault on LGBTQ+ rights taking place in the U.S.

    The timing of these efforts is primarily driven by two factors: Donald Trump’s second term as president and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned the constitutional guarantee of the right to an abortion.

    During his first term in office, Trump enacted policies harmful to the LGBTQ+ community, particularly involving health care and transgender rights.

    But the Biden administration reversed most of these policies.

    In his second term, Trump has upped his hostility to the LGBTQ+ community, following an election campaign in which he made transgender rights a wedge issue. This includes canceling more than US$125 million in federal grants related to LGBTQ+ health programs and stopping the enforcement of the Equal Access Rule, a federal policy that ensured access to federal housing programs regardless of gender identity.

    In turn, this has emboldened Republican lawmakers to target same-sex marriage and other protections for the LGBTQ+ community.

    The Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson is the other key factor motivating the timing of attacks on same-sex marriage.

    Legislators in the Tennessee statehouse, seen here, introduced legislation that would create a new category of marriage that would be available only to opposite-sex couples.
    AP Photo/George Walker IV

    In Dobbs, the court’s conservative majority indicated its willingness to revisit – and overrule – precedents that it disagreed with, even if those precedents were supported by a large majority of the public, as was the case for Roe.

    In addition, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in Dobbs in which he argued that the Supreme Court should apply the logic used to overrule Roe to reconsider other decisions, including Obergefell. Although Thomas’ concurring opinion does not have the force of law, it nonetheless sent what some court observers say is a clear message to opponents of same-sex marriage that at least one justice has an appetite for reconsidering Obergefell.

    Reaffirm or overrule?

    Should the Supreme Court agree to hear a challenge to Obergefell, one of two main outcomes is likely.

    First, the court could reaffirm Obergefell. This would probably put an end to most Republican attacks on same-sex marriage and would maintain the status quo by prohibiting states from outlawing same-sex marriage.

    It would also serve to make the Supreme Court appear moderate, which may enhance its near historically low public approval ratings.

    Second, the court could overrule Obergefell. If a majority of justices did so, I believe they would almost certainly use the same logic employed to overturn Roe v. Wade. That is, the court’s conservative majority could argue that the Constitution does not recognize marriage as a fundamental right, and therefore it is up to the states to regulate and define marriage, including prohibiting same-sex couples from obtaining marriage licenses.

    Under the Respect for Marriage Act, however, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, states outlawing same-sex marriage would have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, as would the federal government.

    The bottom line is that Trump’s second term and the Supreme Court’s conservative activism have lit a fire in some Republican lawmakers, who are targeting same-sex marriage as part of a broader attack on LGBTQ+ rights.

    If successful, these efforts would be a dramatic blow to the progress made toward LGBTQ+ equality over the past two decades.

    Paul M. Collins Jr. 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. Same-sex marriage is under attack by state lawmakers, emboldened by Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ measures and the Supreme Court’s willingness to overturn precedent – https://theconversation.com/same-sex-marriage-is-under-attack-by-state-lawmakers-emboldened-by-trumps-anti-lgbtq-measures-and-the-supreme-courts-willingness-to-overturn-precedent-252154

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Are twins allergic to the same things?

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Breanne Hayes Haney, Allergy and Immunology Fellow-in-Training, School of Medicine, West Virginia University

    If one has a reaction to a new food, is the other more likely to as well? BjelicaS/iStock via Getty Images Plus

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

    Are twins allergic to the same things? – Ella, age 7, Philadelphia

    Allergies, whether spring sneezes due to pollen or trouble breathing triggered by a certain food, are caused by a combination of someone’s genes and the environment they live in.

    The more things two people share, the higher their chances of being allergic to the same things. Twins are more likely to share allergies because of everything they have in common, but the story doesn’t end there.

    I’m an allergist and immunologist, and part of my job is treating patients who have environmental, food or drug allergies. Allergies are really complex, and a lot of factors play a role in who gets them and who doesn’t.

    What is an allergy?

    Your immune system makes defense proteins called antibodies. Their job is to keep watch and attack any invading germs or other dangerous substances that get inside your body before they can make you sick.

    An allergy happens when your body mistakes some usually harmless substance for a harmful intruder. These trigger molecules are called allergens.

    Y-shaped antibodies are meant to grab onto any harmful germs, but sometimes they make a mistake and grab something that isn’t actually a threat: an allergen.
    ttsz/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    The antibodies stick like suction cups to the allergens, setting off an immune system reaction. That process leads to common allergy symptoms: sneezing, a runny or stuffy nose, itchy, watery eyes, a cough. These symptoms can be annoying but minor.

    Allergies can also cause a life-threatening reaction called anaphylaxis that requires immediate medical attention. For example, if someone ate a food they were allergic to, and then had throat swelling and a rash, that would be considered anaphylaxis.

    The traditional treatment for anaphylaxis is a shot of the hormone epinephrine into the leg muscle. Allergy sufferers can also carry an auto-injector to give themselves an emergency shot in case of a life-threatening case of anaphylaxis. An epinephrine nasal spray is now available, too, which also works very quickly.

    A person can be allergic to things outdoors, like grass or tree pollen and bee stings, or indoors, like pets and tiny bugs called dust mites that hang out in carpets and mattresses.

    A person can also be allergic to foods. Food allergies affect 4% to 5% of the population. The most common are to cow’s milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish and sesame. Sometimes people grow out of allergies, and sometimes they are lifelong.

    Who gets allergies?

    Each antibody has a specific target, which is why some people may only be allergic to one thing.

    The antibodies responsible for allergies also take care of cleaning up any parasites that your body encounters. Thanks to modern medicine, people in the United States rarely deal with parasites. Those antibodies are still ready to fight, though, and sometimes they misfire at silly things, like pollen or food.

    Hygiene and the environment around you can also play a role in how likely it is you’ll develop allergies. Basically, the more different kinds of bacteria that you’re exposed to earlier in life, the less likely you are to develop allergies. Studies have even shown that kids who grow up on farms, kids who have pets before the age of 5, and kids who have a lot of siblings are less likely to develop allergies. Being breastfed as a baby can also protect against having allergies.

    Children who grow up in cities are more likely to develop allergies, probably due to air pollution, as are children who are around people who smoke.

    Kids are less likely to develop food allergies if they try foods early in life rather than waiting until they are older. Sometimes a certain job can contribute to an adult developing environmental allergies. For example, hairdressers, bakers and car mechanics can develop allergies due to chemicals they work with.

    Genetics can also play a huge role in why some people develop allergies. If a mom or dad has environmental or food allergies, their child is more likely to have allergies. Specifically for peanut allergies, if your parent or sibling is allergic to peanuts, you are seven times more likely to be allergic to peanuts!

    Do you have an allergy twin in your family?
    Ronnie Kaufman/DigitalVision via Getty Images Plus

    Identical in allergies?

    Back to the idea of twins: Yes, they can be allergic to the same things, but not always.

    Researchers in Australia found that 60% to 70% of twins in one study both had environmental allergies, and identical twins were more likely to share allergies than fraternal (nonidentical) twins. Identical twins share 100% of their genes, while fraternal twins only share about 50% of their genes, the same as any pair of siblings.

    A lot more research has been done on the genetics of food allergies. One peanut allergy study found that identical twins were more likely to both be allergic to peanuts than fraternal twins were.

    So, twins can be allergic to the same things, and it’s more likely that they will be, based on their shared genetics and growing up together. But twins aren’t automatically allergic to the exact same things.

    Imagine if two twins are separated at birth and raised in different homes: one on a farm with pets and one in the inner city. What if one’s parents smoke, and the others don’t? What if one lives with a lot of siblings and the other is an only child? They certainly could develop different allergies, or maybe not develop allergies at all.

    Scientists like me are continuing to research allergies, and we hope to have more answers in the future.

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

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

    Breanne Hayes Haney 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. Are twins allergic to the same things? – https://theconversation.com/are-twins-allergic-to-the-same-things-245914

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Perceived consensus drives moral intolerance in a time of identity-driven politics and online bubbles

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jen Cole Wright, Professor of Psychology, College of Charleston

    Differences of opinion within your group signal for you to be tolerant around that issue. OsakaWayne Studios/Moment via Getty Images

    To live together in social communities, people create and maintain expectations about what is normal and what is not. Sometimes things can fall outside the range of normal and people are OK with it. You might have a neighbor who likes to wear Revolutionary War-era costumes on their evening walks around the neighborhood. Their behavior seems weird to you, but you consider it an instance of everyone’s freedom to express themselves.

    But other times something seems not only abnormal but also unacceptable. In this case, people take active steps to squelch what feels unfair, inappropriate, bad or deviant. Things that people think are morally abnormal – aberrant behavior, transgressions, violations of their most sacred values – are viewed as highly threatening and necessary to shut down, with force if necessary. Most people would find a neighbor who purposefully starves and tortures their dogs morally repugnant. That neighbor would need to be stopped and would deserve to be punished.

    A decade of research in my psychology lab and others’ demonstrates that people struggle to express tolerance for different moral values – for instance, about sexual orientation, helping the poor, being a stay-at-home mother and so on.

    In study after study, people are less willing to help, share with, date, be roommates with and even work for people who have different moral values. Even children and adolescents express more willingness to shun and punish moral transgressors than people who do something personally obnoxious or offensive but not immoral.

    When asked to talk with a stranger who they know disagrees with them, people will turn their bodies away more and move farther away when the disagreement involves a moral rather than personal disagreement. And they are more willing to condone using violence against someone who doesn’t share their morals.

    All this sounds like bad news for societies like ours filled with people who hold diverse moral values. But there is an important counterbalance to this blanket intolerance. When people sense disagreement within their community about moral issues – even those they personally feel strongly about – it pushes them to have tolerance for people with other views.

    In other words, when it is clear that people you see as your peers – members of your community – disagree with each other, you recognize the need for continued respectful discussion. It automatically tones down the natural tendency toward intolerance for moral views that differ from your own.

    Splintering off into polarized groups

    While perceived disagreement within a community appears to function as a corrective to intolerance, the opposite is also true: Consensus is a powerful trigger of intolerance. When most of the community agrees that something is morally bad, then those who disagree are viewed as outliers and labeled as “deviant.” Intolerance becomes not only justified but is seen as necessary.

    But how is consensus reached? In diverse, democratic societies like ours − where people are allowed to form their own opinions − there are two ways this might happen.

    The democratic ideal is that over time, through shared discussion and reflection, people eventually come to an agreement or compromise. Once a sense of consensus – or close enough – has been reached, group members can be confident that those who continue to disagree can be safely ignored or no longer tolerated.

    More often, though, consensus is achieved when the disagreement becomes strong enough to fracture communities into multiple, smaller “issue-position” groups. Here’s an example.

    An original group could hold members with varying views who eventually split off into smaller, more uniform position-based groups.
    Olivier Le Moal/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Consider a controversial issue, such as abortion. Two people may agree that terminating a pregnancy is something that causes harm but also falls within women’s reproductive autonomy. Yet, at the same time, they may disagree – one prioritizes discouraging abortions whenever possible, while the other prioritizes the freedom to make that choice.

    Over time, the two people encounter others whose views are more extreme. Because the two resonate more with different sides of the issue, they find themselves pulled in opposite directions, eventually becoming more at odds with each other.

    At the community level, when more extreme views grow strong enough and gain enough traction with enough people, it activates new group identities. Where once there was a community of people who disagreed with one another about abortion, there are now two smaller, distinct and separate communities of pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

    What is problematic is that issue-position groups, by definition, create consensus, signaling to their members that they, and not the other group, have got things right.

    Civility toward the other side is no longer required: The other viewpoint, and anyone who holds it, is considered morally wrong. Intolerance, though, can become a moral mandate. Members of issue-position groups often find themselves on a moral crusade against the other side.

    Extreme identities in opposition

    Unfortunately, this type of group-driven consensus is increasingly common.

    One prominent example in the United States is that people are more likely than they were in the past to experience politics as not just about disagreement on various political values and approaches to governance but as opposing groups. Being liberal or conservative is an identity that puts one group in opposition to the other. And only one side can be “right” and “moral.”

    At least in these group-identity-fueled contexts, people can lose sight of the fact that they are all Americans, even going so far as to assert that their smaller group represents the only “true” or “real” Americans.

    The proliferation of issue-position groups is made easier by the ability to quickly find and connect with people who share your views via the internet and social media. Many Americans don’t actively participate in civic life within the larger groups they’re a part of, such as their neighborhood or city, where they would naturally encounter a diversity of opinions. People have less practice sharing their views and making room for those who disagree.

    Online it’s easy to block out others you don’t agree with.
    Olga Pankova/Moment via Getty Images

    In contrast, it’s easy, especially online, to find like-minded communities to join and feel validated. This is made even easier by the algorithms employed by search engines and social media apps that prioritize showing content that reflects and reinforces your beliefs, values, activities and practices and shields you from those who are different – unless presenting them as things to disparage and hate.

    This process can accelerate movement toward extreme issue-position groups and identities. As online algorithms begin taking people down different paths, the likelihood that they will find themselves ultimately with more extreme attitudes becomes more probable and more rapidly accomplished.

    Reengaging with your broader communities

    How can people combat this dangerous trend?

    For one, you can get off social media and back into your communities, welcoming opportunities to interact with the complex diversity they contain. And even when online, you can take intentional steps to “burst” the alogrithms, actively finding ways to connect with people who are not like you and ideas with which you may not agree.

    Most importantly, you can always take a step back from the impulse toward intolerance and humbly remember our shared humanity. Even looking into another’s eyes without words can activate compassion and remind you that we are all ultimately members of the same global community.

    Jen Cole Wright is affiliated with the Charleston Climate Coalition, a 501c3 that advocates for a livable climate in the Lowcountry.

    – ref. Perceived consensus drives moral intolerance in a time of identity-driven politics and online bubbles – https://theconversation.com/perceived-consensus-drives-moral-intolerance-in-a-time-of-identity-driven-politics-and-online-bubbles-242088

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Getting AIs working toward human goals − study shows how to measure misalignment

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Aidan Kierans, Ph.D. Student in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut

    Self-driving cars are only one example where it’s tricky but critical to align AI and human goals. AP Photo/Michael Liedtke

    Ideally, artificial intelligence agents aim to help humans, but what does that mean when humans want conflicting things? My colleagues and I have come up with a way to measure the alignment of the goals of a group of humans and AI agents.

    The alignment problem – making sure that AI systems act according to human values – has become more urgent as AI capabilities grow exponentially. But aligning AI to humanity seems impossible in the real world because everyone has their own priorities. For example, a pedestrian might want a self-driving car to slam on the brakes if an accident seems likely, but a passenger in the car might prefer to swerve.

    By looking at examples like this, we developed a score for misalignment based on three key factors: the humans and AI agents involved, their specific goals for different issues, and how important each issue is to them. Our model of misalignment is based on a simple insight: A group of humans and AI agents are most aligned when the group’s goals are most compatible.

    In simulations, we found that misalignment peaks when goals are evenly distributed among agents. This makes sense – if everyone wants something different, conflict is highest. When most agents share the same goal, misalignment drops.

    Why it matters

    Most AI safety research treats alignment as an all-or-nothing property. Our framework shows it’s more complex. The same AI can be aligned with humans in one context but misaligned in another.

    This matters because it helps AI developers be more precise about what they mean by aligned AI. Instead of vague goals, such as align with human values, researchers and developers can talk about specific contexts and roles for AI more clearly. For example, an AI recommender system – those “you might like” product suggestions – that entices someone to make an unnecessary purchase could be aligned with the retailer’s goal of increasing sales but misaligned with the customer’s goal of living within his means.

    Recommender systems use sophisticated AI technologies to influence consumers, making it all the more important that they aren’t out of alignment with human values.

    For policymakers, evaluation frameworks like ours offer a way to measure misalignment in systems that are in use and create standards for alignment. For AI developers and safety teams, it provides a framework to balance competing stakeholder interests.

    For everyone, having a clear understanding of the problem makes people better able to help solve it.

    What other research is happening

    To measure alignment, our research assumes we can compare what humans want with what AI wants. Human value data can be collected through surveys, and the field of social choice offers useful tools to interpret it for AI alignment. Unfortunately, learning the goals of AI agents is much harder.

    Today’s smartest AI systems are large language models, and their black box nature makes it hard to learn the goals of the AI agents such as ChatGPT that they power. Interpretability research might help by revealing the models’ inner “thoughts”, or researchers could design AI that thinks transparently to begin with. But for now, it’s impossible to know whether an AI system is truly aligned.

    What’s next

    For now, we recognize that sometimes goals and preferences don’t fully reflect what humans want. To address trickier scenarios, we are working on approaches for aligning AI to moral philosophy experts.

    Moving forward, we hope that developers will implement practical tools to measure and improve alignment across diverse human populations.

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

    Aidan Kierans has participated as an independent contractor in the OpenAI Red Teaming Network. His research described in this article was supported in part by the NSF Program on Fairness in AI in collaboration with Amazon. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Amazon. Kierans has also received research funding from the Future of Life Institute.

    – ref. Getting AIs working toward human goals − study shows how to measure misalignment – https://theconversation.com/getting-ais-working-toward-human-goals-study-shows-how-to-measure-misalignment-251896

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Public protesters are our socially connected friends and neighbours, not angry loners

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Shelley Boulianne, Professor in Communication Studies, Mount Royal University

    For some people, protests don’t seem like rational and responsible forms of political participation in a democratic system. According to the latest World Values Survey (2017-2022), 28.6 per cent of Canadians and 27.7 per cent of Americans said they’d would never, under any circumstances, attend a peaceful demonstration.

    Yet citizens often lack opportunities to influence government decisions outside of voting during elections, leaving them feeling powerless about the direction of their elected government.

    From this perspective, it’s easy to understand why millions may attend protests against Donald Trump’s tariffs, his annexation threats and other policy decisions.

    Some argue that citizens should email, call or write letters to political leaders, but these individualistic activities are easily ignored because they occur behind closed doors. The visibility of protests, combined with a large turnout, helps raise awareness of issues among other citizens and political leaders.

    Protests serve a critical function in a democratic system — they offer a collective and visible method for citizens to express their political views. These events can attract millions of people — many more than the number of respondents to public opinion polls or attendees at government public consultation events.

    Perceptions of effectiveness

    When deciding whether to participate in a march or demonstration, anger, grievances and discontent are important, but these sentiments alone are insufficient to motivate people to act.

    Instead, citizens must interpret their experiences as unjust or unfair to feel compelled to participate in a protest. Likewise, people must believe that the protest will be effective in influencing political leaders.

    In 2019, I conducted an online survey in four countries — the U.S., Canada, the U.K and France — asking respondents to rate the effectiveness of street marches and demonstrations in influencing political leaders.

    Across the four countries, the averages were similar, based on the five-point scale ranging from “not at all” to “a great deal.” And those who believed that protests were effective were far more likely to report having participated in a march or demonstration in the past 12 months compared to those who did not view protests as effective.

    Who protests and why?

    The decision to take part in a protest involves weighing a variety of factors that may encourage or discourage participation, as well as views about the effectiveness of public protests.

    People will often join if they’re asked to, and whether they’re asked to depends on their ties to others who are also interested in attending, or if they’re a member of an organization that encourages its members to attend.

    This social network effect is as important, if not more important, than simply being angry or frustrated.

    People who identify as left-wing are more likely to participate in marches and demonstrations. Historically, this has been true in the United States, but in contemporary research, individuals on both the right and the left sides of the political continuum participate in protest.

    Furthermore, these ideological differences vary by country and time period. Whether a protest attracts those from the right versus the left depends on the issue. Liberals tend to protest against racism, for example, while conservatives protested COVID-19 restrictions.

    Paying attention

    Rather than focusing on left vs. right, research should pay attention to political interest. Are people paying attention to current events or what’s going on in government? Political interest precedes the development of ideological views.

    Furthermore, people can only form their views about the effectiveness of protest once they start paying attention to politics.

    The recent global Hands Off protests attracted citizens who are dissatisfied with Trump’s newly imposed tariffs and other recent government decisions, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants, dismantling of the Department of Education, changes to immigration enforcement and Social Security administration and the termination of health and science funding, especially those with a diversity, equity and inclusion focus.

    These demonstrations were part of a cycle of protests, similar to those observed in 2017 after Trump’s first election.

    To truly understand who participates and who does not in public protests, we need to consider social connections, views about the effectiveness of protest and people’s interest in politics.

    Shelley Boulianne received funding for the administration of the survey from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. Public protesters are our socially connected friends and neighbours, not angry loners – https://theconversation.com/public-protesters-are-our-socially-connected-friends-and-neighbours-not-angry-loners-254044

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: how a lack of protective clothing cost lives

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Susan L. Carruthers, Professor of History, University of Warwick

    Clothing can kill. So, too, can the absence of personal protective equipment. For decades, the medical establishment has understood the role of fabric in both spreading contagion and guarding against its transmission — but never with greater urgency than 80 years ago.

    On April 15 1945, British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle in northern Germany. Shocking scenes awaited behind the barbed wire.

    On entry, British personnel found an epidemic of typhus decimating the camp’s surviving population. Thousands of unburied corpses, appallingly overcrowded huts, the absence of running water and chronic emaciation contributed to the rapid spread of this louse-borne disease. So too did unwashed garments into which lice burrowed and deposited their contaminated faeces.

    For warmth, some camp inmates removed clothing from corpses, heedless of the danger of contagion. Others feared infection so acutely that they went unclothed rather than risk contamination. Anne Frank died, just weeks before the camp’s liberation, in a state of naked terror.

    For military and medical personnel, burying bodies and burning garments was imperative, along with triaging survivors and moving the fittest from the camp’s corpse-strewn huts to a hastily established hospital area. To transform a site of mass death into a place of recovery wasn’t easy. Staff lacked supplies of every sort, substituting newspaper for mackintosh sheeting and commandeering dog bowls for use as bedpans.

    Protective clothing was also in desperately short supply. There, too, improvisation was the order of the day. Around 100 British medical students drafted into action at Belsen sported a motley assemblage of British military and appropriated German Wehrmacht apparel. They, like everyone else in the camp, were liberally sprayed with DDT. This pesticide was later proven to be carcinogenic.

    Female British Red Cross workers modified their uniforms, ditching regulation skirts. “I always go about in slacks and battle dress, trousers being a greater protection against the louse!” Margaret Ward wrote home to her mother with forced bravado.

    Meanwhile, members of the Royal Army Medical Corps, better provisioned than anyone else at Belsen, wore “typhus suits” as they stretchered patients from the huts to the hospital. These outfits – complete with drawstring hoods, gauntlets and gaiters, but no masks – helped keep contagion at bay, though their alien appearance terrified some patients.

    British authorities “solved” their protective equipment crisis at Belsen by compelling captured German SS personnel to undertake the most dangerous work. Sometimes, prisoners were given rubberised capes. But more often, as numerous photographs taken by British military photographers attest, German prisoners handled corpses without any protection at all.

    Dressed in their SS uniforms, German men and women set to work (under armed guard) removing piles of contaminated clothing and dead bodies from the huts. With uncovered mouths and bare hands, they carried corpses to mass graves.

    In April and May 1945, anti-Nazi feelings ran understandably high among allied personnel, particularly those who just participated in the camps’ liberation. Few found anything ethically wrong with the decision to expose German prisoners to a high risk of infection.

    War crimes trials, with the prospect of execution for defendants found guilty, awaited SS prisoners. Forcing German camp personnel to confront the deadly consequences of their actions – in the most visceral way possible – struck most uniformed Britons as an entirely warranted form of retribution. A moral corrective for SS prisoners was also a medical expedient made necessary by the camp’s dire shortage of protective equipment.

    At Belsen, the consequences were predictable. Seven of the British medical students contracted typhus, though none seemingly died of the disease.

    The brunt was borne by the captured enemies. Reuters reported on June 28 1945 that 20 SS guards had “died of typhus before their trials by the war crimes court could be held”, adding that it was “believed that they caught the disease when they were forced to bury the bodies of some of the prisoners”.

    Meanwhile, Belsen’s survivors urgently required garments and footwear. Retributive justice played a role here too. British military personnel ordered German civilians in the environs of the camp to surrender clothing, shoes and bedding for use by survivors. Here was postwar redress at its most literal. People stripped of so much by the Third Reich would begin life anew in apparel removed from Germans.

    Susan L. Carruthers 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. Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: how a lack of protective clothing cost lives – https://theconversation.com/liberation-of-bergen-belsen-how-a-lack-of-protective-clothing-cost-lives-252838

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Five lessons from Perugia’s global gathering of journalists, climate changemakers and media leaders

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Turns, Senior Environment Editor

    Perugia, Italy. Anna Turns, CC BY-NC-ND

    Last week, I travelled to the historic city of Perugia in Umbria, Italy. With clear blue skies, wisteria hanging over ancient Roman walls, plenty of gelato and beautiful vistas from the hilltop, the setting was pretty special. More inspiring though, were the people I spoke to during my visit. Perugia is the home of the annual international journalism festival, a meeting of media movers and shakers from all over the globe. These are my five biggest takeaways.

    1. In-person connections are irreplaceable

    Yes, I see the irony of flying to talk about climate journalism, but sometimes face-to-face connections, impromptu chats and dinner table discussions are just impossible to replicate on a video call. I caught up with journalists from my Oxford Climate Journalism Network cohort. Run by the Reuters Institute, this six-month programme is proving invaluable, not only for seminars from guest speakers at the top of their game, but for the collaborations that are developing within the network. Learning from my peers working in Austria, Brazil, Canada and way beyond has opened my eyes so much to the diversity of challenges we all face – and the creative possibilities.

    Kevin Burden (European media leaders fellowship project manager), Nina Fasciaux (director of Solutions Journalism Network) and Anna Turns.
    Kevin Burden, CC BY-NC-ND

    During my discussions with colleagues from my European media leaders climate solutions fellowship visiting from France, Italy and the Czech Republic, I listened to the lightbulb moments others have had and reflected on my own progress – internally, in terms of what leadership means to me and how I can effect meaningful change, plus externally, in terms of supporting my own team and encouraging more collaboration within this organisation.

    By sharing joys and worries over a margarita pizza or scoop of nocciola (hazelnut icecream – my favourite), I was struck that authenticity is the most important attribute. All else follows and every single one of those real, honest and open in-person connections deepens my appreciation for that.

    2. Environmental journalism is thriving

    So many early career journalists approached me, keen to chat and wanting to know more about how to immerse themselves in this specialism. When I first started out as a biology graduate, I worked in wildlife TV production and magazine journalism. Back then, environment coverage tended to be an outlier, an afterthought at best. Climate journalists were few and far between; willing mentors were difficult to find.

    Anna Turns chatted to lots of environmental journalists after her conference event.
    Monica Rizza #IJF25, CC BY-NC-ND

    That landscape has shifted so much over the past 20 years and I’m proud that this part of our industry is growing, and becoming richer for it. Now, people want to cover climate stories in so many creative formats and that’s invigorating.

    3. Science doesn’t have to stay in silos

    With growing misinformation, (both inadvertent misinterpretation and deliberate miscommunication) online, combined with widespread disengagement from mainstream news sources, social media has a big role to play in how we engage with climate, or not.

    I hosted an event with Adam Levy about how to make climate science shine on social media. With a PhD in atmospheric physics from the University of Oxford, Levy now works as a science journalist and broadcaster, while producing jargon-free videos that make complex climate issues relatable and succinct.

    Anna Turns interviewed Adam Levy at the International Journalism Festival.
    Monica Rizza #IJF25, CC BY-NC-ND

    Climate communication is definitely not just about imparting facts. There’s space for nuance, even humour. We chatted about bridging the gap between science and storytelling, how to apply a rigorous journalistic approach to all forms of content and how integrity must be the top priority. That all builds precious trust and creates connection.

    4. Time is ticking

    The next UN climate summit (Cop30) is coming and we’re getting ready. One of my favourite sessions was a talk by Daniel Nardin, another solutions journalist member of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. He lives in Belem, the Brazilian city that will be hosting Cop30 in November, where negotiators will continue to debate how best to tackle and adapt to climate change. But those strategies, frameworks and commitments can seem dry, dense and hard to digest.

    Nardin’s publication, Amazonia Vox, platforms the voices of the people living in the Amazon, in forested, deforested and urban areas. He explained that the environmental, social and political issues in the Amazon are complex and full of nuance, which is why he makes local voices central to the narrative.

    None of this is rocket science. But Nardin is proactively cracking on with it, because there isn’t time to wait.

    Mark Hertsgard from Covering Climate Now (far left) talks about how newsrooms can make climate training effective.
    Alexa Cano #IJF25, CC BY-NC-ND

    5. Newsroom culture is transforming

    The Conversation is already highly respected. So many expert communicators, academics and readers told me how much they love what we do and what we stand for. Tackling misinformation in engaging ways is what we do best. Connecting you, our audience and community, with the most accurate and evidence-based knowledge is our purpose. We’re already bridging the gap between research and the real world. But there’s still scope to evolve and embrace change.

    Looking ahead, The Conversation can help shift the way climate stories can be told. The climate crisis has gone way beyond being an environmental issue. It’s linked to all aspects of our lives, from health and education to business and democracy, as well as conflicts and culture. Newsrooms don’t have to function like they have done for decades. By being curious, we can experiment, find out what works and reinvent the norm.

    At the New York Times, the climate team is physically in the centre of the office. At the French newswire Agence France-Presse, job titles such as “future of the planet, global editor” reflect big ambitions to integrate climate into everything. At CBC, the Canadian public broadcaster, the science and climate unit has made climate literacy training a top priority for all staff – not because it’s worthy, but because future proofing makes business sense.

    As the executive director of Covering Climate Now, a media community based in the US, Mark Hertsgard said: “Every journalist in the 21st century will need to be a climate journalist.”

    Now, my job is to turn Perugia’s inspiration into action. Watch this space.

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

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

    – ref. Five lessons from Perugia’s global gathering of journalists, climate changemakers and media leaders – https://theconversation.com/five-lessons-from-perugias-global-gathering-of-journalists-climate-changemakers-and-media-leaders-254457

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Terminations at U.S. government agencies that monitor extreme weather events will have negative effects

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Gordon McBean, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography and Environment, Western University

    A weather station in Santa Cruz, Calif. Cuts to government agencies monitoring the weather will increase the impacts of extreme weather events. (Shutterstock)

    In August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report confirmed that the climate is warming and the impacts will be widespread and more intense than anticipated.

    In 2023, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the Weather, Water, and Climate Strategy (2023-27) for the United States and around the world.

    The strategy addresses the risks to lives, property, economies and ecosystems that are increasing at an alarming rate due to the warming planet. It highlights that U.S. citizens are in harm’s way, infrastructure is increasingly outdated and at risk and, in many places, not designed for new environmental realities and extreme weather events.

    In February 2025, Donald Trump’s administration reduced the government’s size. The NOAA was severely affected, experiencing budget cuts and the termination of about 800 employees’ positions. NOAA is a critically important government organization, and includes the National Weather Service (NWS).

    Recent developments regarding science and scholarship in the U.S., including major reductions in federal research funding and censorship around topics such as climate change and gender, are forcing many U.S. science agencies and research organizations to abruptly suspend normal operations.

    As former assistant deputy minister of the Meteorological Service of Environment Canada between 1994 and 2000, I regularly met with my colleagues at the NWS and other weather agencies. We worked together to share information to provide the best weather services possible in our countries.

    Climate and misinformation

    In January of this year, the World Economic Forum released its Global Risks Report. This ranked the global risks that could have major impacts on the global population, GDP or natural resources in the short term (two years) and long term (10 years).

    For the short term, the top risk identified is “misinformation and disinformation,” with “extreme weather events” being the second-highest risk. Extreme weather events include storms, floods, wildfires, heat and others, with a warming climate leading to more severity and impacts. By geography, extreme weather events is ranked as the highest risk for Northern America and most other regions.

    The risks due to misinformation and extreme weather events are interconnected. If an extreme weather event is about to occur and people are not informed, or are misinformed, about the occurrence and risks, they do not take actions to reduce exposure and vulnerability, resulting in higher impacts.

    Impacts of layoffs

    Because of the importance of the NOAA, NWS and other climate research bodies, many have spoken out about the negative impacts of these job terminations and budget reductions.

    The NWS has developed leading weather forecast models by working with the academic and global science communities, and partners with others beyond national borders to share their data. The multi-year development and implementation of these weather systems has led to high quality and reliable information for weather, climate and ocean situations.

    One example is science journalist Andy Revkin, who referred to Trump’s actions as “The Dangerous Trump Purge of Weather and Climate Expertise.” In his Substack, Revkin writes:

    “There’s an enormous, and justified surge of criticism from private-sector and academic meteorologists from across the political spectrum over the purge of expertise and supporting staff under way at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service.”

    Meteorologists Jeff Masters and Bob Henson wrote that “cuts to U.S. weather and climate research could put public safety at risk… and slow emergency disaster response and weaken resilience efforts.”

    Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, stated that the “mass job termination” will have major negative impacts across the U.S. and nearby countries, such as Canada. This will be due to reduced aviation and shipping safety; lack of information for communities to respond to severe weather; safety assessments for search-and-rescue; and other concerns.

    Alarming increases

    With a warming climate, the impacts of extreme weather events are rising around most of the world. The year 2024, the warmest on record, was also the single-most expensive year on record in terms of Canadian insurance payouts of C$8.5 billion, with the number of catastrophe claims exceeding 273,000. Disaster costs in the U.S. also increased with many billion-dollar events.

    On Oct. 17, 2024, NOAA shared initial imagery from the GOES-19 lightning mapper showing lightning activity in two extremely hazardous hurricanes – Helene and Milton — on Sept. 24.
    (GOES-19/NOAA)

    In September 2024, Hurricane Helene caused 228 deaths and economic losses assessed at US$78.7 billion. In advance of Helene’s landfall, states of emergency in Florida and Georgia were declared by the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

    The U.S. Air Force Weather Reconnaissance Squadron provided information for the NHC to upgrade the storm to Tropical Storm Helene. Follow-up research by the World Weather Attribution concluded with “high confidence” that Helene was made worse by climate change.

    Reliance on observation and collaboration

    Forecasting extreme weather events relies on observational systems that provide weather information over a significant area which extends beyond a country. In North America, the U.S. weather forecasts rely on information from Canada, Mexico and countries across the Gulf of Mexico, and vice versa.

    The World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s lead agency on weather and climate, co-ordinates international co-operation for the free and unrestricted exchange of data and information, products and services in real time. This is critical for the safety and security of society, economic welfare and protection of the environment.

    With the NOAA’s reductions in resources, there will be negative impacts across all services in the U.S. and on the effective sharing of data between internationally collaborating weather services.

    These cuts to NOAA also relate to broad concern about impacts on science. The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities has expressed grave concern over the escalating threats to academic freedom, both in the U.S. and beyond.

    Gordon McBean receives funding from Western University and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction to undertake research on building climate resilient communities. None of my affliations are relevant to this paper.

    – ref. Terminations at U.S. government agencies that monitor extreme weather events will have negative effects – https://theconversation.com/terminations-at-u-s-government-agencies-that-monitor-extreme-weather-events-will-have-negative-effects-251314

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: U.S. tariffs are about to trigger the greatest trade diversion the world has ever seen

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Wolfgang Alschner, Hyman Soloway Chair in Business and Trade Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

    United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs have shaken the global trading system. Canadians have rightly been preoccupied by the tariff’s devastating impact on U.S.-Canada relations, but the wider ripple effects could prove just as damaging.

    The tariffs have redirected billions of dollars in exports originally bound for the U.S., which are now poised to flood global markets — including Canada’s. This will trigger a historic trade diversion that will put even the most free trade-minded nations to the test.

    Around 15 per cent of global imports went to the U.S. in 2024. The country has long been the world’s biggest consumer market, in part, due to its low average tariffs of just 3.3 per cent.

    These days are now over. On April 2, the U.S. increased its average tariff rate seven-fold to a staggering 22 per cent — by far the highest among countries with a major economy.



    Read more:
    Canada was mostly spared from Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, but it must not grow complacent

    Even though the U.S.’s “reciprocal” tariffs have since been suspended for all countries except China and Trump has now exempted smartphones, computers and microchips, a 10 per cent baseline rate and several sectoral duties remain in place.

    Together, they form a tariff wall around the U.S. unlike anything seen in generations.

    The Great Trade Diversion

    Much of the trade disruption stems from China. In 2024, China exported US$438.9 billion worth of goods to the U.S. Millions of parcels, sent via e-commerce platforms like Shein, entered the U.S. duty-free because they fell below the US$800 “de minimis” threshold.

    On April 2, Trump eliminated this exemption for low-value Chinese exports and imposed a reciprocal tariff on all Chinese imports of 34 per cent.

    This rate was increased further after China vowed to retaliate on April 4, and is now stacked on top of a 20 per cent fentanyl-related tariff. The result is an effective tariff rate exceeding 100 per cent, making it prohibitively costly for China to export to the U.S.

    Last time U.S.-China trade tensions escalated, China rerouted many of its exports through Southeast Asia. This time, however, Southeast Asian countries were hit hard, too.

    Vietnam, a major destination of Chinese export-oriented foreign investment, exported US$137 billion in goods to the U.S. in 2024. While the 46 per cent reciprocal tariff against Vietnam has since been suspended, the U.S. is unlikely to tolerate such circumvention this time around.

    The U.S. has also imposed a 25 per cent tariff on all imported automobiles. South Korea, Japan and Germany all export cars to the U.S. market. While some of these exports may continue as tariff costs are absorbed or passed on to customers, others will divert their vehicles to alternative markets.

    All told, billions of dollars in trade are being rerouted, with a tidal wave of diverted goods now headed for markets around the world.

    A repeat of the Great Depression

    The world has been here before. In the 1930s, the U.S. enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on thousands of imported goods in an effort to shield American industries during the Great Depression. The result was a rapid contraction of global trade.

    What ultimately tipped the world over the edge wasn’t direct retaliation against the U.S. Instead, global trade collapsed as U.S. trading partners turned on each other. Faced with a flood of diverted goods, they rushed to protect their own manufacturing by enacting trade restrictions of their own.

    Similarly, today, we face a similar risk. The greater concern is not Trump’s tariffs themselves or even the retaliation they provoke, but rather the resulting trade diversion and wave of protectionism it can trigger.

    Old fears, new pressures

    In some respects, the world may be in a more precarious position today than it was in the early 1930s.

    For close to a decade, western policymakers, including G7 members, have sounded alarm bells over “Chinese overcapacity.” China consumes too little at home and exports too much abroad, often using unfair non-market practices such as covert subsidization to undercut local prices.

    Fears of deindustrialization have already led some governments to put new trade barriers in place. Canada, for example, placed a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles to protect its own nascent industry in 2024. A flood of diverted Chinese imports will only heighten these pre-existing concerns.

    At the same time, global trade rules meant to safeguard against protectionism have become brittle. The U.S. has blocked the appointment of judges to the World Trade Organization’s highest court, which is tasked with enforcing trade rules.

    The resulting impunity has emboldened countries beyond the U.S. to openly flout WTO rules. Indonesia, for example, continues to maintain a WTO-inconsistent export ban on nickel. Canada’s electric vehicle tariff will likely be judged illegal under trade rules as well.

    Global trade system at a crossroads

    The Great Trade Diversion is set to put an already strained system to the test. There is still time for countries to reaffirm their commitment to international trade rules. Those same rules also allow countries to temporarily restrict trade when faced with a flood of imports.

    The Canadian government can proactively identify sectors at risk of disruption and call on the Canada Border Services Agency to self-initiate investigations into vulnerable sectors to swiftly clear the procedural hurdles for imposing temporary import restrictions.

    If countries stick to these rules, the global trading system can weather the storm. Just as possible, though, is a slide toward protectionism. Faced with a deluge of goods coming from China, the temptation to erect illegal trade barriers like the U.S. already has will be high.

    The global economy stands at a crossroads: one path leads to a reassertion of international co-operation and global rules; the other to a cascade of protectionist measures and a weakening of the very system that has enabled decades of economic growth and stability.

    Wolfgang Alschner receives funding from the SSHRC.

    – ref. U.S. tariffs are about to trigger the greatest trade diversion the world has ever seen – https://theconversation.com/u-s-tariffs-are-about-to-trigger-the-greatest-trade-diversion-the-world-has-ever-seen-254049

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s record-breaking contract with the Toronto Blue Jays is a win-win deal for both sides

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ryan Clutterbuck, Assistant Professor in Sport Management, Brock University

    After missing out on the Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto sweepstakes in 2023 and 2024, the Toronto Blue Jays and first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have reportedly agreed to a record-breaking 14-year US$500 million extension to his contract with the team.

    The deal will likely prove to be a win-win for both sides.

    For the Blue Jays, the win, as articulated by current Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer, means “you just solidified your organization, and you know who’s playing first for the next 14 years.”

    One of Guerrero Jr.’s wins (that doesn’t include a dollar sign), according to teammate Bo Bichette, is that he gets to remain at a team he wants to keep playing for.

    In terms of lessons learned, this contract offers future sport managers and negotiators from across disciplines several reminders to reflect on and incorporate into future deals.

    Dealing with time pressures

    Time pressure arises in auctions or negotiations when people feel like they are running out of time.

    It can lead to people making unwise decisions, such as the winner’s curse, where someone ends up overpaying for something because they overestimated its value. However, in negotiations, there are real time pressures and imagined time pressures, and recognizing each is important.

    For example, we can imagine an alternate universe in which the Blue Jays accepted and then acted upon Guerrero Jr.’s Feb. 18 deadline to negotiate a contract extension.

    In that universe, there’s no win-win potential. Instead, negotiations between the Blue Jays and Guerrero Jr. end and the conversation turns to possible trading partners and timelines to secure the greatest possible return.

    The Blue Jays recognized Guerrero Jr.’s Feb. 18 deadline represented an imagined rather than a real time pressure. Faced with an imagined time pressure, the Blue Jays executed a clever act of negotiation jiu-jitsu.

    Over a month after Guerrero Jr.’s Feb. 18 deadline had passed, Blue Jays President Mark Shapiro said: “I think we’re going to sign him. I think we’re going to extend him. The reason I feel that way is because we have such a clear alignment on the desired outcome.”

    Whereas other, perhaps less experienced negotiators may have been tempted to meet Guerrero Jr.’s demands with reciprocal force, for example, by issuing their own counter-ultimatum (as in: take it or leave it!), Shapiro simply ignored the demand and reinforced the team’s desire to make Guerrero Jr. a Blue Jay for life.

    Even experienced negotiators can fall into repetitive action-reaction cycles in which every demand, ask and ultimatum is met with equal or increased resistance from the other side. Of course, in every negotiation, either side will have to stand up for their interests and push back at times. But sometimes it can be more useful to simply step aside than it is to push back.

    Time value of money

    There were also financial issues that had to be resolved via negotiation. Notable, as well, is the time-value-of-money concept that entered into the sport lexicon with hitter Shohei Ohtani’s uniquely structured contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers (US$700 million over 10 years with US$680 million deferred until 2034). This may have been a major factor for Guerrero Jr. too.

    To understand how the time-value-of-money concept can impact negotiations, it may be helpful to reflect on how far $50 used to go 10 years ago and far it does today. Just as $50 in 2015 was more valuable then than it is today, the same will be true for hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Much has been made of Guerrero Jr.’s reported contact and its compensation structure that, similar to outfielder Juan Soto’s deal with the New York Mets, does not include such team/ownership-friendly deferrals.

    Ohtani may be more comfortable and uniquely positioned, by virtue of his lucrative off-the-field endorsements in North America and Japan, to defer a large chunk of his US$700 million deal with the LA Dodgers. However, the message from Soto and Guerrero Jr.’s camps seems to have been: show me the present value.

    What is interesting from a negotiation standpoint and worth reflecting on here and for the future is how showing Guerrero Jr. the present-value-of-money facilitated the deal.

    Despite challenges to securing a long-term win-win, that included an arbitration hearing in February 2024, the application of time pressure by Guerrero Jr. a year later and a reported deadlock over $50 million in the late stages of the negotiation, the Blue Jays and Guerrero Jr. can now each claim victory. It’s a classic win-win.

    Ryan Clutterbuck 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. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s record-breaking contract with the Toronto Blue Jays is a win-win deal for both sides – https://theconversation.com/vladimir-guerrero-jr-s-record-breaking-contract-with-the-toronto-blue-jays-is-a-win-win-deal-for-both-sides-254055

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –