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Category: Science

  • MIL-OSI Global: Canadian community foundations rally to support local news, calling it essential to democracy

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Magda Konieczna, Associate Professor of Journalism, Concordia University

    A couple of weeks ago, a neighbour mentioned our son’s school might be moving. I couldn’t find anything about this online.

    But I did find plenty of news from down south. While the erosion of democracy in the United States is something to pay attention to, some news outlets appear to be capitalizing on its sensational aspects.

    When Donald Trump and Elon Musk get into an online fistfight, local news can seem like the less glamorous cousin.

    But there’s really not much we can do about American democracy.

    A poster on a lamp post that says ‘Good News is Coming.’
    Jon Tyson/Unsplash, CC BY

    Still, U.S. media reports have contributed to news burnout. Many Canadians are tuning out from their regular news sources. Forty per cent of Canadians responding to a survey from the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report said they were sometimes or often avoiding the news, as compared to 28 per cent eight years earlier.

    Hearing about problems we can’t do much about is disempowering, according to a study on solutions journalism. Researchers found that readers who were treated as active civic participants rather than passive consumers felt more empowered.

    The news about my kid’s school is something that profoundly impacts my family. And I can do something about it, at least in theory. I can attend public meetings and organize my neighbours to take a stand, in hopes of affecting the outcome of the discussions.

    Local news can help me do that. It’s the very stuff that can help rebuild frayed community ties and mis- and disinformation. Without access to quality local news, malicious entities can more easily step into communities with misinformation designed to sway or mislead.

    Voter turnout is higher in places with more newspapers. Local journalists act as news brokers, ensuring the flow of information, which is essential to fulfilling the information needs of communities. We know that when less local news is present, communities become more polarized, and that polarization leads to increased sharing of misinformation.

    But local news is increasingly in trouble. Local news outlets are closing — 566 across Canada, to be precise, between 2008 and April 2025. That’s compared to the 283 that opened and remain in operation in that same period, according to the Local News Research Project.

    Rallying to support local news

    My recent report for The Canadian Philanthropy Partnership Research Network, “In Defense of the Local: How Community Foundations Across Canada are Supporting Local News” describes an increasingly popular way to support these local news outlets.

    Through case studies, I documented — along with my research assistant, Jessica Botelho-Urbanski, and supported by our research team at OCADU — the early signs of a growing movement of Canadian community foundations supporting local journalism.

    Community foundations across Canada are becoming ever more aware that many of the issues they care about, like building just and sustainable communities, are connected to the availability of local journalism.

    And some communities are starting to fund their local news outlets.

    For example, the Toronto Foundation made a rare, 10-year commitment to support The Local, a non-profit news outlet founded in 2019 that describes itself as “unabashedly Toronto, reporting from corners of the city that are too often ignored or misunderstood.”

    Screenshot of a story on ‘Moss Park’ from the digital news outlet The Local.
    The Local

    Sharon Avery, Toronto Foundation’s president and CEO, says the organization hadn’t spent much time prioritizing journalism because “the dots have not been connected …that a healthy local journalism equals a healthy community.” But she grew convinced of the essential links between local news and democracy, and realized local news is a powerful tool.

    The Winnipeg Foundation has been interested in local news for a while. Most recently, it funded the salary for one reporter, shared between Winnipeg’s The Free Press, a major local newspaper, and The Narwhal, an environmentally focused digital news startup that had been looking to expand its coverage in the Prairies.

    This kind of collaboration can improve the quality of work produced while also increasing the attention garnered by the resulting journalism in a way that is truly a win-win for all partners.

    How to support local journalism

    All of this is happening alongside government support, delivered through solutions like the Local Journalism Initiative, which funds journalists to report on under-covered topics, and the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit, which covers a portion of salaries of eligible journalists.

    Our report also includes recommendations on how place-based foundations can turn these initiatives into a movement to support local journalism. Community foundations could start by getting to know their local news ecosystems. What news organizations exist? What audiences do they serve?

    They should also consider policies to direct some of their ad spending to local media, following the lead of the provincial government in Ontario, which has its four largest agencies allocate at least one-quarter of their annual advertising budgets to Ontario publishers.

    Perhaps the most powerful — and most challenging — of our recommendations includes working with other local players to set up a community news fund.

    This would enable funders to pay into a pool allocated to local news. This approach has generated millions for local news ecosystems in the U.S., Europe and South America.

    Community foundations have the power to promote journalistic collaboration, which can help to combat mis- and disinformation.

    To improve the quality of life and information for Canadians from coast to coast to coast, supporting local journalism is a must.

    The contribution of the research assistant on the report described here was funded by a SSHRC grant obtained by the Canadian philanthropy partnership research network (PhiLab). The work was also supported by the Cultural Policy Hub at OCADU.

    – ref. Canadian community foundations rally to support local news, calling it essential to democracy – https://theconversation.com/canadian-community-foundations-rally-to-support-local-news-calling-it-essential-to-democracy-257873

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Presidents of both parties have launched military action without Congress declaring war − Trump’s bombing of Iran is just the latest

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sarah Burns, Associate Professor of Political Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

    President Donald Trump is seen on a monitor in the White House press briefing room on June 21, 2025, after the U.S. military strike on three sites in Iran. AP Photo/Alex Brandon

    In the wake of the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, many congressional Democrats and a few Republicans have objected to President Donald Trump’s failure to seek congressional approval before conducting military operations.

    They note that Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and say that section required Trump to seek prior authorization for military action.

    The Trump administration disagrees. “This is not a war against Iran,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, implying that the action did not require approval by Congress. That’s the same view held by most modern presidents and their lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel: Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to use the military in certain situations without prior approval from Congress.

    By this reading of the text, presidents, as commander in chief, claim the power to unilaterally order the military to initiate small-scale operations for a short duration. Members of Congress may object to that claim, but they have done little to limit presidents’ unilateralism. What little they have done has not been effective.

    As I’ve demonstrated in my research, even though the 1973 War Powers Resolution attempted to constrain presidential power after the disasters of the Vietnam War, it contains many loopholes that presidents have exploited to act unilaterally. For example, it allows presidents to engage in military operations without congressional approval for up to 90 days. And more recent congressional resolutions have broadened executive control even further.

    President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the U.S. declaration of war against Japan on Dec. 8, 1941.
    U.S. National Archives

    A long tradition of executive authority

    Presidents can even overcome the loopholes in the War Powers Resolution if the operation lasts longer than 90 days. In 2011, a State Department lawyer argued that airstrikes in Libya could continue beyond the War Powers Resolution’s 90-day time limit because there were no ground troops involved. By that logic, any future president could carry out an indefinite bombing campaign with no congressional oversight.

    While every president has bristled at congressional restraints on their actions, presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have successfully circumvented them by citing vague concerns like “national security,” “regional security” or the need to “prevent a humanitarian disaster” when launching military operations. While members of Congress always take issue with these actions, they never hold presidents accountable by passing legislation restraining him.

    President Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites without consulting Congress falls in line with precedent from both Democratic and Republican leaders for decades.

    Much like his predecessors, Trump did not, and likely will not, provide Congress with more concrete information about the legality of his actions. Nor are congressional lawmakers effectively holding him accountable.

    The push-and-pull between Congress and the president over military operations dates back to the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, which led Congress to declare war on Japan. Before then, Congress had prevented the U.S. from joining World War II by enforcing an arms embargo and refusing to help the Allies prior to the attack on Hawaii. But afterward, Congress began allowing the president to take more control over the military.

    During the Cold War, rather than returning to a balanced debate between the branches, Congress continued to relinquish those powers.

    Congress never authorized the war in Korea; Harry Truman used a U.N. Security Council resolution as legal justification. Congress’ vote explicitly opposing the invasion of Cambodia didn’t stop Richard Nixon from doing it anyway. Even after the Cold War, Bill Clinton regularly acted unilaterally to address humanitarian crises or the continued threat from leaders like Saddam Hussein. He sent the military to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, among other places.

    After 9/11, Congress quickly gave up more of its power. A week after those attacks, Congress passed a sweeping Authorization for Use of Military Force, giving the president permission to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

    In a follow-up 2002 authorization, Congress went even further, allowing the president to “use the Armed Forces … as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend national security … against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” This approach provides few, if any, congressional checks on the control of military affairs exercised by the president.

    In the two decades since those authorizations, four presidents have used them to justify all manner of military action, from targeted killings of terrorists to the years long fight against the Islamic State group.

    Congress regularly discusses terminating those authorizations, but has yet to do so. If Congress did, the loopholes in the original War Powers Resolution would still exist.

    While President Biden claimed he supported the repeal of the authorizations, and supported more congressional oversight of military actions, Trump has made no such claims. Instead, he has claimed even more sweeping authority to act without any permission from Congress.

    As recently as 2024, Biden used the 2002 authorization as a legal rationale for the targeted killing of Iranian-backed militiamen in Iraq, a strike condemned by Iraqi leaders.

    Those actions may have ruffled congressional feathers, but they were in keeping with a long U.S. tradition of targeting members of terrorist groups and protecting members of the military serving in a conflict zone.

    Demonstrators outside the U.S. Capitol in January 2020 call on Congress to limit the president’s powers to use the military.
    AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

    Threats of war

    During his first presidential term in 2020, Trump ordered a lethal drone strike against a respected member of the Iranian government, Major General Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran’s equivalent of the CIA, without consulting Congress or publicly providing proof of why the attack was necessary, even to this day.

    Tensions – and fears of war – spiked but then slowly faded when Iran responded with missile attacks on two U.S. bases in Iraq.

    Now, the U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites have revived both fears of war and renewed questions about the president’s authority to unilaterally engage in military action. Presidents since the 1970s, however, have effectively managed to dodge definitive answers to those questions – demonstrating both the power inherent in their position and the unwillingness among members of the legislative branch to reclaim their coequal status.

    This article is an updated version of a story published on Jan. 24, 2024.

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

    – ref. Presidents of both parties have launched military action without Congress declaring war − Trump’s bombing of Iran is just the latest – https://theconversation.com/presidents-of-both-parties-have-launched-military-action-without-congress-declaring-war-trumps-bombing-of-iran-is-just-the-latest-259636

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: It’s time to face an uncomfortable truth: maybe our pampered pets would be better off without us

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nancy Cushing, Associate professor, University of Newcastle

    ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images

    Pet-keeping is often promoted for the benefits it brings humans. A close association with another animal can provide us with a sense of purpose and a daily dose of joy. It can aid our health, make us more conscientious and even help us form relationships with other humans.

    But the situation is perhaps not as rosy for the animal itself. Domesticated animals often live longer than their free-living counterparts, but the quality of those lives can be compromised. Pets can be fed processed foods that can lead to obesity. Many are denied a sexual life and experience of parenthood. Exercise can be limited, isolation is common and boredom must be endured.

    In the worst cases, pets suffer due to selective breeding practices, physical abuse and unethical commercial breeding.

    Is this the best life for the species we feel closest to? This question was raised for me when I heard the story of Valerie, the dachshund recaptured in April this year after almost 18 months living on her own on South Australia’s Karta Pintingga/Kangaroo Island.

    Is being a pet the best life for the species we feel closest to?
    Oleksandr Rupeta/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Valerie: the story that captivated a nation

    Valerie, a miniature dachshund, escaped into the bush during a camping trip on Kangaroo Island in November 2023. After several days of searching, her bereft humans returned to their home in New South Wales. They assumed the tiny dog, who had lived her life as a “little princess”, was gone forever.

    Fast-forward a year, and sightings were reported on the island of a small dog wearing a pink collar. Word spread and volunteers renewed the search. A wildlife rescue group designed a purpose-built trap, fitting it out with items from Valerie’s former home.

    After several weeks, a remotely controlled gate clattered shut behind Valerie and she was caught.

    Cue great celebrations. The searchers were triumphant and the family was delighted. Social media lit up. It was a canine reenactment of one of settler Australia’s enduring narratives: the lost child rescued from the hostile bush.

    A dog’s-eye view

    But imagine if Valerie’s story was told from a more dog-centred perspective. Valerie found herself alone in a strange place and took the opportunity to run away. She embarked on a new life in which she was responsible for herself and could exercise the intelligence inherited from her boar-hunting ancestors.

    No longer required to be a good girl, Valerie applied her own judgement – that notorious dachshund “stubbornness” – to evade predators, fill her stomach and pass her days.

    Some commentators assumed Valerie must have been fed by anonymous benefactors – reflecting a widely held view that pets have limited abilities.

    Veterinary experts, however, said her diet likely consisted of small birds, mammals and reptiles she killed herself – as well as roadkill, other carrion and faeces.

    Valerie was clearly good at life on the lam. Unlike the human competitors in the series Alone Australia, she did not waste away when left in an island wilderness. Instead, she gained 1.8 kg of muscle – and was so stocky she no longer fit the old harness her humans brought to collect her. She had literally outgrown her former bonds.

    Valerie could have sought shelter with the island’s humans at any time, but chose not to. She had to be actively trapped. Once returned to her humans, she needed time to reacclimatise to life as a pet.

    Not all missing pets thrive in the wild. But all this raises the question of whether Valerie’s rescue would be better understood as a forced return from a full life of freedom, to a diminished existence in captivity?

    A long history of pets thriving in the wild

    Other examples exist which suggest an animal’s best life can take place outside the constraints of being a pet.

    Exotic parrots have fled lives in cages to form urban flocks. In the United States, 25 species initially imported as pets have set up set up self-sustaining, free-living populations across 23 states.

    Or take the red-eared slider turtle, which is native to parts of the US and Mexico. It’s illegal to keep the turtles as pets in Australia, but some of those smuggled in have later been released into urban wetlands where they have established large and widespread populations.

    Cats are perhaps the most notorious example of escaped pets thriving on their own in Australia. They numbers in the millions, in habitats from cities to the Simpson Desert to the Snowy Mountains, showing how little they need human assistance.

    One mark of their success is their prodigious size. At up to 7kg, free-living cats can be more than twice the weight of the average domestic cat.

    Around the world, exotic former companion mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects have all established populations large enough to pose problems for other species.

    Rethinking animals as pets

    Of course, I am not advocating that pets be released to the wild, creating new problems. But I do believe current pet-keeping practices are due for reconsideration.

    A dramatic solution would be to take the animal out of the pet relationship. Social robots that look like seals and teddy bears are already available to welcome you home, mirror your emotions and offer up cuddles without the cost to other animals.

    A less radical option is to rethink the idea of animals as “pets” and instead see them as equals.

    Some people already enjoy these unforced bonds. Magpies, for example, are known to have strong allegiances with each other and are sometimes willing to extend those connections to humans in multi-species friendships.

    As for Valerie, she did make “her little happy sounds” when reunited with her humans. But she might look back with nostalgia to her 529 days of freedom on Kangaroo Island.

    Nancy Cushing receives funding from the State Library of New South Wales as the Coral Thomas Fellow. She is a member of the executive committee of the Australian Historical Association.

    – ref. It’s time to face an uncomfortable truth: maybe our pampered pets would be better off without us – https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-face-an-uncomfortable-truth-maybe-our-pampered-pets-would-be-better-off-without-us-256903

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: More women are using medical cannabis – but new research shows barriers push some into illegal markets

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vinuli Withanarachchie, PhD candidate, College of Health, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

    Getty Images

    The number of women using medicinal cannabis is growing in New Zealand and overseas. They use cannabis treatment for general conditions such as pain, anxiety, inflammation and nausea, as well as gynaecological conditions, including endometriosis, pelvic floor conditions, and menopause.

    However, their experiences with medicinal cannabis remain under-explored in research and overlooked in policy and regulation. As our work shows, they face several gender-specific barriers to accessing medicinal cannabis. Some of these hurdles lead women to seeking cannabis from illegal markets.

    New Zealand introduced the medicinal cannabis scheme five years ago to enable access to legal, safe and quality-controlled cannabis products for any condition a doctor would deem suitable for a prescription.

    A recent analysis found the number of medicinal cannabis products dispensed has increased more than 14-fold since 2020, with more than 160,000 prescriptions administered during 2023/2024.

    In the first two years of the scheme, women were the primary recipients of medicinal cannabis prescriptions. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of prescriptions issued to female patients doubled to 47,633.

    Our findings from a large-scale national survey show that although women perceive physicians as supportive of prescribing medicinal cannabis, they were less likely to have prescriptions than men. This is similar to findings from Australia.

    Potential reasons include the cost of visiting health professionals, unpaid care-giving duties, lower workforce participation and a pay disparity – all creating barriers to accessing health services.

    Women were also more likely not to disclose their medicinal cannabis use to others, citing it would be less accepted by society because of their gender.

    Gendered risks in illegal cannabis markets

    Our latest study aligned with Australia in finding that women often seek cannabis from illegal sources because of perceived lower prices. Many could not financially sustain accessing legal prescriptions because medicinal cannabis is not funded by New Zealand’s drug-buying agency Pharmac.

    Study participants discussed the health risks of accessing illegal cannabis such as consuming products without knowing how strong they are or whether they have been contaminated with harmful substances.

    They also characterised illegal cannabis markets as unsafe and intimidating for women, with little legal protection and the presence of predatory male sellers. Some even described gender-specific experiences of physical assault, intimidation and sexual harassment, particularly when cannabis buying occurred in drug houses or locations controlled by the seller.

    Women accessing medicinal cannabis in illegal markets increasingly relied on female suppliers, viewing them as safer and more reliable. Some also helped connect others to these suppliers and used social media to warn other women of unsafe male suppliers. This created informal women-led support networks for access.

    Accessing legal prescriptions

    Women increasingly use cannabis clinics to access pain treatments.
    Getty Images

    One of our recent studies found many women begin their journeys with medicinal cannabis online via social media, often leading them to cannabis clinics with a strong digital presence. Women are now a growing demographic for specialised medicinal cannabis clinics in New Zealand and in other countries.

    Cannabis clinics have a reputation among medicinal cannabis consumers for being more knowledgeable and positive about treatments than general practitioners and other health providers. Women have been encouraged by positive online testimonies from other women using cannabis treatments for gynaecological and other conditions.

    Female medicinal cannabis patients also described the financial burden of accessing a prescription, including consultation fees and the costs of products as barriers to access.

    Their relationships with their GPs strongly influenced their decision to seek a prescription. Those with prior experiences of having their pain underestimated or misdiagnosed in mainstream care were more likely to source legal medicinal cannabis from cannabis clinics.

    Policy and practice

    The current scientific evidence for using medicinal cannabis for gynaecological conditions is still emerging. Clinical trials are under way in Australia to evaluate cannabis treatment for endometriosis and period pain.

    Women’s reliance on online sources and personal recommendations to learn about medicinal cannabis highlights a gap in public awareness and government education about the legal prescription scheme. Hesitance to discuss and recommend cannabis treatment among GPs also persists as a barrier to access.

    Online peer networks on social media platforms are promoting women’s agency and informing their decision making around medicinal cannabis, but also raise the risks of misinformation.

    Although marketing of medicinal cannabis to women may improve their engagement with the prescription scheme, it may also put them in a vulnerable position where they are encouraged to pursue expensive treatment options which may not be effective.

    The collective findings from our studies indicate complex financial, social and systemic factors affecting safe and equitable access to medicinal cannabis for women. To improve women’s engagement with New Zealand’s medicinal cannabis scheme, we suggest GPs should have informed and non-stigmatising discussions with female patients to explore when medicinal cannabis might be an appropriate treatment option.

    Better access to good official consumer information about medicinal cannabis and greater investment in clinical trials for gynaecological conditions would also improve and support women’s decision making about their health.

    Vinuli Withanarachchie receives funding from the Health Research Council for research on cannabis policy reform.

    Chris Wilkins receives funding from the Health Research Council for studies on cannabis policy and vaping.

    Marta Rychert receives funding for cannabis research from the Royal Society of NZ and the Health Research Council.

    – ref. More women are using medical cannabis – but new research shows barriers push some into illegal markets – https://theconversation.com/more-women-are-using-medical-cannabis-but-new-research-shows-barriers-push-some-into-illegal-markets-258797

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Inaccurate and misogynistic: why we need to make the term ‘hysterectomy’ history

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Theresa Larkin, Associate Professor of Medical Sciences, University of Wollongong

    Panuwat Dangsungnoen/Getty Images

    Have you had a tonsillectomy (your tonsils taken out), appendectomy (your appendix removed) or lumpectomy (removal of a lump from your breast)? The suffix “ectomy” denotes surgical removal of the named body part, so these terms give us a clear idea of what the procedure entails.

    So why is the removal of the uterus called a hysterectomy and not a uterectomy?

    The name hysterectomy is rooted in a mental health condition – “hysteria” – that was once believed to affect women. But we now know this condition doesn’t exist.

    Continuing to call this significant operation a hysterectomy both perpetuates misogyny and hampers people’s understanding of what it is.

    From the defunct condition ‘hysteria’

    Hysteria was a psychiatric condition first formally defined in the 5th century BCE. It had many symptoms, including excessive emotion, irritability, anxiety, breathlessness and fainting.

    But hysteria was only diagnosed in women. Male physicians at the time claimed these symptoms were caused by a “wandering womb”. They believed the womb (uterus) moved around the body looking for sperm and disrupted other organs.

    Because the uterus was blamed for hysteria, the treatment was to remove it. This procedure was called a hysterectomy. Sadly, many women had their healthy uterus unnecessarily removed and most died.

    The word “hysteria” did originally came from the ancient Greek word for uterus, “hystera”. But the modern Greek word for uterus is “mitra”, which is where words such as “endometrium” come from.

    Hysteria was only removed as an official medical diagnosis in 1980. It was finally recognised it does not exist and is sexist.

    “Hysterectomy” should also be removed from medical terminology because it continues to link the uterus to hysteria.

    Common but confusing

    About one in three Australian women will have their uterus removed. A hysterectomy is one of the most common surgeries worldwide. It’s used to treat conditions including:

    • abnormal uterine bleeding (heavy bleeding)
    • uterine fibroids (benign tumours)
    • uterine prolapse (when the uterus protrudes down into the vagina)
    • adenomyosis (when the inner layer of the uterus grows into the muscle layer)
    • cancer.

    However, in a survey colleagues and I did of almost 500 Australian adults, which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, one in five people thought hysterectomy meant removal of the ovaries, not the uterus.

    It’s true some hysterectomies for cancer do also remove the ovaries. A hysterectomy or partial hysterectomy is the removal of only the uterus, a total hysterectomy removes the uterus and cervix, while a radical hysterectomy usually removes the uterus, cervix, uterine tubes and ovaries.

    There are important differences between these hysterectomies, so they should be named to clearly indicate the nature of the surgery.

    Research has shown ambiguous terminology such as “hysterectomy” is associated with low patient understanding of the procedure and the female anatomy involved.

    There are different types of hysterectomies, and the label can be confusing.
    Olena Yakobchuk/Shutterstock

    Uterectomy should be used for removal of the uterus, in combination with the medical terms for removal of the cervix, uterine tubes and ovaries as needed. For example, a uterectomy plus cervicectomy would refer to the removal of the uterus and the cervix.

    This could help patients understand what is (and isn’t) being removed from their bodies and increase clarity for the wider public.

    Other female body parts and procedures have male names

    There are many eponyms (something named after a person) in anatomy and medicine, such as the Achilles tendon and Parkinson’s disease. They are almost exclusively the names of white men.

    Eponyms for female anatomy and procedures include the Fallopian tubes, Pouch of Douglas, and Pap smear.

    The anatomical term for Fallopian tubes is uterine tubes. “Uterine” indicates these are attached to the uterus, which reinforces their important role in fertility.

    The Pouch of Douglas is the space between the rectum and uterus. Using the anatomical name (rectouterine pouch) is important, because this a common site for endometriosis and can explain any associated bowel symptoms.

    Pap smear gives no indication of its location or function. The new cervical screening test is named exactly that, which clarifies it samples cells of the cervix. This helps people understand this tests for risk of cervical cancer.

    Language matters in medicine and health care

    Language in medicine impacts patient care and health. It needs to be accurate and clear, not include words associated with bias or discrimination, and not disempower a person.

    For these reasons, the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists recommends removing eponyms from scientific and medical communication.

    Meanwhile, experts have rightly argued it’s time to rename the hysterectomy to uterectomy.

    A hysterectomy is an emotional procedure with not only physical but also psychological effects. Not directly referring to the uterus perpetuates the historical disregard of female reproductive anatomy and functions. Removing the link to hysteria and renaming hysterectomy to uterectomy would be a simple but symbolic change.

    Educators, medical doctors and science communicators will play an important role in using the term uterectomy instead of hysterectomy. Ultimately, the World Health Organization should make official changes in the International Classification of Health Interventions.

    In line with increasing awareness and discussions around female reproductive health and medical misogyny, now is the time to improve terminology. We must ensure the names of body parts and medical procedures reflect the relevant anatomy.

    Theresa Larkin 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. Inaccurate and misogynistic: why we need to make the term ‘hysterectomy’ history – https://theconversation.com/inaccurate-and-misogynistic-why-we-need-to-make-the-term-hysterectomy-history-257972

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: How do sleep trackers work, and are they worth it? A sleep scientist breaks it down

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dean J. Miller, Senior Lecturer, Appleton Institute, HealthWise Research Group, CQUniversity Australia

    Many smartwatches, fitness and wellness trackers now offer sleep tracking among their many functions.

    Wear your watch or ring to bed, and you’ll wake up to a detailed sleep report telling you not just how long you slept, but when each phase happened and whether you had a good night’s rest overall.

    Surfing is done in the ocean, planes fly in the sky, and sleep occurs in the brain. So how can we measure sleep from the wrist or finger?

    The gold standard of sleep measurement

    If you’ve ever had a sleep study or seen someone with dozens of wires attached to their head, body and face, you’ve encountered polysomnography or PSG.

    Eye movements, muscle tone, heart rate and brain activity are measured and assessed by experts to detect which stage of sleep or wakefulness a person is in.

    When we sleep, we cycle through different stages, generally classified as light sleep, slow-wave sleep (also known as deep sleep), and rapid eye movement or REM sleep.

    Each stage has an effect on brain activity, muscle tone and heart rate – which is why sleep scientists need so many wires.

    Accurate? Absolutely. Convenient? Like two left shoes.

    This is where the convenience of wearable at-home sleep trackers comes in.

    What sensors are in sleep trackers?

    Since the 1990s, sleep researchers have been using actigraphy to measure people’s sleep outside the laboratory.

    An actigraphy device is similar to a wristwatch and uses accelerometers to measure the person’s movement. Coupled with sleep diaries, actigraphy assumes a person is awake when they’re moving and asleep when still. Simple.

    While this is a scientifically accepted method of estimating sleep, it’s prone to mislabelling being awake but at rest (such as when reading a book) as sleep.

    There’s one key addition that makes wrist-worn sleep trackers more accurate – PPG or photoplethysmography.

    It’s hard to pronounce, but photoplethysmography is a key driver in the explosion of wearable health tracking.

    It uses those little green lights on the skin-side of the wearable to track the amount of blood passing through your wrist at any given time. Clip-on pulse oximeters used by doctors are the same type of tech.

    The addition of PPG to a wrist tracker allows for the measurement of raw data like heart rate and breathing rate. From this data, the wearable can estimate a number of physiological metrics, including sleep stages.

    Since fitness wearables already have accelerometers and PPG to track your physical activity and heart rate, it makes sense to use these sensors to track sleep too. But how accurate are they?

    Many fitness trackers leverage the sensors used to measure your fitness activities and heart rate for sleep tracking.
    The Conversation

    How do scientists test sleep trackers?

    Two main factors determine the accuracy of sleep trackers. How well does the device detect whether you’re asleep or awake? And how well can it distinguish the sleep stages?

    To answer these questions, sleep scientists conduct validation studies. Participants sleep overnight in a laboratory while wearing both a sleep tracker and undergoing PSG.

    Then, scientists compare the data from both methods in 30-second blocks called “epochs”. That means for a nine-hour sleep there will be 1,080 epochs to compare.

    If both the device and PSG indicate “sleep” for the same epoch, they’re in agreement. If the device indicates “wake” and PSG indicates “sleep” for the same epoch, that’s considered an error. The same is done for sleep stages.

    How accurate are sleep trackers?

    In a 2022 study of several popular trackers, most correctly identified more than 90% of sleep epochs. But because light sleep and restful wake are so similar, wearables struggle more to estimate wakefulness, correctly identifying between 26% and 73% of wake epochs.

    When it comes to sleep stages, wearables are less precise, correctly identifying between 53% and 60% of sleep stage epochs. However, for some devices and some sleep stages the precision can be greater. A recent validation study showed that a latest generation ring-shaped wearable didn’t differ from PSG for estimating light sleep and slow wave sleep.

    In short, most modern sleep trackers do a decent job of estimating your total sleep each night. Some are more accurate for sleep staging, but this level of detail isn’t essential for improving the basics of your sleep.

    Do I need a sleep tracker?

    If you’re struggling with sleep, you should speak to your doctor. A sleep tracker can be a useful tool to help track your sleep goals, but ultimately your behaviour is what will improve sleep.

    Keeping regular bedtimes and wake-up times, having a distraction-free sleep space, and keeping home lighting low in the evenings can all help to improve your sleep.

    If you love tracking your sleep, make sure your device has been independently validated. While sleep stage data may not be essential, devices that perform well in estimating sleep stage also tend to be more accurate at detecting when you’re asleep or awake. When reviewing your data, look at long term trends in sleep rather than day-to-day variability.

    If you don’t love your sleep tracker, you can take it off or ignore it. For some people, access to sleep data can negatively impact sleep by creating stress and anxiety for getting a perfect night’s sleep. Instead, focus on improving your healthy sleep strategies and pay attention to how you feel during the day.

    Dr Dean J. Miller is a member of a research group at Central Queensland University that receives support for research (i.e., funding, equipment) from WHOOP Inc, a smart device maker.

    – ref. How do sleep trackers work, and are they worth it? A sleep scientist breaks it down – https://theconversation.com/how-do-sleep-trackers-work-and-are-they-worth-it-a-sleep-scientist-breaks-it-down-258304

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Africa: Empowering youth, protecting the planet: United Nations Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS) partners with Somali universities to train future environmental advocates


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    Twenty-five students from SIMAD University in Mogadishu were given one day training on the practical management of wastewater and solid waste to help prevent pollution of the environment. The session took place at the UNSOS environmental installations, namely the wastewater treatment plants and waste management yard.  This training aimed to equip students with hands-on skills for effective waste handling and environmental protection.

    This initiative is spearheaded by the UNSOS Environmental Unit, with the aim of linking theoretical knowledge with practical management of the environment, for the benefit of fourth-year public health students. The initiative directly addresses the practical educational gaps in science, which is critical for Somalia’s environmental protection. “UNSOS is committed to supporting locals through the building the capacity as part of our environmental management system,” says Jama, UNSOS Environmental Affairs Officer.

    Since the inception of the program in November 2024, UNSOS has trained 58 undergraduate students in solid waste and wastewater management at the UN facilities in Mogadishu. Jazeera University was the first to partner with UNSOS on this initiative, and it has now been joined by SIMAD University. By collaborating with academic institutions, UNSOS aims to foster a new generation of environmental advocates and professionals who can contribute to Somalia’s environmental protection and public health goals.

    “I have learnt a lot that will enhance my experience. I have practically undertaken what I studied in theory, Garbage is not all waste; it includes materials that can be beneficial to the people and the environment, instead of just being dumped around. We can profit from reusable and recyclable materials like plastics, rather than allow them to negatively impact our health and the environment”, said Muna Hassan Warsame, a passionate advocate for environmental change in her final year of Public Health at SIMAD University. =

    The students’ first field visit was to a waste management facility, a central hub for waste collected daily from 43 designated points within the UN and African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) compounds. There, they observed the critical segregation process, a routine operation aimed at reducing the volume for final disposal and enhancing recycling efficiency.

    Distributed by APO Group on behalf of United Nations Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS).

    MIL OSI Africa –

  • MIL-OSI: Heirloom Debuts a New Way to Store and Control Your Digital Memory

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    Miami, Fl , June 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Heirloom, a first-of-its-kind platform designed to return ownership of memory, data, and digital presence back to the people who create it, announces today the launch of its public pre-sale. Founded by veteran technology entrepreneur Angela Benton — a trailblazer in ethical data ownership — Heirloom marks a bold new chapter in advancing human-centered technology.

    It’s become commonplace for AI systems to be trained on scraped, unconsented human expression; Heirloom offers an entirely new approach: a personal AI memory layer that remains sovereign, portable, and rooted in values. Built to evolve with you—not extract from you—Heirloom ensures that your creative output, life data, and digital identity are protected, remembered, and governed on your terms.

    “We’re at a turning point where AI can either deepen our disconnection or amplify our humanity,” said Benton. “Heirloom is designed to ensure it does the latter. It’s not just a tool—it’s a stance. A refusal to let our data, our creativity, and our essence become raw material for systems we don’t control. This is memory with agency. Technology with a conscience. A future that puts people—not platforms—at the center.”

    At its core, Heirloom is a human-centered memory protocol that allows individuals to securely capture and share their data across AI models, platforms, and agents—without needing to reintroduce or retrain systems each time. Your preferences, your outputs, your life’s work remain intact, verified, and yours.

    The Heirloom ecosystem includes three key elements:

    • Heirloom Identity Token: Verifies each user as a unique human and grants governance access to the Founding Circle
    • Provenance Token: Certifies data as human-generated for sharing, validation, and protection
    • Heirloom Token (HRLM): Fuels the ecosystem, rewards regenerative participation, and grants early access (now in pre-sale)

    “We’re not building another AI product,” Benton added. “We’re building connective tissue—between people, memory, and meaning. Heirloom is modular and lightweight, but deeply human at its core. This is infrastructure for the world we want to live in.”

    Heirloom is the first visible expression of a larger movement: the rise of regenerative tech—systems that don’t just extract and scale, but circulate, honor, and sustain. Heirloom is designed to evolve with its community, inviting creators, builders, and cultural stewards to help shape the future of human-centered AI.

    Heirloom offers a new kind of infrastructure for AI—lightweight, modular, and governed by its community. It ensures that individuals can retain control over their data, memory, and identity as AI continues to evolve. With a focus on data portability, verified authorship, and ethical use, Heirloom is setting a new standard for how people and technology can move forward together.

    Explore the vision and be part of shaping the future of human-centered AI at: www.yourheirloom.ai

    About Angela Benton

    Angela Benton is a visionary entrepreneur, public thinker, and longtime advocate for ethical innovation. She previously founded Streamlytics, advised global corporations on regenerative data strategy, and launched the first tech accelerator for underrepresented founders in Silicon Valley. Her work has influenced how AI and data are used across industries, helping founders and institutions raise over $150M in capital while advancing people-first models of technology.

    About Heirloom

    Heirloom is a human-centered memory protocol that gives individuals control over their data, identity, and digital presence in the age of AI. Built to protect and verify human contributions across platforms and systems, Heirloom makes AI memory portable, secure, and aligned with the people who generate it. Using tools like decentralized identity, data provenance, and regenerative design, Heirloom offers an alternative to extractive data systems—one that prioritizes individual agency and long-term value.

    Press inquiries

    Heirloom
    https://www.yourheirloom.ai
    Angela Benton
    press@yourheirloom.ai

    A video accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.youtube.com/embed/R3cKxKZepUw

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Gulf States want no winner in the conflict between Israel and Iran

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mira Al Hussein, Research Fellow at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh

    When Israel assassinated a number of senior Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists on June 13, there was an initial euphoria among some ruling elites in the Gulf. They saw it as a sign of Iran’s diminishing regional threat.

    Relations between Gulf states and Iran have been fraught since 1979 when Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, vowed to export the revolution that had brought him to power that same year. This set off decades of ideologically charged proxy conflicts, with Gulf states viewing Iran as the principal destabilising force in the Middle East.

    But the recent euphoria has given way to unease as the push by Israel – and now the US – for regime change in Tehran has become clear. Following US strikes against Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend, US president Donald Trump has floated the idea of overthrowing the government to “make Iran great again”.

    Retaliatory attacks by Iran on American forces at bases in Qatar and Iraq have now brought the conflict closer to home. The strikes have prompted Gulf states to close their airspaces, while Qatar has warned of its right to respond directly “in a manner equivalent with the nature and scale” of Iran’s attack. What effect the attacks will have on the involvement of Gulf countries in the conflict will soon become clear.

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

    The Gulf states have long worked to keep Iran’s influence in check without attempting to topple its leadership. They have sought rapprochement, with Saudi Arabia and Iran reestablishing diplomatic ties in 2023 and reopening embassies in each other’s countries.

    Gulf leaders view the alternative to warmer relations – be it a chaotic regime change or a globally interconnected or expansionist Iran – as possibly even more destabilising for the Gulf region and its economic ambitions.

    Iran, for all its regional adventurism, is still regarded in the Gulf as an organic part of the Middle East. It is a civilisation with deep, ancient roots and an uninterrupted history of co-existence and cultural co-creation within the Islamic world.

    This stands in contrast to how Israel is perceived. Some Gulf states have established diplomatic relations with Israel since 2020, under the framework of the Abraham Accords. But there remains a wider perception – particularly among citizens of these countries – that Israel is an imposed colonial presence whose threat to regional stability is growing.

    Iran has hardly been a benign actor. Its government has played a destabilising role across the Arab world, from propping up the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to supporting armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. And now it has attacked the sovereign territory of two Gulf countries.

    It also continues to occupy three islands that are claimed by the United Arab Emirates: Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa. Iran’s interventions have left behind a trail of sectarianism, militarisation and humanitarian crises.

    Yet Gulf leaders separate the actions of the Iranian regime from the people of Iran. Repeated waves of protests within Iran, particularly the women-led uprisings of recent years, have reinforced the sense that ordinary Iranians are themselves victims of a repressive regime.

    There’s empathy within the Gulf for Iranian society, coupled with recognition of the historic and cultural ties that bind the region and its people. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, described Iran as a “neighbour forever” in 2022, and with this neighbourliness comes a preference for stability over collapse.

    Gulf states would rather not see Iran plunge into chaos. This could unleash humanitarian crises and refugee flows that would be morally troubling and economically disastrous for the region.

    No decisive winner

    While there is no appetite within the Gulf for regime change in Tehran, views expressed in government-controlled media suggest there is interest in seeing a political transformation in Israel. It seems to me that the Gulf states would prefer neither Iran nor Israel to emerge as a decisive winner in this military confrontation. A prolonged war of attrition weakens both, reducing the threats they pose to Arab sovereignty and regional stability.

    Such a conflict could result in political change in Israel that sees the end of oppressive policies against Palestinians and curbs to regional aggression. This would ease the political cost of normalising relations with Israel. Current efforts to integrate Israel into the regional order place Gulf leaders in an awkward position, appearing to side with a state that routinely violates Arab rights.

    A regime change in Iran, particularly one that produces a nationalist, pro-western government, would present new complications for the Gulf. A more internationally connected and economically ambitious Iran could overshadow Gulf economies and revive old territorial disputes.

    A prolonged conflict would, of course, raise the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz emerging as a flashpoint. A closure, which Iran is reportedly discussing as a possibility, would disrupt one-fifth of the world’s oil supply and plunge global markets into turmoil.

    Neither side may actively seek this, but the risk of miscalculation is high. For Gulf economies, whose futures are tied to global energy markets and diversification projects, such an outcome would be catastrophic.

    However, at least for now, Gulf countries seem relatively calm about the prospects of a closure. They issued a series of statements on June 22, expressing concern over the US strikes on Iran and calling for restraint. But the tone of their statements was rather measured.

    The mood in the Middle East appears to be shifting. As one Emirati analyst, Mohammed Baharoon, recently warned: “Israel risks seeing itself as Thor, the mythical deity whose real status as a god is related to his hammer. This is dangerous for Israel’s future in the region and the world.”

    Baharoon added on social media: “Hammer-wielding Israel will have very limited space in a region that seeks economic partnerships over security alliances.” In other words, the region’s priorities are shifting, and Israel’s overreliance on military power is increasingly at odds with the future that the Gulf leaders are trying to shape.

    They wish to make the region an economic magnet for investment, not a cinematic backdrop for perpetual conflict.

    Mira Al Hussein is a non-resident fellow with DAWN MENA and Gulf International Forum.

    – ref. Gulf States want no winner in the conflict between Israel and Iran – https://theconversation.com/gulf-states-want-no-winner-in-the-conflict-between-israel-and-iran-259471

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI USA: OSTP Issues Agency Guidance for Gold Standard Science

    US Senate News:

    Source: US Whitehouse
    WASHINGTON, DC – Today, as called for in President Trump’s recent Executive Order, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios issued guidance to federal agencies on incorporating Gold Standard Science tenets into their research activities.  
    The EO directs federal research agencies to establish and strengthen practices related to reproducibility, transparency, falsifiability, interdisciplinary research, and merit-based peer review, as well as communicating uncertainties, recognizing negative or null results, and disclosing conflicts on interests. Within 60 days, agencies are required to report back publicly on relevant initiatives, including how Gold Standard Science is reflected in the agency’s culture, funding opportunities, award selection and reporting, and other research activities.
    “President Trump’s Gold Standard Science EO will transform the conduct and management of federal science, from research design to public communication, in order to strengthen scientific inquiry, rebuild public trust, and ensure the U.S. continues to be the global leader in rigorous, evidence-based science,” said Director Kratsios. “But federal agencies are only one part of our nation’s research ecosystem. American universities, scientific journals, industry and philanthropic leaders all have a crucial role in improving the overall quality of research, and we encourage this executive action to serve as a model for the entire scientific enterprise.”
    In the memo, Director Kratsios says that “the need for Gold Standard Science stems from the crucial role of scientific integrity in tackling complex challenges to address critical areas, such as energy innovation and national security. In an age of rapid technological progress and heightened public scrutiny, federal science, and its use in federal decision making, must be beyond reproach.”
    President Trump is ushering in the Golden Age of American Innovation and is committed to maintaining our global technological dominance. However, first the relationship between the public and the scientific community must be rebuilt. President Trump’s Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order provides a new standard and plan to improve the federal scientific enterprise.
    Read the memo HERE.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Mission Accomplished! Artemis ROADS III National Challenge Competitors Celebrate their Achievements

    Source: NASA

    The NASA Science Activation program’s Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pathways (NESSP) team has successfully concluded the 2024–2025 Artemis ROADS III National Challenge, an educational competition that brought real NASA mission objectives to student teams (and reached more than 1,500 learners) across the country. From December 2024 through May 2025, over 300 teams of upper elementary, middle, and high school students from 22 states participated, applying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) skills in exciting and creative ways.
    Participants tackled eight Mission Objectives inspired by NASA’s Artemis missions, which aim to return humans to the Moon. Students explored challenges such as:

    Designing a water purification system for the Moon inspired by local water cycles
    Developing a Moon-based agricultural plan based on experimental results
    Programming a rover to autonomously navigate lunar tunnels
    Engineering and refining a human-rated water bottle rocket capable of safely returning a “chip-stronaut” to Earth
    Envisioning their future careers through creative projects like graphic novels or video interviews
    Exploring NASA’s Artemis program through a new Artemis-themed Lotería game

    In-person hub events were hosted by Northern Arizona University, Central Washington University, and Montana State University, where teams from Washington, Montana, and Idaho gathered to present their work, collaborate with peers, and experience life on a college campus. Students also had the chance to connect virtually with NASA scientists and engineers through NESSP’s NASA Expert Talks series.
    “Artemis ROADS III is NESSP’s eighth ROADS challenge, and I have to say, I think it’s the best one yet. It’s always inspiring to see so many students across the country engage in a truly meaningful STEM experience. I heard from several students and educators that participating in the challenge completely changed their perspective on science and engineering. I believe that’s because this program is designed to let students experience the joy of discovery and invention—driven by both teamwork and personal creativity—that real scientists and engineers love about their work. We also show students the broad range of STEM expertise NASA relies on to plan and carry out a mission like Artemis. Most importantly, it gives them a chance to feel like they are part of the NASA mission, which can be truly transformative.” – Dr. Darci Snowden, Director, NESSP
    NESSP proudly recognizes the following teams for completing all eight Mission Objectives and the Final Challenge:

    Space Pringles, 3rd-5th Grade, San Antonio, TX 
    Space Axolotls, 3rd-5th Grade, Roberts, MT 
    TEAM Wild, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Pessimistic Penguins, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Dwarf Planets, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Astronomical Rovers, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Cosmic Honeybuns, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Houston we have a Problem, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    FBI Wanted List, 6th-8th Grade, Eagle Mountain, UT 
    Lunar Legion, 6th-8th Grade, San Antonio, TX 
    Artemis Tax-Free Space Stallions, 6th-8th Grade, Egg Harbor, NJ 
    Aquila, 6th-8th Grade, Gooding, ID 
    Space Warriors, 6th-8th Grade, Wapato, WA 
    Team Cygnus, 6th-8th Grade, Red Lodge, MT 
    Maple RocketMen, 6th-8th Grade, Northbrook, IL 
    RGB Hawks, 6th-8th Grade, Sagle, ID 
    The Blue Moon Bigfoots, 6th-8th Grade, Medford, OR 
    W.E.P.Y.C.K., 6th-8th Grade, Roberts, MT 
    Lunar Dawgz, 6th-8th Grade, Safford, AZ 
    ROSEBUD ROCKETEERS, 6th-8th Grade, Rosebud, MT 
    The Cosmic Titans, 6th-8th Grade, Thomson Falls, MT 
    The Chunky Space Monkeys, 6th-8th Grade, Naches, WA 
    ROSEBUD RED ANGUS, 9th-12th Grade, Rosebud, MT 
    Bulky Bisons, 9th-12th Grade, Council Grove, KS 
    The Falling Stars, 9th-12th Grade, Thomson Falls, MT 
    The Roadkillers, 9th-12th Grade, Thomson Falls, MT 
    The Goshawks, 9th-12th Grade, Thomson Falls, MT 
    Sequim Cosmic Catalysts, 9th-12th Grade, Sequim, WA 
    Spuddie Buddies, 9th-12th Grade, Moses Lake, WA 
    Astrocoquí 2, 9th-12th Grade, Mayaguez, PR 
    Big Sky Celestials, 9th-12th Grade, Billings, MT 
    TRYOUTS, 9th-12th Grade, Columbus, MT 
    Cosmonaughts, 9th-12th Grade, Columbus, MT 
    TCCS 114, 9th-12th Grade, Tillamook, OR 
    Marvin’s Mighty Martians, 9th-12th Grade, Simms, TX

    You can see highlights of these teams’ work in the Virtual Recognition Ceremony video on the NESSP YouTube channel. The presentation also features the teams selected to travel to Kennedy Space Center in August of 2025, the ultimate prize for these future space explorers!
    In addition to student engagement, the ROADS program provided professional development workshops and NGSS-aligned classroom resources to support K–12 educators. Teachers are invited to explore these materials and register for the next round of workshops, beginning in August 2025: https://nwessp.org/professional-development-registration.
    For more information about NESSP, its programs, partners, and the ROADS National Challenge, visit www.nwessp.org or contact info@nwessp.org.
     ———–
    NASA’s Northwest Earth and Space Science Pathways’ (NESSP) project is supported by NASA cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC22M0006 and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn/about-science-activation/

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Starts Unpacking Boxwork Formations

    Source: NASA

    [embedded content]
    Drag your mouse or move your phone to pan around within this 360-degree view to explore the boxwork patterns on Mars that NASA’s Curiosity is investigating for the first time. The rover captured the 291 images that make up this mosaic between May 15 and May 18.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

    The rover recently drilled a sample from a new region with features that could reveal whether Mars’ subsurface once provided an environment suitable for life.
    New images from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover show the first close-up views of a region scientists had previously observed only from orbit. The images and data being collected are already raising new questions about how the Martian surface was changing billions of years ago. The Red Planet once had rivers, lakes, and possibly an ocean. Although scientists aren’t sure why, its water eventually dried up and the planet transformed into the chilly desert it is today.
    By the time Curiosity’s current location formed, the long-lived lakes were gone in Gale Crater, the rover’s landing area, but water was still percolating under the surface­. The rover found dramatic evidence of that groundwater when it encountered crisscrossing low ridges, some just a few inches tall, arranged in what geologists call a boxwork pattern. The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks and fissures, hardening and becoming cementlike. Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within.

    The ridges Curiosity has seen so far look a bit like a crumbling curb. The boxwork patterns stretch across miles of a layer on Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain whose foothills the rover has been climbing since 2014. Intriguingly, boxwork patterns haven’t been spotted anywhere else on the mountain, either by Curiosity or orbiters passing overhead.
    “A big mystery is why the ridges were hardened into these big patterns and why only here,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we drive on, we’ll be studying the ridges and mineral cements to make sure our idea of how they formed is on target.”
    Important to the boxwork patterns’ history is the part of the mountain where they’re found. Mount Sharp consists of multiple layers, each of which formed during different eras of ancient Martian climate. Curiosity essentially “time travels” as it ascends from the oldest to youngest layers, searching for signs of water and environments that could have supported ancient microbial life.
    The rover is currently exploring a layer with an abundance of salty minerals called magnesium sulfates, which form as water dries up. Their presence here suggests this layer emerged as the climate became drier. Remarkably, the boxwork patterns show that even in the midst of this drying, water was still present underground, creating changes seen today.

    Scientists hope to gain more insight into why the boxwork patterns formed here, and Mars recently provided some unexpected clues. The bedrock between the boxwork ridges has a different composition than other layers of Mount Sharp. It also has lots of tiny fractures filled with white veins of calcium sulfate, another salty mineral left behind as groundwater trickles through rock cracks. Similar veins were plentiful on lower layers of the mountain, including one enriched with clays, but had not been spotted in the sulfate layer until now.
    “That’s really surprising,” said Curiosity’s deputy project scientist, Abigail Fraeman of JPL. “These calcium sulfate veins used to be everywhere, but they more or less disappeared as we climbed higher up Mount Sharp. The team is excited to figure out why they’ve returned now.”
    New Terrain, New Findings
    On June 8, Curiosity set out to learn about the unique composition of the bedrock in this area, using the drill on the end of its robotic arm to snag a sample of a rock nicknamed “Altadena.” The rover then dropped the pulverized sample into instruments within its body for more detailed analysis.
    Drilling additional samples from more distant boxwork patterns, where the mineral ridges are much larger, will help the mission make sense of what they find. The team will also search for organic molecules and other evidence of an ancient habitable environment preserved in the cemented ridges.
    As Curiosity continues to explore, it will be leaving a new assortment of nicknames behind, as well. To keep track of features on the planet, the mission applies nicknames to each spot the rover studies, from hills it views with its cameras to specific calcium sulfate veins it zaps with its laser. (Official names, such as Aeolis Mons — otherwise known as Mount Sharp — are approved by the International Astronomical Union.)
    The previous names were selected from local sites in Southern California, where JPL is based. The Altadena sample, for instance, bears the name of a community near JPL that was severely burned during January’s Eaton Canyon fire. Now on a new part of their Martian map, the team is selecting names from around Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, Earth’s largest salt flat. This exceptionally dry terrain crosses into Chile’s Atacama Desert, and astrobiologists study both the salt flat and the surrounding desert because of their similarity to Mars’ extreme dryness.
    More About Curiosity
    Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
    For more about Curiosity, visit:
    science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
    News Media Contacts
    Andrew GoodJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-2433andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
    Karen Fox / Molly WasserNASA Headquarters, Washington202-358-1600karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
    2025-080

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Clay Minerals From Mars’ Most Ancient Past?

    Source: NASA

    Recent detections of clay-bearing bedrock on Jezero’s crater rim have the Perseverance Science Team excited and eager to sample.

    Written by Alex Jones, Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College London 

    Since finishing its exploration of spherule-rich stratigraphy at Witch Hazel Hill, Perseverance has been exploring the Krokodillen plateau, a relatively low-lying terrain on the outer slopes of the crater rim. It was in these rocks where the SuperCam instrument began detecting signatures of clay-minerals. These minerals, also known as “phyllosilicates,” are an exciting find as they primarily form by extensive interactions between basaltic rocks and liquid water. Phyllosilicates are also excellent at preserving organic materials, if present, by adsorbing them or encapsulating them within their mineral structure. 
    What’s more, it’s possible that these clay-bearing rocks may be some of the most ancient rocks explored by Perseverance, dating back to a time when Mars may have been warmer and wetter than the present day. Clay-bearing rocks are abundant in the regions around Jezero, and are thought to date to Mars’ Noachian period, around 4 billion years ago. Needless to say, the Science Team were keen to investigate (and eventually sample) these materials. 
    Perseverance performed an initial toe-dip into this clay-bearing unit back in April, creating the Strong Island abrasion patch, before returning back upslope to Witch Hazel Hill to sample some spherule-bearing rocks. Since then, Perseverance has started exploring this clay-bearing unit more extensively, creating the Laknes abrasion (pictured) on Sol 1526.  
    Initial data collected by Perseverance suggests that the clay signature may be variable across the Krokodillen plateau. Next, the Science Team plan to rove around to establish a clear geologic context for these rocks, as well as locating a good site for sampling!

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: NASA Intern Took Career from Car Engines to Cockpits

    Source: NASA

    Some career changes involve small shifts. But for one NASA engineering intern, the leap was much bigger –moving from under the hood of a car to helping air taxis take to the skies.
    Saré Culbertson spent more than a decade in the auto industry and had been working as a service manager in busy auto repair shops. Today, she supports NASA’s Air Mobility Pathfinders project as a flight operations engineer intern at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, through NASA’s Pathways program.

    Saré Culbertson
    NASA Intern

    “NASA has helped me see opportunities I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I realized that being good at something isn’t enough – you have to be passionate about it too.”
    With a strong foundation in mechanical engineering – earning a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Long Beach, Antelope Valley Engineering Program – she graduated magna cum laude and delivered her class’s commencement speech. Culbertson also earned two associate’s degrees, one in engineering and one in fine arts.

    Before making the switch to aeronautics, she worked at car dealerships and independent car repair facilities while in college. She also led quality control efforts to help a manufacturer meet international standards for quality.
    “I never thought land surveying would have anything to do with flying. But it’s a key part of supporting our research with GPS and navigation verification,” Culbertson said. “GPS measures exact positions by analyzing how long signals take to travel from satellites to ground receivers. In aviation testing, it helps improve safety by reducing signal errors and ensuring location data of the aircraft is accurate and reliable.”
    A musician since childhood, Culbertson has also performed in 21 states, playing everything from tuba to trumpet, and even appeared on HBO’s “Silicon Valley” with her tuba. She’s played in ska, punk, and reggae bands and now performs baritone in the Southern Sierra Pops Orchestra.

    The NASA Pathways internship, she says, changed everything. Culbertson was recently accepted into the Master of Science in Flight Test Engineering program at the National Test Pilot School, where she will be specializing in fixed wing performance and flying qualities.
    Her advice for anyone starting out?
    “Listen more than you talk,” she said. “Don’t get so focused on the next promotion that you forget to be great at the job you have now.”
    During her internship, Culbertson is making meaningful contributions toward NASA’s Urban Air Mobility research. She collects location data for test landing sites as part of the first evaluation of an experimental commercial electric vertical takeoff landing aircraft, a significant milestone in the development of next generation aviation technologies. From fixing cars to helping air taxis become a reality, Saré Culbertson is proof that when passion meets persistence, the sky isn’t the limit – it’s just the beginning.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: NASA Fosters Innovative, Far-Out Tech for the Future of Aerospace

    Source: NASA

    Through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, NASA nurtures visionary yet credible concepts that could one day “change the possible” in aerospace, while engaging America’s innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey.  
    These concepts span various disciplines and aim to advance capabilities such as finding resources on distant planets, making space travel safer and more efficient, and even providing benefits to life here on Earth. The NIAC portfolio of studies also includes several solutions and technologies that could help NASA achieve a future human presence on Mars. One concept at a time, NIAC is taking technology concepts from science fiction to reality.  
    Breathing beyond Earth 
    Astronauts have a limited supply of water and oxygen in space, which makes producing and maintaining these resources extremely valuable. One NIAC study investigates a system to separate oxygen and hydrogen gas bubbles in microgravity from water, without touching the water directly. Researchers found the concept can handle power changes, requires less clean water, works in a wide range of temperatures, and is more resistant to bacteria than existing oxygen generation systems for short-term crewed missions. These new developments could make it a great fit for a long trip to Mars.  
    Newly selected for another phase of study, the team wants to understand how the system will perform over long periods in space and consider ways to simplify the system’s build. They plan to test a large version of the system in microgravity in hopes of proving how it may be a game changer for future missions. 
    Detoxifying water on Mars
    Unlike water on Earth, Mars’ water is contaminated with toxic chemical compounds such as perchlorates and chlorates. These contaminants threaten human health even at tiny concentrations and can easily corrode hardware and equipment. Finding a way to remove contaminates from water will benefit future human explorers and prepare them to live on Mars long term. 
    Researchers are creating a regenerative perchlorate reduction system that uses perchlorate reduction pathways from naturally occurring bacteria. Perchlorate is a compound comprised of oxygen and chlorine that is typically used for rocket propellant. These perchlorate reduction pathways can be engineered into a type of bacterium that is known for its remarkable resilience, even in the harsh conditions of space. The system would use these enzymes to cause the biochemical reduction of chlorate and perchlorate to chloride and oxygen, eliminating these toxic molecules from the water. With the technology to detoxify water on Mars, humans could thrive on the Red Planet with an abundant water supply. 
    Tackling deep space radiation exposure 
    Mitochondria are the small structures within cells often called the “powerhouse,” but what if they could also power human health in space? Chronic radiation exposure is among the many threats to long-term human stays in space, including time spent traveling to and from Mars. One NIAC study explores transplanting new, undamaged mitochondria to radiation-damaged cells and investigates cell responses to relevant radiation levels to simulate deep-space travel. Researchers propose using in vitro human cell models – complex 3D structures grown in a lab to mimic aspects of organs – to demonstrate how targeted mitochondria replacement therapy could regenerate cellular function after acute and long-term radiation exposure.  
    While still in early stages, the research could help significantly reduce radiation risks for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. Here on Earth, the technology could also help treat a wide variety of age-related degenerative diseases associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. 
    Suiting up for Mars 
    Mars is no “walk in the park,” which is why specialized spacesuits are essential for future missions. Engineers propose using a digital template to generate custom, cost-effective, high-performance spacesuits. This spacesuit concept uses something called digital thread technology to protect crewmembers from the extreme Martian environment, while providing the mobility to perform daily Mars exploration endeavors, including scientific excursions. 
    This now completed NIAC study focused on mapping key spacesuit components and current manufacturing technologies to digital components, identifying technology gaps, benchmarking required capabilities, and developing a conceptional digital thread model for future spacesuit development and operational support. This research could help astronauts suit up for Mars and beyond in a way like never before.   
    Redefining what’s possible 
    From studying Mars to researching black holes and monitoring the atmosphere of Venus, NIAC concepts help us push the boundaries of exploration. By collaborating with innovators and entrepreneurs, NASA advances concepts for future and current missions while energizing the space economy.  
    If you have a visionary idea to share, you can apply to NIAC’s 2026 Phase I solicitation now until July 15.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Heather Cowardin Safeguards the Future of Space Exploration  

    Source: NASA

    As branch chief of the Hypervelocity Impact and Orbital Debris Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Dr. Heather Cowardin leads a team tasked with a critical mission: characterizing and mitigating orbital debris—space junk that poses a growing risk to satellites, spacecraft, and human spaceflight. 
    Long before Cowardin was a scientist safeguarding NASA’s mission, she was a young girl near Johnson dreaming of becoming an astronaut.  
    “I remember driving down Space Center Boulevard with my mom and seeing people running on the trails,” she said. “I told her, ‘That will be me one day—I promise!’ And she always said, ‘I know, honey—I know you will.’” 

    Heather Cowardin
    Hypervelocity Impact and Orbital Debris Branch Chief

    Today, that childhood vision has evolved into a leadership role at the heart of NASA’s orbital debris research. Cowardin oversees an interdisciplinary team within the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, or ARES. She supports measurements, modeling, risk assessments, and mitigation strategies to ensure the efficiency of space operations.  
    With more than two decades of experience, Cowardin brings expertise and unwavering dedication to one of the agency’s most vital safety initiatives. 
    Her work focuses on characterizing Earth-orbiting objects using optical and near-infrared telescopic and laboratory data. She helped establish and lead the Optical Measurement Center, a specialized facility at Johnson that replicates space-like lighting conditions and telescope orientations to identify debris materials and shapes, and evaluate potential risk. 
    Cowardin supports a range of research efforts, from ground-based and in-situ, or in position, observations to space-based experiments. She has contributed to more than 100 scientific publications and presentations and serves as co-lead on Materials International Space Station Experiment missions, which test the durability of materials on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory. 
    She is also an active member of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, an international forum with the goal of minimizing and mitigating the risks posed by space debris.  

    Her passion was fueled further by a mentor, Dr. James R. Benbrook, a University of Houston space physics professor and radar scientist supporting the Orbital Debris Program Office. “He was a hard-core Texas cowboy and a brilliant physicist,” she said. “He brought me on as a NASA fellow to study orbital debris using optical imaging. After that, I was committed to working at NASA—no matter what it took.” 
    After completing her fellowship, Cowardin began graduate studies at the University of Houston while working full time. Within a year, she accepted a contract position at Johnson, where she helped develop the Optical Measurement Center and supported optical analyses of geosynchronous orbital debris. She soon advanced to optical lead, later serving as a contract project manager and section manager. 

    Heather Cowardin
    Hypervelocity Impact and Orbital Debris Branch Chief

    Building on her growing expertise, Cowardin became the laboratory and in-situ measurements lead for the Orbital Debris Program Office, a program within the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA Headquarters. She led efforts to characterize debris and deliver direct measurement data to support orbital debris engineering models, such as NASA’s Orbital Debris Engineering Model and NASA’s Standard Satellite Breakup Model, while also overseeing major projects like DebriSat.  
    Cowardin was selected as the Orbital Debris and Hypervelocity Integration portfolio scientist, where she facilitated collaboration within the Hypervelocity Impact and Orbital Debris Office—both internally and externally with stakeholders and customers. These efforts laid the foundation for her current role as branch chief. 
    “I’ve really enjoyed reflecting on the path I’ve traveled and looking forward to the challenges and successes that lie ahead with this great team,” she said.  
    One of Cowardin’s proudest accomplishments was earning her doctorate while working full time and in her final trimester of pregnancy. 
    “Nothing speaks to multitasking and time management like that achievement,” Cowardin said. “I use that story to mentor others—it’s proof that you can do both. Now I’m a mom of two boys who inspire me every day. They are my motivation to work harder and show them that dedication and perseverance always pay off.” 

    Throughout her career, Cowardin said one lesson has remained constant: never underestimate yourself. 
    “It’s easy to think, ‘I’m not ready,’ or ‘Someone else will ask the question,’” she said. “But speak up. Every role I’ve taken on felt like a leap, but I embraced it and each time I’ve learned and grown.” 
    She has also learned the value of self-awareness. “It’s scary to ask for feedback, but it’s the best way to identify growth opportunities,” she said. “The next generation will build on today’s work. That’s why we must capture lessons learned and share them. It’s vital to safe and successful operations.” 

    To the Artemis Generation, she hopes to pass on a sense of purpose. 
    “Commitment to a mission leads to success,” she said. “Even if your contributions aren’t immediately visible, they matter. What we do at NASA takes new thinking, new skills, and hard work—but I believe the next generation will raise the bar and lead us beyond low Earth orbit.” 
    When she is not watching over orbital debris, she is lacing up her running shoes. 
    “I’ve completed five half-marathons and I’m training for the 2026 Rock ‘n’ Roll half-marathon in Nashville,” she said. “Running helps me decompress—and yes, I often role-play technical briefings or prep conference talks while I’m out on a jog. Makes for interesting moments when I pass people in the neighborhood!” 

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Africa: Cabo Verde: Unlocking Inclusive Growth Through Increased Resilience and Equal Opportunities


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    Cabo Verde’s economy continues on a strong recovery path, according to the latest Cabo Verde Economic Update 2025, released today by the World Bank. Real GDP in Cabo Verde grew by 7.3% in 2024, supported by robust tourism activity and a modest recovery in agriculture. However, while the country has made notable strides – particularly in macroeconomic management, debt reduction, and poverty alleviation – key vulnerabilities remain. These include reliance on tourism, exposure to external shocks, and fiscal pressures from state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

    The report, titled Unlocking Women’s Economic Potential, analyses the country’s economic growth projections, highlights progress on poverty alleviation, and outlines the structural reforms needed to ensure sustained and inclusive growth. The report also includes a special topic, focused on leveraging women’s economic potential.

    “Cabo Verde’s recovery is a testament to the resilience of its people and institutions. But to transform this rebound into lasting and inclusive prosperity, bold reforms are needed – particularly to improve SOE governance, support women’s economic participation, and diversify the economy,” said Indira Campos, World Bank Resident Representative for Cabo Verde.

    The report notes that inflation dropped to 1% in 2024 – its lowest level in recent years – helping to bring poverty down to 14.4% ($3.65 a day 2017PPP line). Public investment execution increased, debt levels continued to decline, and the current account posted a surplus for the first time in four years.

    Looking ahead, GDP growth is projected at 5.9% in 2025, with poverty expected to fall further. However, the report warns that global uncertainties, commodity price shocks, and climate risks could affect the pace of growth and reform. Among the recommendations, the report calls for accelerated efforts to improve SOE performance, prudence in creating new ventures, and for maintaining fiscal discipline while investing in high-impact projects.

    The report highlights the critical need for policies to ensure growth is inclusive. Despite progress in education and health, Cabo Verdean women continue to face labor market barriers. The report finds that closing gender gaps in employment and earnings could boost GDP by up to 12.2% in the long-term.

    To achieve this, the report recommends:

    • Expanding access to childcare and flexible work arrangements.
    • Promoting women’s skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as in technical and vocational education and training.
    • Tackling employer discrimination and transforming social norms.

    “By aligning reform efforts with inclusive policies, Cabo Verde has a unique opportunity to strengthen resilience, empower more citizens – especially women – and build a more sustainable and equitable future,” said Anna Carlotta Massingue, Senior Country Economist.

    Distributed by APO Group on behalf of The World Bank Group.

    MIL OSI Africa –

  • MIL-OSI Africa: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) launch second phase of the Africa Phytosanitary Programme

    The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), in collaboration with the Government of South Africa, represented by the Department of Agriculture, launched the second phase of the Africa Phytosanitary Programme (APP) today – representing a major effort to stop the spread of plant pests and diseases in Africa using cutting-edge digital tools.

    The launch event was hosted by the Government of South Africa and brought together over 50 phytosanitary specialists from nine countries: Algeria, Cape Verde, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Liberia, Malawi, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. They will participate in a weeklong Train-the-Trainer (ToT) workshop in advanced pest surveillance techniques, including the use of customised digital tools and applications for monitoring, detecting and reporting major pests of economic, regulatory and environmental importance in Africa. Participants will receive state-of-the-art tablets for geospatial pest surveillance, use field survey protocols developed by technical experts, and undertake practical sessions using the pest survey tools.

    “Africa stands at a turning point. With immense biodiversity, rising agricultural productivity, and growing opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), we are well-positioned to become a global leader in the trade of high-quality plant products. But this vision can only be achieved if we ensure that the movement of plants and plant products is safe, traceable, and fully compliant with international phytosanitary standards” said John Henry Steenhuisen, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, in South Africa, in remarks read on his behalf by Jan Hendrik Venter, South Africa’s Director of Plant Health.

    “Well-trained, well-equipped plant health officials across the continent are our best line of defence in maintaining pest-free or low-prevalence status, an essential condition for accessing these lucrative markets”, he added.

    The first and pilot phase of APP started in 2023, engaging phytosanitary specialists from Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Phase 2 builds on achievements made in the pilot phase and aims to train plant health officers, who upon their return to their countries will teach their peers in the national plant protection organisations (NPPOs) and other government stakeholders on the use of the APP suite of digital tools.

    “We are building a critical mass of phytosanitary inspectors, technicians and officers across Africa by equipping plant health officers with the tools and skills to prevent and address major plant pest threats, that ultimately jeopardize food security, agricultural trade, economic growth and the environment”, said Beth Bechdol, FAO Deputy Director-General and Officer-in-Charge of the IPPC, in her video message.

    Funded through generous contributions from the European Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, APP phase two builds on support from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) which funded phase one in 2023. FAO and the IPPC are working to replicate and scale up the benefits from APP to more African countries and other regions. 

    Mitigating the pest problem in Africa

    Worldwide, plant pests destroy about 40 percent of crop yields, resulting in approximately USD 220 billion in economic losses[1]. In Africa, the impacts of climate change are worsening  the problem, with invasive pests – such as, fruit flies, false codling moth, maize lethal necrosis disease, citrus greening and fall armyworm – causing major damages. Fall armyworm alone is estimated to cause the highest yield loss in Africa – USD 9.4 billion annually –, based on data from the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI). 

    The African Union’s Plant Health Strategy for Africa highlights that limited technical capability remains a key barrier to achieving sustainable agriculture on the continent. Through APP, FAO, the IPPC and partners aim to strengthen plant health systems and build national phytosanitary capacity across Africa.

    Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO): Regional Office for Africa.

    MIL OSI Africa –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Learning Refuge: How women-led community efforts help refugees resettle in Cyprus

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Suzan Ilcan, Professor of Sociology & University Research Chair, University of Waterloo

    A grassroots organization in Paphos, Cyprus, is bringing women together to address the needs of refugees in the city. (Shutterstock)

    Since 2015, the Republic of Cyprus (ROC) has seen a steady rise in migrant arrivals and asylum applications, primarily from people from Middle Eastern and African countries like Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon.

    But many asylum-seekers face significant challenges. Refugees formally in the asylum system are often denied residency permits, which means they face persistent insecurity, poverty and isolation

    These conditions are compounded by restrictive and limited services for asylum-seekers. This deepens the precarity and exclusion refugees face within a political and economic system that treats them more like economic burdens than as human beings with rights who need help.

    In response to these institutional failures, citizens, volunteers and refugees themselves have begun to build grassroots networks of care and solidarity in the ROC and beyond to support refugee communities.

    In 2022 and 2023, we conducted interviews with women volunteers and refugees affiliated with The Learning Refuge, a civil society organization in the city of Paphos in southwest Cyprus that cultivates dialogue and collaboration among these two diverse groups.

    Women-led initiatives

    Many displaced people first arrive on the island of Cyprus through the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). However, the absence of a functioning asylum system or international legal protections leaves them in limbo.

    With no viable path to status in the TRNC, most cross the Green Line that bifurcates Cyprus into the ROC, where European Union asylum frameworks exist but remain limited in practice.

    Women-led community-building is often a response to the negative effects of inadequate state support and humanitarian aid for refugees. In Cyprus, this situation leaves many refugees without access to sufficient food, satisfactory health care, accommodation, employment, clothing and language training. In this current environment, refugees are increasingly experiencing insecure and fragile situations, especially women.

    In Cyprus, ss in many other countries, a variety of community-building efforts are important responses to limited or restricted state support and humanitarian aid for refugees.

    Women-led efforts offer opportunities to deliver educational activities and establish networks, and to help improve the welfare and social protection of refugee women, however imperfectly.

    These and other similar efforts highlight how women refugees and volunteers can mobilize to foster dialogue and collaboration.

    The Learning Refuge

    Founded in 2015, The Learning Refuge began as community meetings in a city park. The organization then used space from a nearby music venue to conduct support activities, and later, established itself in a dedicated building.

    Organizations like The Learning Refuge emerged to address the limited state support and humanitarian assistance services available to refugees.

    The Learning Refuge cultivates dialogue and collaboration among a diverse group of community volunteers.
    (Suzan Ilcan)

    As Syrian families began arriving in Paphos in 2015, local mothers started working with Syrian children, assisting them with homework, providing skills-training opportunities and language classes.

    The Learning Refuge cultivates dialogue and collaboration among a diverse group of community volunteers, including schoolteachers, artists, musicians, local residents, refugees and other migrants.

    With the aid of 20 volunteers, the loosely organized groups provide women refugees with material support and resources to enhance collective activities, including art and music projects, while also engaging in educational and friendship activities.

    While modest in scale, the organization has formed partnerships with local and international organizations, including Caritas Cyprus, UNHCR-Cyprus and the Cyprus Refugee Council to extend its outreach to various refugee groups.

    The organization has also launched creative initiatives aimed at cultivating additional inclusive civic spaces. One such effort, “Moms and Babies Day,” was developed in response to the rising number of single mothers from Africa arriving on the island. These women often face poverty and isolation, and struggle with language barriers.

    These efforts highlight how grassroots responses — especially those led by women — can offer partial but vital educational and emotional support to refugees struggling to find their footing in a new country.

    Negotiated belonging

    Through participation in The Learning Refuge, refugee women in Paphos engage in a dynamic process of negotiated belonging, navigating challenges like language barriers, gendered isolation, domestic violence and poverty while contributing to broader community-building efforts.

    For example, Maryam, a Syrian woman and mother of three, told us how The Learning Refuge helped her children establish friendships and learn Greek. She also highlighted that it helped her form close ties with volunteers and other Syrian women living in Cyprus, and find paid work in the city.

    The volunteers and women refugees participating in The Learning Refuge’s activities emphasized not only their capacity to develop new forms of belonging and solidarity; they also help reshape communal knowledge and generate supportive spaces for women from various backgrounds.

    Our research shows that women-led community-building is an effective, though short-term, response to insufficient state support and humanitarian aid systems that leave many refugees in precarious situations.

    In varying degrees, these efforts offer women and their families spaces to learn and cultivate new relationships, and foster collective projects and better visions of resettlement and refuge.

    Suzan Ilcan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

    Seçil Daǧtaș receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. The Learning Refuge: How women-led community efforts help refugees resettle in Cyprus – https://theconversation.com/the-learning-refuge-how-women-led-community-efforts-help-refugees-resettle-in-cyprus-252682

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Alberta youth have the right to school library books that reflect their lives, including sexuality

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jamie Anderson, PhD Candidate, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

    Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has expressed fondness for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, most recently wagering a a friendly public bet on the NHL hockey playoffs. In 2023, she said she wanted Albertans to enjoy some of the same freedoms available to citizens in certain American states, including Florida.

    Her government’s latest proposal aims to take more than a page from DeSantis’s playbook, setting its sights on how Florida has targeted school library books, effectively purging and banning many.

    Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides recently announced the province will move ahead to develop provincial standards “to ensure the age-appropriateness of materials available to students in school libraries.” This followed a public engagement survey related to what he said were concerns about “sexually explicit” books in Edmonton and Calgary schools.

    The province says the survey results show “strong support” for a school library policy, even while the majority of respondents don’t want the government setting standards for school library books.

    This marks the Alberta government’s latest effort to restrict the rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ children and youth.

    New proposed school library standards

    Like Florida’s statute on K-12 instructional materials, Alberta’s proposal centres on age-appropriateness and increasing parental choice in learning materials.

    Despite claiming a need for new standards, Nicolaides has acknowledged there are already mechanisms in place in Alberta’s school jurisdictions for parents to challenge materials. Many school boards already have policies governing school library materials.

    Additionally, librarians are trained professionals who follow established practices around organizing materials that reflect developmental appropriateness.

    Florida school book purges

    Florida’s statute, framed by DeSantis as empowering parents to object to obscene material, has targeted 2,700 books. More than 700 were removed from libraries in 2023-24.



    Read more:
    Ron DeSantis shows how ‘ugly freedoms’ are being used to fuel authoritarianism

    Confusion and a climate of fear caused by the bill has led Florida teachers and librarians to self-censor. Florida’s Department of Education urged districts to “err on the side of caution” to avoid potential felony charges.

    Such fear and surveillance lead to unnecessary restrictions on students’ rights.

    Targeting 2SLGBTQIA+ books

    Nicolaides has emphasized that developing the new standards in Alberta is not a question of “banning certain books,” and has acknowledged he does not have that authority.

    However, as PEN Canada notes, the implications of the proposed policies raise alarm bells, with the government’s actions “paving the way to a new era of government-sponsored book banning.” Singling out books has the same effect as a ban, according to the CEO of the St. Albert Public Library.

    By labelling four books as inappropriate — three of which include 2SLGBTQIA+ authors and themes — Nicolaides suggests these books don’t belong in K-12 schools. One of the books, the graphic novel Flamer, has won several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Young Adult Literature in 2021.

    PEN America interview with Mike Curato, author of ‘Flamer.’

    The education minister refuted the idea that singling out the books is anti-queer or anti-trans, and did so in an inflammatory manner, characterizing concern as being about protecting children from seeing porn, child molestation and other sexual content.

    Nicolaides also said the proposed policy is focused on sexual content, so themes and depictions of graphic violence are “probably not” an issue.

    Rolling back trans, queer rights

    Alberta has already rolled back the rights of trans and non-binary children and youth to use different pronouns, access gender-affirming care and participate in sports.

    Queer and trans identities are also absent from all subjects in the K-12 program of studies, including recently updated K-6 curriculum. New sexual health resource guidelines prohibit the use of learning materials that primarily and explicitly address sexual orientation or gender identity unless they have been vetted and approved by Alberta Education (except for use in religion classes).

    Survey amplifies moral panic

    Through specific communication tactics, the minister’s public engagement works to exacerbate moral panics about sexuality as a threat to childhood innocence. This influences broader messages about 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion.

    The government-created survey shared illustrations and text excerpts on their own, without context or consideration of their narrative purpose in each book. Although the excerpts flagged by the minister make up between 0.1 to two per cent of the total page count in each book, the books as a whole are labelled “extremely graphic.”

    In a media appearance, Nicolaides stated the books in question were available to “elementary-aged” students. This is misleading because K-9 schools include junior high students.

    In a social media post, the minister’s press secretary said “these problematic books were found in and around books like Goldilocks,” suggesting targeted books are alongside children’s storybooks. But the image he shared showed Flamer near the graphic novel Goldilocks: Wanted Dead or Alive, aimed at middle-grade readers aged nine to 12 years old.

    Survey respondents

    The survey reported 77,395 responses by demographics, including parents, teachers, school administrators, librarians and other interested Albertans.

    Forty-nine per cent of parents of school-aged children were not at all or not very supportive of the creation of government guidelines, compared to 44 per cent of the same demographic who were somewhat or very supportive (eight per cent were unsure). Across each other demographic, most respondents expressed that they didn’t support the creation of new government standards. But the ministry plans to move ahead anyway.

    Socially conservative lobby

    The Investigative Journalism Foundation reports two conservative activist groups have taken credit for giving the Alberta government names of books believed to be inappropriate.

    Parental rights groups and far-right activists have long asserted that 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion in schools “indoctrinates” and sexualizes children.

    We’re concerned the Alberta government may be reinforcing this message to manufacture a greater public consensus in support of wider policies against 2SLGBTQIA+ rights.

    Since at least 2023, United Conservative Party (UCP) members have embraced socially conservative “parental rights” rhetoric and supported motions for purging school libraries and mandating parent approval of changes to kids’ names and pronouns.

    Traditionalist ‘parental rights’

    Far-right activist groups like Take Back Alberta have shaped the UCP government’s policies alongside special interest groups like Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education.

    A common thread among such groups is parental authority over one’s own children framed in traditionalist or hetero-normative terms. Significant mobilizing has happened against the inclusion of sexual orientations and gender identities in school curricula, trans-inclusive health care, drag shows, conversion therapy bans and more.



    Read more:
    Pride, pages and performance: Why drag story time matters more than ever

    Queer and trans identities are viewed as a social contagion threatening to change anyone exposed to them, and efforts for inclusion are labelled “gender ideology.”

    These misconceptions, combined with political and religious biases, frame queerness and transness as “adult topics” that will confuse or harm children. However, research confirms ignoring these topics is of far greater concern when children may already experience discrimination about their gender expression by the age of five.

    Earlier learning about diverse forms of gender expression and relationships can reduce victimization, and prevent young children from becoming perpetrators of, or bystanders to, anti-2SLGBTQIA+ harassment and violence.



    Read more:
    ‘Parental rights’ lobby puts trans and queer kids at risk

    The United Nations recognizes that governments need to resist political pressure “based on child protection arguments to block access to information on [2SLGBTQIA+] issues, or to provide negatively biased information.”

    Access to self-selected literature is important for all students, and can be a lifeline for 2SLGBTQIA+ students who don’t see themselves in the curriculum.

    If Alberta Education will not prepare students for the world they live in — where we queer and trans people exist, flourish and are loved — then students should be able to seek out stories that reflect that world. It’s a matter of protecting their freedom of expression.

    Jamie Anderson has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Calgary.

    Tonya D. Callaghan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Trusts.

    Caitlin Campbell and Nicole Richard 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. Alberta youth have the right to school library books that reflect their lives, including sexuality – https://theconversation.com/alberta-youth-have-the-right-to-school-library-books-that-reflect-their-lives-including-sexuality-258265

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Rep. Dan Goldman Demands Transparency Around Immigration Proceedings for Unaccompanied Minors

    Source: US Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10)

    REP. DAN GOLDMAN DEMANDS TRANSPARENCY AROUND IMMIGRATION PROCEEDINGS FOR UNACCOMPANIED MINORS 

     

    Trump’s March Attempt to Terminate Federally Funded Legal Aid for Unaccompanied Migrant Children Has Thrown System into Disarray 

     

    Juvenile Dockets Safeguard Unaccompanied Children from Trafficking, Exploitation, and Abuse 

     

    Read Letter Here 

    Washington D.C. – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) led 77 of his colleagues in sending a bipartisan letter to the House Appropriations Subcommittee to direct the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to submit a report to Congress detailing the status of unaccompanied children’s immigration proceedings. The letter also asks the Committee to include language in its FY2026 report encouraging EOIR to continue using specialized juvenile dockets to improve fairness, efficiency, and child protection in immigration court proceedings. 

    “The immigration courts have a critical role to play in administering justice efficiently while maintaining standards that ensure due process, which can be especially difficult in proceedings where children are the sole or principal respondent.  Utilization of specialized juvenile dockets with robust anti-trafficking safeguards and child-appropriate accommodations can both help protect children from dangers and achieve much needed efficiency benefits for the backlogged immigration courts, all while improving due process in children’s cases,” the Members wrote. 

    Children as young as two are often left to navigate America’s complex and unforgiving immigration system entirely on their own, exposing them to serious risks of abuse, human trafficking, and long-term harm. Earlier this year, Donald Trump terminated the federal contract that provided critical legal assistance to these unaccompanied migrant children, stripping away one of their few remaining protections for over 26,000 unaccompanied migrants. The Members asked for the following language to be included in the FY26 federal budget: 

    “The Committee encourages EOIR to continue using specialized juvenile dockets across the immigration courts to improve the fairness and efficiency of immigration adjudications involving unaccompanied children, better protect those children against trafficking and exploitation, and connect children with legal assistance. The Committee directs EOIR to submit a report to the Committee, within 180 days of enactment of this act, detailing the status of unaccompanied children’s immigration proceedings.”  

    Congressman Dan Goldman has consistently fought to ensure unaccompanied minors receive support and proper legal representation when navigating the U.S. immigration system.  

    Congressman Goldman was instrumental in prompting the Biden Administration’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to release new guidance for children’s immigration proceedings. This guidance established specialized children’s dockets in every immigration court, overseen by dedicated judges. 
    The Biden Administration’s Executive Order followed the introduction of Congressman Goldman’s Children’s Court Act, which intended to reduce the immigration court backlog and strengthen due process rights for children. 

    In March 2025, President Trump terminated federal funding for legal services that protected and provided legal aid to over 26,000 unaccompanied migrant children. 

    Read the letter here or below:  

    Dear Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Meng:  

    As your committee considers appropriations for Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies for Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, we urge you to direct the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to submit a report to Congress detailing the status of unaccompanied children’s immigration proceedings.  

    The immigration courts have a critical role to play in administering justice efficiently while maintaining standards that ensure due process, which can be especially difficult in proceedings where children are the sole or principal respondent. The immigration courts are also an important element of creating a system that ensures unaccompanied children are protected from dangers like human trafficking, exploitation, and abuse. Utilization of specialized juvenile dockets with robust anti-trafficking safeguards and child-appropriate accommodations can both help protect children from dangers and achieve much needed efficiency benefits for the backlogged immigration courts, all while improving due process in children’s cases.   

    In December 2023, EOIR clarified in the Director’s Memorandum on Children’s Cases in Immigration Court that each immigration court would have a specialized juvenile docket for cases where the sole or principal respondent was under 21 years old. These dockets would be held separately from adult cases and would be overseen by judges who receive specialized training. The Memorandum also outlined certain procedures and practices that immigration judges should follow to create a system where children could better comprehend their proceedings; where indicators of trafficking would be identified; and through which the courts could work towards streamlining benefits.   

    Unfortunately, EOIR rescinded the Director’s Memorandum this year and reinstated 2017 guidance that offers fewer trafficking safeguards, efficiency benefits, and pragmatic processes. This change threatens to create unnecessary delays which further exacerbate the severe immigration court backlog. It also diminishes critical safeguards designed to ensure that children can seek relief for which they may be eligible and that they comply with their immigration responsibilities, including updating their address with government agencies.   

    Given the important role of Congress in overseeing the immigration courts’ handling of juvenile proceedings, we ask the Committee to include the following language in its report:  

    The Committee encourages EOIR to continue using specialized juvenile dockets across the immigration courts to improve the fairness and efficiency of immigration adjudications involving unaccompanied children, better protect those children against trafficking and exploitation, and connect children with legal assistance. The Committee directs EOIR to submit a report to the Committee, within 180 days of enactment of this act, detailing the status of unaccompanied children’s immigration proceedings. This report shall address: the name and number of immigration courts implementing juvenile dockets; training that has been provided to juvenile docket judges; any restrictions imposed on judges’ ability to use docket management tools for children’s proceedings; methods that courts are using to facilitate legal representation for children; and other relevant matters, as appropriate.  

    We appreciate your consideration of this important issue.  

    ###

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Banking: New Mu language model powers the agent in Windows Settings

    Source: Microsoft

    Headline: New Mu language model powers the agent in Windows Settings

    We are excited to introduce our newest on-device small language model, Mu. This model addresses scenarios that require inferring complex input-output relationships and has been designed to operate efficiently, delivering high performance while running locally. Specifically, this is the language model that powers the agent in Settings,  available to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel with Copilot+ PCs, by mapping natural language input queries to Settings function calls.

    Mu is fully offloaded onto the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and responds at over 100 tokens per second, meeting the demanding UX requirements of the agent in Settings scenario. This blog will provide further details on Mu’s design and training and how it was fine-tuned to build the agent in Settings.

    Model training Mu

    Enabling Phi Silica to run on NPUs provided us with valuable insights about tuning models for optimal performance and efficiency. These informed the development of Mu, a micro-sized, task-specific language model designed from the ground up to run efficiently on NPUs and edge devices.

    Encoder-Decoder Architecture compared to Decoder-only Architecture

    Mu is an efficient 330M encoder–decoder language model optimized for small-scale deployment, particularly on the NPUs on Copilot+ PCs. It follows a transformer encoder–decoder architecture, meaning an encoder first converts the input into a fixed-length latent representation, and a decoder then generates output tokens based on that representation.

    This design yields significant efficiency benefits. The figure above illustrates how an encoder-decoder reuses the input’s latent representation whereas a decoder-only must consider the full input + output sequence. By separating the input tokens from output tokens, Mu’s one-time encoding greatly reduces computation and memory overhead. In practice, this translates to lower latency and higher throughput on specialized hardware. For example, on a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (a mobile AI accelerator), Mu’s encoder–decoder approach achieved about 47% lower first-token latency and 4.7× higher decoding speed compared to a decoder-only model of similar size. These gains are crucial for on-device and real-time applications.

    Mu’s design was carefully tuned for the constraints and capabilities of NPUs. This involved adjusting model architecture and parameter shapes to better fit the hardware’s parallelism and memory limits. We chose layer dimensions (such as hidden sizes and feed-forward network widths) that align with the NPU’s preferred tensor sizes and vectorization units, ensuring that matrix multiplications and other operations run at peak efficiency. We also optimized the parameter distribution between the encoder and decoder – empirically favoring a 2/3–1/3 split (e.g. 32 encoder layers vs 12 decoder layers in one configuration) to maximize performance per parameter.

    Additionally, Mu employs weight sharing in certain components to reduce the total parameter count. For instance, it ties the input token embeddings and output embeddings, so that one set of weights is used for both representing input tokens and generating output logits. This not only saves memory (important on memory-constrained NPUs) but can also improve consistency between encoding and decoding vocabularies.

    Finally, Mu restricts its operations to those NPU-optimized operators supported by the deployment runtime. By avoiding any unsupported or inefficient ops, Mu fully utilizes the NPU’s acceleration capabilities. These hardware-aware optimizations collectively make Mu highly suited for fast, on-device inference.

    Packing performance in a tenth the size

    Mu adds three key transformer upgrades that squeeze more performance from a smaller model:

    • Dual LayerNorm (pre- and post-LN) – normalizing both before and after each sub-layer keeps activations well-scaled, stabilizing training with minimal overhead.
    • Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) – complex-valued rotations embed relative positions directly in attention, improving long-context reasoning and allowing seamless extrapolation to sequences longer than those seen in training.
    • Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) – sharing keys / values across head groups slashes attention parameters and memory while preserving head diversity, cutting latency and power on NPUs.

    Training techniques such as warmup-stable-decay schedules and the Muon optimizer were used to further refine its performance. Together, these choices deliver stronger accuracy and faster inference within Mu’s tight edge-device budget.

    We trained Mu using A100 GPUs on Azure Machine Learning, taking place over several phases. Following the techniques pioneered first in the development of the Phi models, we began with pre-training on hundreds of billions of the highest-quality educational tokens, to learn language syntax, grammar, semantics and some world knowledge.

    To continue to enhance accuracy, the next step was distillation from Microsoft’s Phi models. By capturing some of the Phi’s knowledge, Mu models achieve remarkable parameter efficiency. All of this yields a base model that is well-suited to a variety of tasks – but pairing with task-specific data along with additional fine-tuning through low-rank adaption (LoRA) methods, can dramatically improve the performance of the model.

    We evaluated Mu’s accuracy by fine-tuning on several tasks, including SQUAD, CodeXGlue and Windows Settings agent (which we will talk more about later in this blog). For many tasks, the task-specific Mu achieves remarkable performance despite its micro-size of a few hundred million parameters.

    When comparing Mu to a similarly fine-tuned Phi-3.5-mini, we found that Mu is nearly comparable in performance despite being one-tenth of the size, capable of handling tens of thousands of input context lengths and over a hundred output tokens per second.

    Task Model Fine-tuned Mu Fine-tuned Phi
    SQUAD 0.692 0.846
    CodeXGlue 0.934 0.930
    Settings Agent 0.738 0.815

    Model quantization and model optimization

    To enable the Mu model to run efficiently on-device, we applied advanced model quantization techniques tailored to NPUs on Copilot+ PCs.

    We used Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) to convert the model weights and activations from floating point to integer representations – primarily 8-bit and 16-bit. PTQ allowed us to take a fully trained model and quantize it without requiring retraining, significantly accelerating our deployment timeline and optimizing for efficiently running on Copilot+ devices. Ultimately, this approach preserved model accuracy while drastically reducing memory footprint and compute requirements without impacting the user experience.

    Quantization was just one part of the optimization pipeline. We also collaborated closely with our silicon partners at AMD, Intel and Qualcomm to ensure that the quantized operations when running Mu were fully optimized for the target NPUs. This included tuning mathematical operators, aligning with hardware-specific execution patterns and validating performance across different silicon. The optimization steps result in highly efficient inferences on edge devices, producing outputs at more than 200 tokens/second on a Surface Laptop 7.

    Mu running a question-answering task on an edge device, using context sourced from Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)

    Notice the fast token throughputs and ultra-fast time to first token responses despite the large amount of input context provided to the model.

    By pairing state-of-the-art quantization techniques with hardware-specific optimizations, we ensured that Mu is highly effective for real-world deployments on resource-constrained applications. In the next section, we go into detail on how Mu was fine-tuned and applied to build the new Windows agent in Settings on Copilot+ PCs.

    Model tuning the agent in Settings

    To improve Windows’ ease of use, we focused on addressing the challenge of changing hundreds of system settings. Our goal was to create an AI-powered agent within Settings that understands natural language and changes relevant undoable settings seamlessly. We aimed to integrate this agent into the existing search box for a smooth user experience, requiring ultra-low latency for numerous possible settings. After testing various models, Phi LoRA initially met precision goals but was too large to meet latency targets. Mu, with the right characteristics, required task-specific tuning for optimal performance in Windows Settings.

    While baseline Mu in this scenario excelled in terms of performance and power footprint, it incurred a 2x precision drop using the same data without any fine-tuning.  To close the gap, we scaled training to 3.6M samples (1300x) and expanded from roughly 50 settings to hundreds of settings. By employing synthetic approaches for automated labelling, prompt tuning with metadata, diverse phrasing, noise injection and smart sampling, the Mu fine-tune used for Settings Agent successfully met our quality objectives. The Mu model fine-tune achieved response times of under 500 milliseconds, aligning with our goals for a responsive and reliable agent in Settings that scaled to hundreds of settings. The below image shows how the experience is integrated with an example showing the mapping from a natural use language query to a Settings action being surfaced by the UI.

    Screenshot demonstrating the agent in Settings

    To further address the challenge of short and ambiguous user queries, we curated a diverse evaluation set combining real user inputs, synthetic queries and common settings, ensuring the model could handle a wide range of scenarios effectively. We observed that the model performed best on multi-word queries that conveyed clear intent, as opposed to short or partial-word inputs, which often lack sufficient context for accurate interpretation. To address this gap, the agent in Settings is integrated into the Settings search box, enabling short queries that don’t meet the multi-word threshold to continue to surface lexical and semantic search results in the search box, while allowing multi-word queries to surface the agent to return high precision actionable responses.  

    Managing the extensive array of Windows settings posed its own challenges, particularly with overlapping functionalities. For instance, even a simple query like “Increase brightness” could refer to multiple settings changes – if a user has dual monitors, does that mean increasing brightness to the primary monitor or a secondary monitor?

    To address this, we refined our training data to prioritize the most used settings as we continue to refine the experience for more complex tasks.

    What’s ahead

    We welcome feedback from users in the Windows Insiders program as we continue to refine the experience for the agent in Settings.

    As we’ve shared in our previous blogs, these breakthroughs wouldn’t be possible without the support of efforts from the Applied Science Group and our partner teams in WAIIA and WinData that contributed to this work, including: Adrian Bazaga, Archana Ramesh, Carol Ke, Chad Voegele, Cong Li, Daniel Rings, David Kolb, Eric Carter, Eric Sommerlade, Ivan Razumenic, Jana Shen, John Jansen, Joshua Elsdon, Karthik Sudandraprakash, Karthik Vijayan, Kevin Zhang, Leon Xu, Madhvi Mishra, Mathew Salvaris, Milos Petkovic, Patrick Derks, Prateek Punj, Rui Liu, Sunando Sengupta, Tamara Turnadzic, Teo Sarkic, Tingyuan Cui, Xiaoyan Hu, Yuchao Dai.

    MIL OSI Global Banks –

  • MIL-OSI Banking: AI at Work: Harvard’s Karim Lakhani on how AI is shifting from tool to ‘teammate’

    Source: Microsoft

    Headline: AI at Work: Harvard’s Karim Lakhani on how AI is shifting from tool to ‘teammate’

    Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani doesn’t just have theories about AI transforming work—he studies how it’s actually happening.  

    In a groundbreaking paper called “The Cybernetic Teammate,” he and his co-authors showed how individuals working with AI can be as effective as entire teams working without it. He is also rapidly evolving Harvard’s MBA program for the age of AI, which includes the launch of a new required course called Data Science and AI for Leaders. 

    When I hosted Karim for a conversation at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference last month in Las Vegas, he raised a provocative question: will AI drive the marginal cost of expertise down toward zero? As AI democratizes access to specialized knowledge across domains, it follows that expertise will shift from being rare and costly to abundant and accessible. “This will dramatically impact the nature of our organizations and strategy,” he told me, “because what are companies but bundles of expertise? And all of us invest to become deep experts in a domain.”  

    Here’s our conversation about organizations and leadership in the AI era (edited and condensed for clarity). 

    It’s a pleasure to talk with one of my friends about where AI is going and what it means for leaders. Karim, I want to start with that “Cybernetic Teammate” study, done with Procter & Gamble. Could you give us the backstory?  

    KARIM LAKHANI: The institute I run at Harvard, the Digital Data Design Institute, is looking at generative AI like a new “drug” in the economy. We don’t know its efficacy, the right doses, the side effects, or the right diet to follow while using it. We don’t know how actual work will transform with the introduction of this technology, so we run the equivalent of “clinical trials”—randomized controlled trials. 

    Victor Aguilar, head of research and development for Procter & Gamble, wanted to understand how generative AI could radically transform the innovation process at P&G. In innovation, there’s often this interaction between R&D and commercial people: R&D comes up with the technical ideas, but the commercial team asks, “is there a market for this or not?” The best practice is to have them collaborate in a team.  

    We designed this study of 758 professionals as what we call a two-by-two design: We had commercial and marketing folks work on challenges given by their business leaders—one group working without AI and one with AI. We also tested individuals under the same conditions. Then we randomized who was in which treatment and had them solve their problems with those tools.  

    Let’s talk about the results. This is the study that showed an individual equipped with AI could perform at least as well as—and sometimes outperform—entire teams of people without AI. It’s a landmark finding. Can you tell us about that? 

    LAKHANI: What does a teammate provide? They provide you with functional expertise, help you with coordination, and give you a sense of camaraderie. We measured these three elements remotely using Microsoft Teams as the platform.  

    The first finding was that when you look at pure performance, the quality of the ideas being created, individuals with AI were as good as a team without AI—and often as good as a team with AI. That was remarkable from our perspective. 

    The other interesting thing we saw was that individuals without AI tended to veer toward their functional expertise: marketing people gave marketing-based solutions, R&D people offered R&D-based solutions. But individuals with AI produced balanced solutions—comparable to the balanced solutions we saw from teams. That was a big moment for us. 

    Were there any other surprises in how people used AI, reframed their work, or wanted to use it going forward? 

    LAKHANI: We had done various studies before showing the productivity effects of AI, in terms of both quality and time. The time compression was actually quite remarkable. Teams normally experience a time penalty [because coordination takes time]. But with AI, that time penalty disappeared.  
     
    That was a big surprise. Another surprise was how people felt while using AI. They reported more positive emotions and fewer negative ones as they were doing the work. 

    The big aha for us was that AI shifted from being a tool to a teammate. This is unprecedented. We now have intelligence and expertise on tap. 

    I imagine what’s on people’s minds is, “I get it. I understand where the technology is…but what does this mean for me? What do I do as a leader?” What advice might you have for the group? 

    LAKHANI: Do you remember debates about whether we should have Wi-Fi in our offices? I’m sure some of you participated in them. The question maybe went up to your boards. Or remember the question, “Should employees have browsers? Access to global information?”  

    Those things didn’t fundamentally change the nature of work. But intelligence on demand, expertise on demand—these technologies are about work itself. You need to drive as much organizational transformation as technical transformation. We often say it’s 30% tech, 70% organization. Staple yourselves to your HR teams. Or have Copilot teach you the things about HR that you should know. It creates great tutorials, as you know. That’s the first thing. 

    Second: People are worried—really worried—about these technologies. That’s part of the conversation you need to have. How do we have an abundance mindset around this? What are the capability unlocks? Again, these are things that technology leaders have not typically been asked about. But you need to own it and engage in a conversation with your leaders and teammates about it. 

    Third: This type of change has to come from the top. I came up in the era of Wired magazine and Fast Company in the 1990s, when the internet came to workplaces. Fast Company was all about change agents. But change agents get massacred in most corporations. Why? Because if there’s no top-down buy-in, the change agents die on the vine. The key for us here is to make sure our top leaders understand this and see AI as a work and business technology, not as an information technology. Leaders in companies need to “do AI” (use Copilot as a thought partner all the time, build their own agents) as much as they “talk AI.” 

    Is there any last concept or idea that you feel has been left unsaid? 

    LAKHANI: Well, if I was good at predicting the future, I would be in the stock market, not academia. I tend to be very much an empiricist: I’ll come in with a discovery mindset, we’ll run the experiment, and then we’ll get the facts. But I’d love to offer a framing around this intelligence view.  

    I decided to become an academic in the 1990s when I discovered open-source software. We’re at the same juncture now. This stuff works in practice, but our management theories or economic theories don’t know how to handle this kind of technology. 

    Think back to the ‘90s again, when the browser became available. What did the browser and the internet really do? Essentially, they lowered the marginal cost of information transmission. If you go on a Teams call today with a global or national team, you don’t think twice about all the videos that are coming in. Thirty years ago, every one of us would have needed a camera operator, a sound operator, a satellite truck uplink, and a downlink. This would be prohibitively expensive. But today, the marginal cost of information transmission has gone down to zero, and we can seamlessly connect with anyone or any device globally. 

    In this moment, we’re predicting the same thing for expertise: the marginal cost of expertise is going to zero. 

    The clinical trials with our collaborative partners (Boston Consulting Group and P&G) are pointing in this direction, and this will dramatically impact the nature of our organizations and strategies. Because what are companies but bundles of expertise? We have finance, marketing, sales, R&D, and brand. You have all this expertise. As that cost of expertise drops, what a company does—what all of our roles are—is all up for invention and reinvention. 

    The direction of this change is up to all of us. We can’t just be the receivers of it; we have to understand what’s happening and then set the direction for ourselves and our companies. 

    Listen to Karim Lakhani’s recent appearance on the WorkLab podcast. For more insights about AI and the future of work, subscribe to this newsletter

    MIL OSI Global Banks –

  • MIL-OSI Canada: Joint Statement: Enduring Partnership, Ambitious Agenda

    Source: Government of Canada – Prime Minister

    1. Today marks a historic milestone as we, the leaders of the European Union and Canada, met to renew our enduring commitment and take a pivotal step to further reinforce the strategic partnership between the European Union and Canada. Our strong partnership is deeply rooted in trust and common values and shaped by a shared history of human connection and robust economic ties. Most importantly, our partnership is grounded in the core values we share: democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and open, rules-based markets. In a rapidly changing world marked by geopolitical uncertainty, shifting economic dynamics, and the accelerating impacts of climate change, this partnership is more important than ever.
       
    2. We stand united in our objective to forge a new ambitious and comprehensive partnership that responds to the needs of today and will evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. This marks the beginning of a long-term effort that will help us promote shared prosperity, democratic values, peace and security. To do this, we have decided to further build on existing ties and launch a process that will move Canada and the EU closer together and that lays out immediate and long-term actions outlined in an ambitious agenda at the end of this document. We also agreed today on an EU-Canada Security and Defence Partnership.
       
    3. Our citizens are looking for responses to the unprecedented challenges we face. This is why it is more important than ever to work together to promote our shared values and the rules-based international order. We will also pursue our common interests, while continuing to promote and deepen our vibrant trade and investment relationship, and our strong people-to-people contacts. We will stand together even more firmly in support of peace, stability, and prosperity in the world, including in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
       
    4. We confirm our unwavering commitment to the rules-based international order with the United Nations and its charter at its core. The EU and Canada will continue to cooperate closely in promoting international peace and security. Our commitment to sustainable development remains a key pillar of our relationship. We will continue to be key partners in promoting democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms, gender equality and the rule of law globally. We will take further action to ensure respect for the rights of women and girls, and to end to all forms of discrimination, including against LGBTI persons. We will continue supporting the implementation of the UN Pact for the Future and the ambitious reforms sought under the UN80 Initiative. We reaffirm our steadfast support for the independent functioning of the international criminal justice system, particularly the International Criminal Court. We condemn threats to the independent functioning of the ICC, including measures against individual officials.
       
    5. We are determined to continue working together in responding to the growing challenges to the international economic and trade order. We reiterate our mutual commitment to sustainable, fair and open trade, grounded in the rule of law and in respect for internationally agreed trade rules, as embodied by the World Trade Organization. This is essential to maintain global economic stability and to safeguard our supply chain resilience.
       
    6. We reaffirm our resolute condemnation of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which constitutes a manifest violation of the UN Charter and international law. Our commitment to ensuring a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders is unshakeable. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to providing continued political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military and diplomatic support to Ukraine and its people for as long as it takes and as intensely as needed, in full respect of the security and defence policy of certain EU Member States and taking into account the security and defence interests of all EU Member States. We support the conclusion of a just and lasting peace agreement, in full compliance with the principles of the UN Charter and international law, and join the call for a full, unconditional ceasefire of at least 30 days, which Ukraine has unilaterally committed to. We will continue to support the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children co-chaired by Ukraine and Canada, and we reiterate our urgent call on Russia and Belarus to immediately ensure the safe return of all unlawfully deported and transferred Ukrainian children. We will continue our close coordination of efforts to provide military equipment and training to the Ukrainian Armed Forces —including through the work of the EU Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM Ukraine) and Operation UNIFIER.
       
    7. We will increase pressure on Russia, including through further sanctions and taking measures to prevent their circumvention, and by ensuring that Russian sovereign assets remain immobilized until Russia ceases its war of aggression against Ukraine and compensates it for the damage caused by this war. We are committed to ensuring full accountability for war crimes and other serious crimes committed in connection with Russia’s war of aggression, including by the establishment of a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. We also remain committed to supporting Ukraine’s repair, recovery and reconstruction including through the Ukraine Donor Platform and in-country coordination mechanisms. We welcome Canada’s continued support, through the extension of an expert deployment to the Ukraine Donor Platform. The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome in July 2025 will be particularly relevant in that context.[1]
       
    8. We also reaffirm our continued support for the Republic of Moldova’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, enhancing the country’s resilience in dealing with the consequences of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the hybrid activities by Russia to undermine Moldova, in particular in the run-up to the Parliamentary elections. 
       
    9. In relation to the situation and latest developments in the Middle East, we reaffirm our commitment to an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and the resumption of unimpeded humanitarian aid at scale into Gaza in line with humanitarian principles, in order to address the catastrophic humanitarian situation on the ground. We reiterate our strong condemnation of the escalation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, following increased settler violence, the expansion of settlements, which are illegal under international law, and Israel’s military operation. We emphasize the importance of pursuing a lasting and sustainable peace based on the implementation of the two-state solution. We see no role for Hamas in the future governance of Gaza. 
       
    10. We express our deepest concern at the dangerous escalation following Israeli strikes on Iran, and Iran’s response. We reiterate our strong commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East, including the security of Israel, and call on all sides to show restraint and abide by international law. We have been consistently clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. A diplomatic solution remains the best way to address concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. The EU and Canada stand ready to contribute to a negotiated deal, which imposes verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear program, with the International Atomic Energy Agency in charge of monitoring and verification. We also remain committed to addressing Iran’s destabilizing behaviour, including its nuclear proliferation risks, military support for Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, backing of regional armed groups, transnational repression, and systematic human rights violations.
       
    11. Security in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions is increasingly interconnected. We reaffirm our shared interest in maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, including in the East and South China Seas and across the Taiwan Strait. We will continue working with regional partners, including ASEAN, to uphold a free, open and secure Indo-Pacific region based on international law. We continue to be deeply concerned by DPRK’s ongoing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and condemn Russia-DPRK military cooperation, which violates UN Security Council resolutions and undermines international security.
       
    12. We will continue deepening our cooperation and dialogue, together with partners from around the world, to address key regional issues, in particular in relation to the broader Middle East – notably Lebanon and Syria. We will also continue engaging with each other on issues related to Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, including Haiti. We will stay engaged in fragile and conflict-affected countries, facing instability or in complex settings, to support populations, in particular the most vulnerable.
       
    13. The Arctic will remain an area of close collaboration to foster peace and security, stability, and sustainable economic development, in particular of the blue economy, in full respect of the interests, priorities and rights of Indigenous Peoples in line with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
       
    14. The EU and Canada will continue to be reliable and responsible partners. We reiterate our steadfast commitment to advancing global sustainable development, working with partners across the globe. We are determined to deliver on the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals, together with international partners and in multilateral fora. We look forward to the upcoming 4th International Conference on financing for Development (FfD4), which will take place in Seville from 30 June to 3 July 2025. We will continue to deepen our cooperation and dialogue on humanitarian aid, including on respect for International Humanitarian Law and response to humanitarian crises.
       
    15. We recognize the existential threat of the interdependent crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and pollution. The EU-Canada Green Alliance is our steadfast, joint commitment to ambitious environment and climate action on the global stage. Carbon pricing, carbon removal and industrial decarbonization are key to reaching net-zero and decarbonization goals, while a high integrity carbon market can contribute to enhancing the global ambition. The EU is a dedicated participant in Canada’s Global Carbon Pricing Challenge (GCPC). At COP30, the EU and Canada aim to further promote carbon pricing as a tool to combat climate change, foster innovation and to modernize our industries. COP30 will also be an opportunity to highlight the importance of decarbonizing the transport sector and to promote sustainable transportation solutions. We reiterate our commitment to the swift and full implementation of the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, including through the Nature Champions Network.
       
    16. We agree that the Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) and the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) are at the core of the EU-Canada relationship. Through these agreements we are developing and deepening our partnership continuously in response to an evolving global context. We will continue to ensure their effective implementation and remain committed to achieving their full ratification. The SPA and CETA have allowed us to boost our cooperation over the past eight years.
       
    17. We are committed to further enhancing our EU-Canada trade and investment relationship, to advance and diversify our trade, promote our economic security and resilience, create investment opportunities and ensure our long-term security and prosperity. Our relationship is underpinned by CETA and its benefits are clear: bilateral trade has increased by over 65% compared to pre-CETA levels. We welcome the efforts being made to remove barriers to interprovincial trade in Canada and reduce barriers within the EU Single Market as they will further ease trading and doing business for our companies.
       
    18. Ensuring reliable and sustainable supply chains is a mutual priority and we have a shared interest in diversifying our supply chains and strategic investment. We will foster a closer cooperation on targeted industrial matters driving global competitiveness and strategic autonomy, such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, space, cyberspace, aeronautics, biotechnologies, new energies, minerals and critical metals, advanced manufacturing and cleantech. We intend to maintain a secure transatlantic supply chain on key technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), supercomputers and semiconductors. We welcome the recent announcement of a Canadian strategic nickel project under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act and will work to identify opportunities for co-investment in projects of mutual interest. We welcome the G7 Global Critical Minerals Action Plan agreed under Canada’s Presidency.
       
    19. We also remain committed to pursuing mutually beneficial collaboration on digital and tech policy issues and bolstering the bilateral digital trade relationship. Through the Canada-EU Digital Partnership, we are already working hand in hand on concrete projects in crucial areas for a robust digital economy, such as research in cutting-edge technologies, and we look forward to Canada hosting the first EU-Canada Digital Partnership Council later this year. We intend to enhance cooperation on AI innovation, including collaboration on AI Factories, to link our high-performance computing infrastructure and to deepen research cooperation in strategic technology areas such as AI and quantum. We also intend to align our frameworks and standards in the regulatory field, to make online platforms safer and more inclusive, to develop trustworthy AI systems and to establish interoperable digital identities and digital credentials to facilitate interactions between our citizens and our businesses.
       
    20. We have agreed today an EU-Canada Security and Defence Partnership, which provides a coherent, high-level political framework for our joint efforts in this field and will strengthen and widen the scope of cooperation and dialogue between the EU and Canada. We remain committed to continuing our strong cooperation, notably through Canada’s contributions to EU missions and operations, and welcome possible further collaboration on crisis management in the future. Canada will strengthen its defence relationship with the EU by posting a defence representative to the EU. We underscore the value of Canada’s participation in the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) projects and look forward to pursuing additional initiatives within this framework. In line with our shared security interests, we attach particular importance to collaboration on defence. For Canada and those EU Member States who are NATO Allies, NATO remains the cornerstone of their collective defence. Our aim will be to help deliver on our capability targets, including through our defence industries, more quickly and economically and with enhanced interoperability in ways that deliver mutual benefit and reinforce the European contribution to NATO. All of the above is without prejudice to the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain EU Member States, and taking into account the security and defence interests of all Member States, in accordance with the EU Treaties. We appreciate Canada’s continued commitment to European security, which includes the largest deployment of Canadian Armed Forces overseas.
       
    21. Recognizing the importance of the Women, Peace and Security as well as the Youth, Peace and Security agendas, we will continue supporting the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in conflict prevention, mediation, resolution, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and post-conflict reconstruction. We recognize that an enabling environment, is fundamental to ensuring the safe participation of women, and remain committed to fostering such environments. We will ensure that Women, Peace and Security is integrated in all aspects of cooperation on security and defence. Gender equality is a shared political and security priority, and we will collaborate to counter setbacks against gender equality and the rights of women and girls.
       
    22. To ensure comprehensive and sustainable progress, Canada and EU senior officials will meet at regular intervals to review progress and identify opportunities to deepen cooperation, in line with existing CETA and SPA consultation mechanisms, and in view of the next EU-Canada Summit. 

    Annex – The New EU-Canada Strategic Partnership of the Future 

    Together, we will: 

    Increase trade flows and promote economic security 

    • Support businesses to grow and diversify markets by fully and effectively implementing CETA.
    • Modernize our approach to trade by launching work towards a Digital Trade Agreement that would complement CETA.
    • Create tools for businesses to better support trade diversification, such as facilitating B2B matchmaking, cluster-to-cluster cooperation, and supporting the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
    • Advance our collaboration in the EU-Canada Economic Security Dialogue. Political and technical exchanges will allow us to identify trends and risks of mutual concern that could affect our economic security, and cooperation on possible policy responses.
    • Reduce barriers and strengthen agriculture and agrifood trade.
    • Prepare ourselves for the energy needs of the future, by cooperating more closely and exploring options to work together on more resilient, diversified, reliable energy supply chains, including clean tech value chains, LNG, renewables, safe and sustainable low-carbon hydrogen and other safe and sustainable low-carbon technologies, in view of increasing bilateral trade and strengthening energy security.
    • Continue the existing cooperation on nuclear technologies, including fuels and fuel cycle services, through the negotiation of a modernized and comprehensive Canada-Euratom Nuclear Cooperation Agreement.
    • Strengthen labour mobility by facilitating the movement of highly skilled workers, and explore shared interests in exchanging information about immigration partnerships. 

    Foster competitiveness and resilience through strengthened cooperation in strategic value chains 

    • Launch a new EU-Canada Industrial Policy Dialogue to boost industrial and supply chain cooperation in strategic sectors.
    • Promote projects and investments that reduce supply chain risks and foster resilience and the competitiveness of our industries and critical goods (e.g. semiconductors), including by promoting projects that abide by environmental, social and governance standards.
    • Work together closely to ensure security and diversity in the supply of minerals and metals critical to our mutual security and the green and digital transitions, including by exploring new opportunities to facilitate the two-way flow of investment, materials and expertise through the EU-Canada Strategic Partnership on Raw Materials.
    • Complete the negotiations for a renewed Canada-EU Competition Cooperation Agreement, providing a legal framework to coordinate enforcement activities and share information obtained through investigative powers in full respect of data privacy guarantees in both jurisdictions, as soon as possible. 

    Deepen regulatory alignment 

    • Identify opportunities for increased regulatory alignment between Canada and the EU, including through advancing work under CETA’s Protocol on the Mutual Acceptance of the Results of Conformity Assessment.
    • Bolster formal consultative mechanisms on EU and Canadian legislation and regulations, including CETA’s Regulatory Cooperation Forum. 

    Increase transatlantic security through a new era of EU-Canada security and defence cooperation, including the full implementation of the EU-Canada Security and Defence Partnership 

    • Bolster our bilateral dialogue and operational cooperation in all areas of joint interest in support of peace, security and defence – such as maritime security, cyber issues and hybrid threats.
    • Advance cooperation on the climate-security nexus and expand joint efforts in maritime security by identifying opportunities for coordinated naval activities.
    • Expand cooperation on defence capabilities, in particular by creating opportunities for increased defence industrial cooperation.
    • Secure and protect our democratic institutions by preventing and countering foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) through increased cooperation through relevant EU, Canadian and multilateral initiatives, such as the Canada-hosted G7 Rapid Response Mechanism.
    • Consider Canada’s further participation in EU Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) projects, with an aim towards joint development of capabilities and greater interoperability.
    • Increase defence procurement cooperation through Canadian collaboration with ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030:
      • launch work towards a bilateral agreement related to the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument
      • explore the possibility of establishing an administrative arrangement between Canada and the European Defence Agency 

    Shape the digital transition and promote exchanges in education and on innovation for technologies of the future 

    • Deepen cooperation in the framework of the EU-Canada Digital Partnership, and hold the first EU-Canada Digital Partnership Council later this year to drive this process forward.
    • Advance cooperation on AI, cybersecurity, secure digital communication and advanced connectivity, secure and trusted communications infrastructure (including 5G and subsea cables), the transparency and resilience of global tech supply chains, digital identity, quantum science, data spaces, online platforms and fighting FIMI.
    • Advance regulatory cooperation under the Digital Partnership, notably in AI and cybersecurity, so as to work towards the mutual recognition of AI and cybersecurity product certification including under the CETA Protocol on Conformity Assessment.
    • Deepen collaboration by leveraging Canada’s association to Horizon Europe, including on high priority topics, and exploring its potential participation in EU’s 10th Framework Programme.
    • Expand cooperation for access to world-class high-performance computing infrastructure through Horizon Europe.
    • Support research and industrial collaboration in research security, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum sciences, cyber security, climate change, oceans, circular economy, polar research and researcher mobility and training, including through the Canada-EU Digital Partnership and under the EU-Canada Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement.
    • Promote and defend the freedom of academic and scientific research and the protection of scientists.
    • Increase people to people ties, improve mobility and recognition, including in higher education and research through Erasmus+, the European Research Council and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. 

    Fight climate change and environmental degradation and facilitate the transition to climate neutrality 

    • Support for carbon pricing and industrial decarbonization as priority cooperation areas to combat climate change.
    • Bolster competitiveness through cooperation on carbon pricing systems and carbon border measures.
    • Work with international partners to promote the full, swift and effective implementation of the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
    • Collaborate to achieve an internationally legally binding instrument on plastic pollution covering the full lifecycle of plastics at INC 5.2.
    • Collaborate on the implementation of the Just Energy Transition Partnerships.
    • Jointly call for ambitious action to implement the Paris Agreement, in line with efforts to keep the 1.5°C warming goal within reach.
    • Continue working with other international partners to promote relevant international instruments to combatting climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
    • Welcome Canada joining the Global Energy Transition Forum launched by the European Commission to deliver on the goals of tripling the world’s renewable energy capacity and doubling the global annual rate of energy efficiency improvement by 2030 in parallel to a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
    • Work together as co-conveners of the Global Methane Pledge to deliver on the goal of reducing global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030.
    • Advance cooperation on the climate–security nexus by exploring a Climate-Security Dialogue. 

    Crisis management 

    • Advance public and private investments, notably in sustainable, inclusive, resilient and quality infrastructure, including through our shared G7 commitment under the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment and the EU’s Global Gateway strategy. At the same time, we recognize that investments in human development are a key enabling factor for just and sustainable digital and green transitions.
    • Strengthen cooperation on international crisis response and enhance cooperation on emergency management with the signing of an Administrative Arrangement between the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development of Canada and the European External Action Service on international cooperation in emergency planning and crisis response.
    • Respond more effectively to humanitarian crises and explore the possibility of a humanitarian administrative arrangement to align priorities and facilitate coordination.
    • Build health security and resilience through enhanced partnerships, including an administrative arrangement on medical countermeasures.
    • Building on the sale of 22 Canadian-built DHC-515 water bombers to the EU and Member States, explore further opportunities to share mutually beneficial technology and expertise in combating disasters. 

    Justice and Home Affairs 

    • Explore cooperation between Eurojust, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Canadian authorities in the field of criminal justice.
    • Advance the implementation, ratification and entry into force of the-EU-Canada Passenger Name Record Agreement.

    [1]We note the reservations of one Member State regarding the strategic direction of certain EU policies towards Ukraine.

    MIL OSI Canada News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Sens. Markey, Wyden Demand Information on Government’s Use of AI and Other Technology to Label People as National Security Risks

    US Senate News:

    Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts Ed Markey
    State/DHS Letter Text (PDF) | GAO Letter Text (PDF)
    Washington (June 20, 2025) – Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today led their colleagues in two letters about the government’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies to determine whether an individual poses a national security risk. 
    The lawmakers write to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, urging the Trump administration to reverse its decision to expand its social media screening of visa applicants. Those policy changes appear intended to chill dissent, discriminate against particular viewpoints, and punish individuals for speech the Administration finds objectionable. In another letter, the lawmakers wrote to the Government Accountability Office, requesting that it investigate how the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are using AI technologies to label individuals as potential threats to the public, including automated analysis of content people post online. The letters were also signed by Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.).
    In their letter to Secretaries Rubio and Noem, the lawmakers write, “Although the national security benefits of social media screening may be unproven, the costs are very real. The wide-scale collection of social media information violates the free expression rights of foreigners and American citizens, infringes on applicants’ personal privacy, creates unnecessary processing delays, and creates risks of abuse and discrimination…Even in an administration intending to conduct social media screening in a fair and unbiased manner, the risks of mistakes are high. In an administration with malign intentions, these social media screening tools guarantee abuse.”
    The lawmakers continued, “We are deeply concerned that State and DHS’s respective new policies around social media screening are a thinly veiled effort to discriminate against visa applicants and other noncitizens seeking to pursue their studies or obtain asylum or lawful residence in the United States.”
    The lawmakers request answers by July 9, 2025, to questions including:
    Please provide any studies, analyses, audits, or other examination of the social media collection, screening, and vetting programs at State or DHS conducted between December 15, 2015, and the date of this letter.
    Is the State Department or DHS using artificial intelligence (AI) or any other automated system to collect, process, analyze, or otherwise review information collected from social media accounts of visa applicants and applicants for an immigration benefit?
    How many visa applicants or individuals seeking an immigration benefit have had their application denied solely or primarily due to the social media screening and vetting process, including those denied for failing to provide a social media identifier? 
    Please provide any State Department and DHS memos, guidance documents, or other written policies intended to guide career staff in interpreting social media indicia for a visa applicant or applicant for an immigration benefit.
    Has the State Department, DHS, or any other agency or component conducted any legal analysis or First Amendment review of the March 25 State Department memo or the April 9 DHS announcement?
    What safeguards, if any, are in place to ensure that personal bias, political viewpoints, or cultural misunderstandings do not influence visa adjudications or immigration benefit decisions based on social media content?
    Did the State Department’s Office of Civil Rights or DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties or Privacy Office review the respective policies before their implementation?
    In their letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the lawmakers raise serious concerns about DHS and DOJ’s use of “technologies that make dubious automated inferences about individuals’ emotions, attitudes, and intentions,” including the administration’s deployment of “AI to scan the social media accounts of tens of thousands of student visa holders and flag some as supposedly supporting terrorist organizations.”
    The GAO letter is also cosigned by Representatives Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash).
    The lawmakers write: “It is particularly dangerous to use AI for inferring mental states in law enforcement contexts, where false positives can subject individuals to baseless investigation and detention. Furthermore, since many criminal statutes require proof of intent or other state of mind, using AI in this way could lead prosecutors to bring more severe charges against individuals on the basis of pseudoscientific evidence. This technology is also ripe for deliberate abuse, providing a pretext for government officials to target groups they disfavor.”
    The lawmakers request that GAO produce a report that addresses questions including the following:
    How many people have been the subject of an automated analysis conducted by DOJ or DHS personnel using AI technologies that infer people’s emotions, attitudes, or intentions?
    What kinds of law enforcement actions have been guided by DOJ and DHS personnel’s use of these technologies?
    What tests of these technologies did DOJ and DHS conduct before using them for law enforcement purposes?
    What DOJ and DHS policies govern the uses of these AI technologies to prevent violations of due process, freedom of expression, equal protection, and other constitutional rights?

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Markey Joins Ranking Member Shaheen, Representative Lieu in Introducing Resolution to Recognize World Refugee Day

    US Senate News:

    Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts Ed Markey
    Washington (June 20, 2025) — Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) today joined Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA-36) to introduce the “World Refugee Day Resolution” to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to supporting the safety, health and welfare of refugees and forcibly displaced persons worldwide as they flee persecution, conflict and violence. The resolution was cosponsored by 23 Senators and 49 Representatives.
    “On World Refugee Day, I am reminded of our nation’s history of welcoming those who have been forced to flee from violence, persecution, disease, famine, and climate disaster,” said Senator Markey. “The United States must honor that history and remain a beacon of hope and safety. It is unconscionable that the Trump administration has turned its back on refugees and halted funding to resettlement agencies. Due to these cruel actions, refugees who have been rigorously vetted are being denied entry into the United States and forced to remain in dangerous conditions. While the world is dealing with the growing threats of climate change and ongoing conflicts, the United States mut remain a beacon of hope and safety. I am calling on the Trump administration to resume the resettlement of refugees without any further delays. Today and every day, we must say loudly and clearly that refugees are welcome here.”
    “Conflict, persecution and violence continue to force millions of people from their homes – with more than 123 million people forcibly displaced at the end of 2024, including Afghans, Burmese Rohingya and Sudanese,” said Ranking Member Shaheen. “The United States has long been a leader in supporting refugees overseas and welcoming the most vulnerable, promoting stability around the world and boosting the U.S. economy through refugees’ contributions. Yet the Trump Administration is turning its back on this bipartisan legacy of support, slashing U.S. foreign aid programs that help refugees and host communities and indefinitely suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. On this World Refugee Day, our resolution honors the resilient spirit of forcibly displaced persons globally and calls on the Trump Administration to recommit to supporting refugees and displaced persons.” 
    “There used to be more consensus among Democrats and Republicans that the world’s wealthiest nation has an obligation to help those seeking refuge from violence, persecution, human rights abuses, and other dangers,” said Representative Lieu. “A strong U.S. foreign aid program was once considered both morally correct policy, and a smart return on investment that engendered good will and protected our national security. Now, Trump has turned his back on the world’s most vulnerable people by banning refugees and pulling funding for foreign aid programs. This is a terrible abdication of our duty to help those who need it the most. On World Refugee Day, those of us who want the world to be a more peaceful, prosperous place for everyone reiterate our call to help refugees who are fleeing unimaginable circumstances. Everyone deserves to live freely and safely.”
    “With an ongoing refugee ban leaving so many with no path to protection – it is imperative we take this opportunity to stand in solidarity with all those forced to flee their homes around the world,” said Erol Kekic, Chief Strategy Officer at Church World Service. “CWS thanks Senator Shaheen and Representative Lieu for honoring refugees and leading this year’s congressional World Refugee Day resolution. From 80 years of walking alongside newcomers, CWS knows that refugees and immigrants enrich our communities – culturally, artistically, religiously, and economically. They are our neighbors and friends. They are mothers and fathers working to build better futures for their children.” 
    “Today, more than 123 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes—the highest number in recorded history,” said Myal Greene, President and CEO of World Relief. “On World Refugee Day, we remember that behind every statistic is a person made in the image of God, longing for safety, stability, and hope. This crisis should stir the conscience of lawmakers and citizens alike–particularly those, like me, motivated by the Christian faith. We urge Congress to champion policies that protect the persecuted, restore dignity, and uphold America’s long legacy of welcoming those fleeing violence and oppression.” 
    “On World Refugee Day, we are reminded that the right to seek safety is both a legal commitment and a moral imperative,” said Sharif Aly, President of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “The United States has the capacity, and the obligation, to uphold its commitments to refugees and asylum seekers. Yet today, tens of thousands of people who were promised protection under the U.S. resettlement program remain stranded due to unlawful and discriminatory policies. We commend this resolution for reaffirming the values enshrined in our Constitution and refugee laws and urge our leaders to restore U.S. leadership in protecting the rights and dignity of those forced to flee.” 
    “There has never been a more urgent moment for Congress to reaffirm America’s support for refugees, both at home and abroad,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International. “On World Refugee Day, we must renew our pledge to advance refugee protection, including by ensuring refugees have a role in shaping policy; to uphold the right to seek asylum; and to generously welcome those who seek safety and the chance to rebuild their lives with dignity and opportunity.” 
    “RCUSA reminds the Trump administration of the incredible contributions that refugees have made in the 45-year history of the refugee resettlement program,” said John Slocum, Executive Director of Refugee Council USA. “We stand in solidarity with those forced to flee their homes due to violence and persecution – families and individuals continue to seek safety, dignity, freedom, and opportunity in the face of unimaginable hardship. As global displacement reaches historic highs, the United States must lead with compassion and courage. That means rejecting fear-based policies and recommitting to a system that upholds the rights of all people to seek safety. Congress must invest in our nation’s capacity to welcome refugees and asylum seekers — and safeguard the use of public resources in good faith. RCUSA calls on all people of conscience to stand with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants, not only today but every day. Our work is far from over.” 
    The resolution is also cosponsored by Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Chris Coons (D-DE), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), John Fetterman (D-PA), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Peter Welch (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).  
    The House resolution is cosponsored by Representatives Gabe Amo (RI-D), Yassmin Ansari (AZ-D), Becca Balint (VT-D), Joyce Beatty (OH-D), Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL-D), Judy Chu (CA-D), Gil Cisneros (CA-D), Steve Cohen (TN-D), Danny Davis (IL-D), Diana Degette (CO-D), Suzan DelBene (WA-D), Mark DeSaulnier (CA-D), Adriano Espaillat (NY-D), Chuy Garcia (IL-D), Robert Garcia (CA-D), Sylvia Garcia (TX-D), Jonathan L. Jackson (IL-D), Pramila Jayapal (WA-D), Hank Johnson (GA-D), Ro Khanna (CA-D), Troy A. Carter, Sr. (LA-D), Summer Lee (PA-D), Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-D), Stephen Lynch (MA-D), Jennifer McClellan (VA-D), Betty McCollum (MN-D), Jim McGovern (MA-D), Robert Menendez (NJ-D), Gwen Moore (WI-D), Seth Moulton (MA-D), Kevin Mullin (CA-D), Jerrold Nadler (NY-D), Eleanor Norton (DC-D), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-D), Ilhan Omar (MN-D), Nancy Pelosi (CA-D), Mark Pocan (WI-D), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Jan Schakowsky (IL-D), Darren Soto (FL-D), Shri Thanedar (MI-D), Dina Titus (NV-D), Rashida Tlaib (MI-D), Jill Tokuda (HI-D), Paul Tonko (NY-D), Derek Tran (CA-D), Nydia Velazquez (NY-D), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-D) and Nikema Williams (GA-D).
    The resolution is supported by the following organizations: Church World Service, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, Center for Victims of Torture, Climate Refugees, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, Franciscan Action Network, Friends Committee on National Legislation, HIAS, International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), Just Neighbors, National Partnership for New Americans, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, Refugee Advocacy Lab, Refugee Council USA, Refugee Congress, Refugees International, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, United Church of Christ, Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), World Relief and Women’s Refugee Commission.
    Full text of the resolution is available HERE.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Ms. Aya Suzuki of Japan – Senior Vice-Rector of the United Nations University

    Source: United Nations MIL-OSI 2

    nited Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, following consultation with the United Nations University (UNU), announced today the appointment of Aya Suzuki of Japan as the next UNU Senior Vice-Rector.  She succeeds Sawako Shirahase of Japan, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her dedication and service.  Ms. Suzuki is a distinguished Japanese development economist whose main research interest is examining how developing countries can reduce poverty levels, with a particular focus on agricultural and industrial development.

    She is a Professor in the Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, at the University of Tokyo, Japan.  She also serves as Special Adviser to the President of the University of Tokyo and as Deputy Director General of the Division of University Corporate Relations.  In these leadership capacities, she has championed initiatives to promote social entrepreneurship, foster international collaboration and enhance support for students from the Global South.

    Ms. Suzuki serves as an Auditor for the Japanese Association for Development Economics, an Editorial Board Member for the Asian Development Review, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, the Division of Management, the University of Waikato (New Zealand).  She was a Founding Board Member of the Japanese Association for Development Economics.  Her previous positions include Associate/Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo; Assistant Professor, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan); Visiting Scholar, School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, the Division of Management, the University of Waikato (New Zealand); Visiting Scholar at the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Research Institute; and policy advisory work with the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development.

    Ms. Suzuki has published extensively on topics related to agricultural marketing and development economics.  She holds a PhD in Development and Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Davis, United States; a Master of International Development Studies from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan; and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Waseda University, Japan.  She is fluent in English, Japanese, and speaks basic Chinese (Mandarin).

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Atul K. Shah, Professor, Accounting and Finance, City St George’s, University of London

    Krailath/Shutterstock

    Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.

    But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.

    Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.

    Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.

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

    This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?

    Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.

    This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.

    Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.

    Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.

    In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.

    The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.

    Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.

    Trust before profits

    Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.

    In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.

    Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.

    For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.

    When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.

    This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

    Atul K. Shah 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. I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable – https://theconversation.com/ive-studied-faiths-and-cultures-around-the-world-heres-how-finance-can-be-made-more-inclusive-and-sustainable-258254

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Atul K. Shah, Professor, Accounting and Finance, City St George’s, University of London

    Krailath/Shutterstock

    Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.

    But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.

    Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.

    Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.

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    This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?

    Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.

    This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.

    Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.

    Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.

    In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.

    The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.

    Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.

    Trust before profits

    Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.

    In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.

    Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.

    For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.

    When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.

    This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

    Atul K. Shah 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. I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable – https://theconversation.com/ive-studied-faiths-and-cultures-around-the-world-heres-how-finance-can-be-made-more-inclusive-and-sustainable-258254

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Grace, PhD Candidate, Climate Change and Literature, Nottingham Trent University

    Whether your favourite tree is in a private garden, on wasteland, in a school playground or on the street, your emotional response may be admiration, relaxation, rejuvenation or awareness of the seasons passing. But so many special trees are experiencing a combination of threats.

    According to a new report from environmental charity the Tree Council and government-funded agency Forest Research, introduced pests and diseases, pollution, extreme weather and infrastructure development are all on the increase, which could be a disaster for the UK’s trees. These affect trees’ condition, resilience and capacity to mitigate the climate and nature crises.

    Not only do trees play ecological roles in nature, such as shelter for wildlife and protection from floods, many people have long-standing connections to trees. A report from the Tree Council highlights the role of trees as an important part of the “fabric of human cultures and societies”.

    This demonstrates a move away from appreciating only the ecological benefits provided by urban trees and towards the social and cultural importance they hold for local populations.

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    The ecological and biodiversity values of trees are well-documented. Trees offer homes and food for birds, insects and wildlife. They prevent rainwater reaching the ground by as much as 45%. When combined with grass, surface water flooding is reduced by 99% compared with tarmac. Urban trees reduce air pollution, quieten noise and keep cities shaded and cool.

    Thousands of people cast votes for their favourite trees in the UK and Europe. In a recent study, over half of 1,800 adults surveyed said they had a favourite tree and 74% felt that urban development is the greatest threat to our trees.

    That’s not the only threat, though. Single species planting of street trees, for example, leaves the trees vulnerable to diseases (such as Dutch elm or ash dieback). Rising temperatures and water scarcity leaves trees competing for resources.

    But what does that mean for our urban trees? Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside forest and woodland. Such trees form an essential habitat in urban areas where 83% of the UK’s population live, yet more than ever before our urban trees are facing threats from a deadly combination of environmental change and human development. In Wales, for example, 7,000 mature trees in towns and cities were lost between 2006 and 2013.

    To try to address this growing crisis, woodland charity Forest Research have released a new, national free to use “trees outside woodland” map. This refers to any trees found in settings such as parks, open countryside and farmland, gardens and estates, or beside roads and paths.

    These can be on a street corner, beside a railway track or in a market square and includes very old trees like those listed on the ancient tree inventory plus otherwise unremarkable trees growing in unusual settings, such as the vandalised 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree.

    Why we love trees

    England is dawdling behind many other countries when it comes to protecting important trees. Forest Research found that trees outside woodland share many of the social and cultural values associated with trees in woodlands, however people make specific relationships with these urban trees and they are more likely to be considered unique and irreplaceable.

    Trees in urban areas have huge social benefits too.
    Karo Martu/Shutterstock

    They can be recognised for their grace and beauty or for their associations with customs, beliefs and rituals. They can be a place to rest and play and symbols of community belonging. They can give a sense of continuity, connecting people’s lifespans with reflections about the natural world and everything beyond.

    Many countries give clear titles to their important trees. In Poland, they are called natural monuments, in Germany they are living monuments. Spain, Belgium, Greece, Mexico and Finland use the term “monumental trees”. In New Zealand, special urban trees are referred to as national living landmarks. Currently England falls behind in designating trees for protection based on their historical or aesthetic importance.

    Trees for everyone

    A common feature across many countries is the opportunity for anyone, including members of the public, to recommend a tree for protection. Tree equity is the idea that everyone should have access to the benefits of trees. It includes prioritising and deploying resources in the areas where people have least access to them.

    Tree inequity exists in most UK towns and cities. On average, the most economically and socially deprived and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have half the tree canopy cover compared to the least deprived and least diverse.

    Canopy cover ranges from 1–2% in parts of north-east England to 36% in Hampstead, north London. Even within London there are wide variations.

    So ensure your favourite tree can be appreciated and celebrated by your community as a living monument, make sure it is on the Trees Outside Woodland map. And check if it needs a drink.

    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 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Lucy Grace receives funding from AHRC for her PhD through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

    – ref. How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger – https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-your-favourite-urban-trees-from-increasing-danger-258227

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