US Food and Drug Administration, Office of Regulatory Affairs, Health Fraud Branch
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an urgent warning about tianeptine – a substance marketed as a dietary supplement but known on the street as “gas station heroin”.
Linked to overdoses and deaths, it is being sold in petrol stations, smoke shops and online retailers, despite never being approved for medical use in the US.
But what exactly is tianeptine, and why is it causing alarm?
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Structurally, it resembles tricyclic antidepressants – an older class of antidepressant – but pharmacologically it behaves very differently. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which typically increase serotonin levels, tianeptine appears to act on the brain’s glutamate system, which is involved in learning and memory.
It is used as a prescription drug in some European, Asian and Latin American countries under brand names like Stablon or Coaxil. But researchers later discovered something unusual, tianeptine also activates the brain’s mu-opioid receptors, the same receptors targeted by morphine and heroin – hence it’s nickname “gas station heroin”.
As a prescription drug, tianeptine is sold under various brand names, including Stablon. Wikimedia Commons
At prescribed doses, the effect is subtle, but in large amounts, tianeptine can trigger euphoria, sedation and eventually dependence. People chasing a high might take doses far beyond anything recommended in medical settings.
Despite never being approved by the FDA, the drug is sold in the US as a “wellness” product or nootropic – a substance supposedly used to enhance mood or mental clarity. It’s packaged as capsules, powders or liquids, often misleadingly labelled as dietary supplements.
This loophole has enabled companies to circumvent regulation. Products like Neptune’s Fix have been promoted as safe and legal alternatives to traditional medications, despite lacking any clinical oversight and often containing unlisted or dangerous ingredients.
Some samples have even been found to contain synthetic cannabinoids and other drugs. According to US poison control data, calls related to tianeptine exposure rose by over 500% between 2018 and 2023. In 2024 alone, the drug was involved in more than 300 poisoning cases. The FDA’s latest advisory included product recalls and import warnings.
Users have taken to the social media site Reddit, including a dedicated channel, and other forums to describe their experiences, both the highs and the grim withdrawals. Some report taking hundreds of pills a day. Others struggle to quit, describing cravings and relapses that mirror those seen with classic opioid addiction.
Since tianeptine doesn’t show up in standard toxicology screenings, health professionals may not recognise it. According to doctors in North America, it could be present in hospital patients without being detected, particularly in cases involving seizures or unusual heart symptoms.
It can be bought online from overseas vendors, and a quick search reveals dozens of sellers offering “research-grade” powder and capsules.
There is little evidence that tianeptine is circulating widely in the UK; to date, just one confirmed sample has been publicly recorded in a national drug testing database. It’s not mentioned in recent Home Office or Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs briefings, and it does not appear in official crime or hospital statistics.
But that may simply reflect the fact that no one is looking for it. Without testing protocols in place, it could be present, just unrecorded.
Because of its chemical structure and unusual effects, if tianeptine did show up in a UK emergency department, it could easily be mistaken for a tricyclic antidepressant overdose, or even dismissed as recreational drug use. This makes it harder to diagnose and treat appropriately.
It’s possible, particularly among people seeking alternatives to harder-to-access opioids, or those looking for a legal high. With its low visibility, online availability and potential for addiction, tianeptine ticks many of the same boxes that once made drugs like mephedrone or spice popular before they were banned.
The UK has seen waves of novel psychoactive substances emerge through similar routes, first appearing online or in head shops, then spreading quietly until authorities responded. If tianeptine follows the same path, by the time it appears on the radar, harm may already be underway.
Michelle Sahai 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.
Lawmakers and school boards across the country have established policies that limit what schools can teach about gender, sexuality and reproductive health.Alexmia/iStock via Getty Images
Behind the loud debate lies a quiet contradiction. Many parents who say sex education should be taught only at home don’t actually provide it there, either.
Comprehensive sex education delays sexual activity, increases contraceptive use and reduces teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection rates. It has a complex history, but has long received bipartisan support.
In June 2025, the Trump administration ordered California to remove gender-identity materials from sex education lessons or risk losing over US$12 million in federal funding.
In 2023, Florida expanded its Parental Rights in Education, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, to extend limits on discussing sexual orientation and gender identity to all K–12 grades. The law states that sex can be defined only as strictly binary, limits discussions of gender and sexuality, imposes rules on pronoun use and increases school board authority over curricula.
Local school boards in states such as Florida, Idaho, Tennessee and Utah have removed textbooks, cut health courses and banned books with LGBTQ+ themes. Conservative, local school boards are reshaping sex education nationwide even though the vast majority of Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools and are confident in public schools’ selection of books.
Who’s having the talk?
A national survey on parental attitudes and beliefs about school-based sex education revealed that some families do not practice what they preach. diane39/iStock via Getty Images
As laws limit teaching about sex, gender and identity, I wanted to explore whether parents are stepping in to fill the gaps.
About 10% of the surveyed parents said sex education should happen only at home. Those parents were also most likely to say they “almost never” or “never” discussed sex, sexuality and romance with their children.
By contrast, parents who supported comprehensive, school-based sex ed were significantly more likely to discuss subjects including consent, contraception, identity and healthy relationships at home.
The survey also found that parents who opposed comprehensive sex education were more likely to believe commonly circulated misinformation, such as the idea that talking about sex encourages early sexual activity and that condoms are not effective.
These preliminary findings align with a robust body of peer-reviewed literature suggesting that parents who are more resistant to school-based sex ed are also less likely and less equipped to have open, informed conversations at home.
These findings point to a gap between expert recommendations and what parents do.
Teenagers learn about sex online, and pornography is among the top sources of information. redhumv?E+ via Getty Images
A 2022 report from Common Sense Media found that nearly half of teens report learning about sex online, with pornography among the top sources.
Research indicates that even when schools and families avoid topics related to sexuality, young people still encounter sexual content. Yet, advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty support the removal of what it considers “age-inappropriate” or “sexually explicit” materials from classrooms and school libraries.
The absence of structured, accurate education likely has implications for public health. According to the CDC, individuals ages 15 to 24 account for nearly half of all new sexually transmitted infections in the U.S.
LGBTQ+ youth are especially vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections and related health challenges. This vulnerability is compounded in regions with limited access to inclusive education.
A 2023 CDC report found that students who receive inclusive sex education feel more connected to school and experience lower rates of depression and bullying. These benefits are especially critical for LGBTQ+ youth.
As debates over sex education continue, I believe it’s important for policymakers, school boards and communities to weigh parental input and public health data.
I am the author of the book, “A Modern Approach to the Birds and the Bees” which I mentioned in the article and do benefit from its sale.
Now imagine living that kind of isolation all the time.
For millions of Americans with serious mental health conditions, being unable to engage in meaningful activities is not just a temporary crisis – it’s daily life.
Community inclusion refers to everyone’s right to participate in meaningful social roles. This includes working, going to school, practicing one’s faith or simply connecting with others in shared activities.
Yet, for the estimated 15.4 million U.S. adults living with significant mental health conditions – about 6% of the adult population – community inclusion is far from guaranteed. Compared with the general population, they are far less likely to be involved in social activities that bring purpose and connection, as well as health benefits.
I am a psychologist who has worked in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric settings, and I directed a federally funded research and training center at Temple University in Philadelphia for more than 20 years that focuses on independent living and participation of people with serious mental illnesses.
My colleagues and I have conducted research which demonstrates that people with such conditions want to participate in their community just like everyone else. We also found that they can do so – with proper supports like medications, therapy, rehabilitation services and communities making reasonable accommodations for them. And furthermore, they should: Community inclusion is good for their health.
Benefits of community life
Community involvement gets people with mental illness out of bed and out of the house. It encourages movement and activity, which enhances physical health.
Some people may assume that people with severe mental illnesses are restricted from active participation in their communities solely due to the mental health symptoms themselves.
For example, they might think that cognitive issues related to schizophrenia make it too difficult for people to work or go to school; or that mania, anxiety and depression prevent them from having good relationships with others.
But environment also plays a major role.
The social model of disability suggests that people are not disabled by their diagnosis. Instead, they experience a disability through limitations in their communities because of physical, structural and social barriers.
For example, someone with anxiety or depression may be penalized in a college class that deducts points for students who do not speak up.
A person with a disability that causes fluctuating moods or low energy might not succeed in a rigid nine-to-five job without accommodations.
And a churchgoer who talks to themselves or has to walk around during services because their medications make them jittery – a condition called akathisia – or who is known to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia might be asked to leave because their presence makes others uncomfortable.
The result is that people are unable to participate not simply because of an impairment, but because of an environment that does not accommodate or appreciate their unique attributes.
Helping people with mental illness rejoin community life
Some programs here in Pennsylvania are working to change that.
Education Plus helps Philadelphia residents with mental health conditions complete college and financial aid application forms, obtain school accommodations for their disability, and develop good study habits or learn to ask for help from their instructors.
Pathways to Housing PA offers transitional job opportunities to people who have been homeless, and organizes picnics, trips to Phillies baseball games and other fun activities that create a sense of community belonging.
A voter access initiative at an inpatient psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania helps patients check their voter registration status, register to vote and apply for mail-in ballots.
The nonprofit Compeer in suburban Philadelphia connects community volunteers to people with mental illnesses to engage in mutual leisure or educational interests. This oftentimes leads to long-term friendships.
And a current study I am conducting is examining ways to support faith communities in Montgomery County to be more welcoming and embracing of individuals with mental illnesses.
Family members, friends and mental health professionals can simply ask people with mental illnesses about their interests – whether it’s employment, going to school, dating or making new friends – and then encourage and support them in pursuing those interests.
Creating inclusive communities means not just offering services to people with serious mental illness, but also changing negative beliefs and behaviors toward them. This includes embracing people who might express emotions differently, require flexibility or simply behave in ways we’re not used to.
For example, say you’re in a coffee shop and encounter a person who is muttering to themselves and may not have bathed in a few days. Maybe you make eye contact, smile and say hello. Certainly reconsider complaining.
It takes empathy, open-mindedness and patience to create a community that welcomes people with mental illness and increases the likelihood that they can participate in society like everyone else.
Mark Salzer receives funding from the National Institute on Disabilities, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. He previously served on the Board of Directors for Pathways to Housing PA and works closely with Horizon House, including in the development of the Education Plus program mentioned in the article.
Speedballing – the practice of combining a stimulant like cocaine or methamphetamine with an opioid such as heroin or fentanyl – has evolved from a niche subculture to a widespread public health crisis. The practice stems from the early 1900s when World War I soldiers were often treated with a combination of cocaine and morphine.
As these dangerous combinations of drugs increasingly flood the market, I see an urgent need and opportunity for a new approach to prevention and treatment.
Why speedballing?
Dating back to the 1970s, the term speedballing originally referred to the combination of heroin and cocaine. Combining stimulants and opioids – the former’s “rush” with the latter’s calming effect – creates a dangerous physiological conflict.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, stimulant-involved overdose fatalities increased markedly from more than 12,000 annually in 2015 to greater than 57,000 in 2022, a 375% increase. Notably, approximately 70% of stimulant-related overdose deaths in 2022 also involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids, reflecting the rising prevalence of polysubstance involvement in overdose mortality.
The rise in speedballing is part of a broader trend of polysubstance use in the U.S. Since 2010, overdoses involving both stimulants and fentanyl have increased 50-fold, now accounting for approximately 35,000 deaths annually.
The conflicting effects of stimulants and opioids can also exacerbate mental health issues. Users may experience heightened anxiety, depression and paranoia. The combination can also impair cognitive functions, leading to confusion and poor decision-making.
Speedballing can also lead to severe cardiovascular problems, including hypertension, heart attack and stroke. The strain on the heart and blood vessels from the stimulant, combined with the depressant effects of the opioid, increases the risk of these life-threatening conditions.
Addressing the crisis
Increasing awareness about the dangers of speedballing is crucial. I believe that educational campaigns can inform the public about the risks of combining stimulants and opioids and the potential for unintentional fentanyl exposure.
Implementing harm reduction strategies by public health officials, community organizations and health care providers, such as providing fentanyl test strips and naloxone – a medication that reverses opioid overdoses – can save lives.
These measures allow individuals to test their drugs for the presence of fentanyl and have immediate access to overdose-reversing medication. Implementing these strategies widely is crucial to reducing overdose deaths and improving community health outcomes.
Andrew Yockey 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.
The U.S. Capitol is seen shortly after the Senate passed its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic tax and spending package, many critics are wondering how the president retained the loyalty of so many congressional Republicans, with so few defections.
Just three Republican senators – the maximum allowed for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to still pass – voted against the Senate version of the bill on July 1, 2025. In the House, only two Republicans voted against the bill, which passed the chamber on July 3.
Trump is not the first president to bend Congress to his will to get legislation approved.
Presidential supremacy over the legislative process has been on the rise for decades. But contrary to popular belief, lawmakers are not always simply voting based on blind partisanship.
Increasingly, politicians in the same political party as a president are voting in line with the president because their political futures are as tied up with the president’s reputation as they have ever been.
Even when national polling indicates a policy is unpopular – as is the case with Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, which an estimated 55% of American voters said in June they oppose, according to Quinnipiac University polling – lawmakers in the president’s party have serious motivation to follow the president’s lead.
Or else they risk losing reelection.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to reporters at the Capitol building on July 3, 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Lawmakers increasingly partisan on presidential policy
Over the past 50 years, lawmakers in the president’s party have increasingly supported the president’s position on legislation that passes Congress. Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, are increasingly united against the president’s position.
These patterns are unheard of in the modern Congress. In 2022, for example – a year of significant legislative achievement for the Biden administration – the Democratic majority in Congress voted the same way as the Democratic president 99% of the time. Republicans, meanwhile, voted with Biden just 19% of the time.
Elections can tell us why
Over the past half-century, the two major parties have changed dramatically, both in the absolutist nature of their beliefs and in relation to one another.
Both parties used to be more mixed in their ideological outlooks, for example, with conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans playing key roles in policymaking. This made it easier to form cross-party coalitions, either with or against the president.
A few decades ago, Democrats and Republicans were also less geographically polarized from each other. Democrats were regularly elected to congressional seats in the South, for example, even if those districts supported Republican presidents such as Nixon or Ronald Reagan.
These changes have ushered in a larger phenomenon called political nationalization, in which local political considerations, issues and candidate qualifications have taken a back seat to national politics.
Ticket splitting
From the 1960s through most of the 1980s, between one-quarter and one-half of all congressional districts routinely split tickets – meaning they sent a politician of one party to Congress while supporting a different party for president.
These are the same few districts in Nebraska and New York, for example, that supported former Vice President Kamala Harris for president in 2024 but which also elected a Republican candidate to the House that same year.
Since the Reagan years, however, these types of districts that could simultaneously support a Democratic presidential nominee and Republicans for Congress have gone nearly extinct. Today, only a handful of districts split their tickets, and all other districts select the same party for both offices.
The past two presidential elections, in 2020 and 2024, set the same record low for ticket splitting. Just 16 out of 435 House districts voted for different parties for the House of Representatives and president.
Members of Congress follow their voters
The political success of members of Congress has become increasingly tied up with the success or failure of the president. Because nearly all Republicans hail from districts and states that are very supportive of Trump and his agenda, following the will of their voters increasingly means being supportive of the president’s agenda.
Not doing so risks blowback from their Trump-supporting constituents. A June 2025 Quinnipiac University poll found that 67% of Republicans support the bill, while 87% of Democrats oppose it.
These electoral considerations also help explain the unanimous opposition to Trump’s legislation by the Democrats, nearly all of whom represent districts and states that did not support Trump in 2024.
Thanks to party polarization in ideologies, geography and in the electorate, few Democrats could survive politically while strongly supporting Trump. And few Republicans could do so while opposing him.
But as the importance to voters of mere presidential support increases, the importance of members’ skill in fighting for issues unique to their districts has decreased. This can leave important local concerns about, for example, unique local environmental issues or declining economic sectors unspoken for. At the very least, members have less incentive to speak for them.
Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.
Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”
Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.
Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.
Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)
Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.
Plestia Alaqad. Plestia
These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.
The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.
The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.
More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.
The work of testimony
The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.
They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.
They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.
The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.
In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?
She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.
Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.
There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30,
all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.
But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.
It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.
“The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”
She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.
In the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.
Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.
Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive.
They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.
You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?
You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.
Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.
50 letters from Gaza
The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.
In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.
This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.
Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.
The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.
In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.
The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.
But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.
There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)
In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:
this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.
But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.
Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”
When comparing agony, only one can live
Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.
Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.
In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:
On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.
In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.
In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.
To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.
Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.
In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.
Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.
“While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.
As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.
And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.
Surviving the October 7 attacks
Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.
Amir Tibon and his family survived the Oct 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border. Scribe
In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.
Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.
Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?
Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.
In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.
The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.
In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.
The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.
The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.
If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.
Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.
Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.
But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.
His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.
Empty land?
This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.
As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.
In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.
The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.
After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.
By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).
The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.
The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.
Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.
He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)
Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.
Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.
A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.
Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”
In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.
The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.
Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.
The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.
Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?
The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.
We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.
If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.
A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?
Stories, awakening and halting the bombs
Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.
Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”
But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.
Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.
This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.
Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:
tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.
If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.
Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.
Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.
Juliet Rogers 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.
Somalia ranks among the lowest scoring countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. The index of 195 countries is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, years of schooling, and access to a decent standard of living. Ali A. Abdi, a scholar of social development education, examines Somalia’s failure to advance social development programmes.
What is socio-economic development and how does Somalia stack up?
Despite the pomp and circumstance, though, the country’s social development indicators are dismal.
Social development generally means visible improvements in the quality of life. People’s well-being is based on aspects of national progress like:
universally available good quality education and adequate healthcare
employment opportunities that generate liveable incomes and upward socioeconomic mobility
governance structures that protect people’s rights to security.
Somalia has failed to meet these human development targets.
Its low score in the UN index can be understood by looking at the statistics relating to education and health. In any society these act as foundational blocks for social development. But in Somalia:
children can expect to get an average of 1.72 years of education (the continental African average is 7.7 years)
the capital city, Mogadishu, with a population of 2.8 million, has only two fully public hospitals and they lack specialist services; patients who require specialist care must go to private hospitals
With these social development liabilities, it’s no wonder that the country is the biggest per capita producer of both global refugees and internally displaced persons.
How did Somalia come to this?
The Somali state collapsed as a cohesive national entity in 1991. The military government that had been in power since 1969 was overthrown by armed opposition forces. The country slowly fragmented into quasi-self-governing regions. Transitional national governments have come and gone.
The current federal political structure came into being in August 2012. The Federal Republic of Somalia comprised five founding member states (there are now six).
The depressed social development situation is not the only obstacle facing Somalia. Other complexities include:
A governance system built on cronyism and political loyalty: Somalia’s national political leadership entrenched cronyism. In fairness, the same selectively applies to sub-national, federal member states leadership. This corrupt system has found traction in a country where professionals, young graduates and traditional leaders lack legitimate sources of income. This undermines good governance while creating discord within and among the federal government and federal member states.
Discord at national level and between national and sub-national leaders: The most recent example of this revolves around the national leadership’s 2024 attempt to change the interim constitution. The unilaterally proposed one-person-one-vote proposal runs counter to the 2012 framework through which the current federal system was created. This has fuelled yet another national controversy with less than a year to the next presidential election.
Externally constructed political and economic interventions: Somalia receives significant international aid to address political and developmental challenges. But the strings attached include the management of these funds by external entities. These donor priorities can be detached from immediate social development needs. And aid creates and sustains dependency and entrenches poverty.
What should the government prioritise and why?
The political class always says fighting terrorism is the top policy priority. This thinking, while viable for the current situation, ignores the potential to minimise terrorism by putting the basic needs of the public first, and especially the youth.
Somali leaders are duty-bound to shift focus. A good place to start is the basis of social development: security, education and healthcare. It falls upon them to marshal the country’s resources and capacities to improve the well-being of its citizens.
The national leadership also needs to restructure its relationship with federal member states. Distribution of development resources (including foreign aid) must be fair, not based on political alliances.
Somalia also needs to reform the government’s policy on public appointments. People must get jobs based on their educational background, professional experience, incorruptible character and institutional accountability.
The country has impressive natural resources. There’s huge untapped potential for fisheries and agriculture, which is the country’s economic backbone. The country also has untapped minerals and hydrocarbons wealth.
The above observations are not to say that the federal government should lose sight of the fight against the terrorist organisations. But the welfare of people, including job creation for young people, must be equally prioritised. That will surely advance much needed social development while also reducing the appeal of terrorism among the youth.
Ali A. Abdi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Canada faces a massive shortage of physicians. According to recent reports, Canadians require about 23,000 family doctors to meet current and emerging needs.
In the absence of effective solutions, mayors and municipal councils across the country are competing with each other to entice doctors to their communities.
It seems insurmountable, but options do exist and, no doubt, multiple approaches will be needed. What’s possible?
My clinical, administrative and educational roles over the years have provided an opportunity to work within and examine the doctor “pipeline” from multiple perspectives. There’s a disconnect between that pipeline and the urgent and growing need for doctors, which was a major motivation for my book The Doctors We Need: Imagining a New Path for Physician Recruitment, Training, and Support. Based on all this, at least seven approaches seem possible. All have their pros and cons.
In Canada, doctors are in demand and enjoy an excellent standard of living. Immigration to Canada, if offered, would likely be seen as a very attractive option.
Option 2: Short-track qualification of foreign-trained physicians already in Canada
Many foreign-trained doctors have already immigrated to Canada and are working at non-medical jobs, hoping to gain residency status that would allow them to undertake examinations or complete their training.
This approach would have many of the same disadvantages as above, but at least ensures these individuals already have some familiarity with Canadian work environment and a better awareness of the expectations facing physicians.
Option 3: Repatriate Canadians who have trained (or are training) abroad
It’s generally acknowledged that there are at least as many Canadians studying medicine outside Canada as within. These are people who were unsuccessful or chose not to engage in our highly competitive admission processes that annually turn away thousands of highly qualified students. They tend to enrol in well-established medical schools in countries such as Australia, Ireland and England.
Although no rigorous analysis or statistics are available, it’s increasingly recognized that the majority remain and practise in the countries where they trained, having established relationships and support structures. In fact, many are actively recruited to take up much needed primary care positions in those countries.
Attracting them back to Canada will require a targeted recruitment strategy and expansion of available post-graduate training positions. All that being said, this is potentially a workforce already prepared and willing to address Canadian health-care needs.
Option 4: Increase the efficiency and capacity of our current physicians
All doctors, particularly family physicians, face a burden of paperwork and administrative tasks that drastically reduces their capacity to assess and treat patients. Developing innovative processes and collaborations that allow them to focus their time on direct patient care will expand their impact and reduce the number of physicians required.
Option 5: Supplement doctor roles with non-physicians
We’re already seeing this strategy play out with nurses and pharmacists providing some primary care that was previously provided only by physicians.
This approach has many merits and can allow physicians to concentrate on key essential roles, as for Option 4, above. The keys will be to ensure that the health-care teams co-ordinate and integrate their work effectively, and that all essential services are provided.
Option 6: Collaborate with high-quality medical schools outside Canada to facilitate entry and training of willing and qualified Canadian students
If we’re not able to train sufficient physicians through our own medical school structure, we could partner with foreign, well-functioning medical schools to promote access for Canadians who wish to return to Canada and engage the types of practices that are in such demand.
This would require identifying appropriate schools and developing partnerships ensuring that the admission standards, curriculum and clinical training meet Canadian standards.
Option 7: Increase medical school admissions and training in Canada
The most obvious and intuitively appealing approach would be to simply ramp up the training pipeline within Canada’s medical schools. After all, we have excellent schools and certainly no shortage of very willing and capable applicants.
There are currently 18 medical schools in Canada. Plans are in place to expand to 20 schools over the next few years, but this will not be effective unless we change the current processes of training.
The supply of family doctors provided by our current admission and training processes falls far short of our needs. Recent studies also demonstrate that graduates from our current training programs are increasingly turning away from the comprehensive and community-based practices so much in need.
Consequently, even a dramatic expansion within the current training paradigm will fall far short of addressing our needs. To be effective, expansion must occur in conjunction with new approaches to admissions and training.
The major drawback of this approach, of course, is that it will take time to even begin to address the shortfall. However, it addresses the fundamental problem most directly and establishes a framework for ongoing sustainability.
While there is no single perfect solution, there are a number of approaches, all of which have potential to relieve Canada’s medical workforce crisis. It’s time to explore and pursue them all. It’s time to develop and empower a multi-disciplinary, pan-Canadian panel to decide which mix of the options will build the reliable, sustainable physician workforce that Canada needs and deserves.
Anthony Sanfilippo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics, McGill University
Many companies have turned to chatbots to manage customer service interactions.(Shutterstock)
Customers contact companies regularly to purchase products and services, inquire about orders, make payments and request returns. Until recently, the most common way for customers to contact companies was through phone calls or by interacting with human agents via company websites and mobile apps.
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen the profileration of a new kind of interface: chatbots. A chatbot is an intelligent software program that can carry out two-way conversations with customers.
Spurred by the potential of chatbots to communicate with customers round-the-clock, companies are increasingly routing customers to chatbots. As such, the worldwide chatbot market has grown from US$370 million in 2017 to about US$2.2 billion in 2024.
As these tools become more embedded in customer service systems, understanding customer preferences and behaviours is crucial.
Most companies today use chatbots as the first point of contact. Only when a chatbot cannot answer a question or a customer asks to speak with someone does the conversation shift to a human agent. (Shutterstock)
Most companies today use chatbots as the first line of customer support. Only when a chatbot fails to provide the necessary information or a customer asks to speak with someone does the conversation shift to a human agent.
While efficient, this one-size-fits-all approach may be sub-optimal because customers may prefer a human agent for some types of services and a chatbot for others.
I used machine learning methods to conduct three analyses on the chat transcripts.
The first focused on why customers reach out to customer service in the first place. I found most inquiries fell into six main categories: orders, coupons, products, shipping, account issues and payments. Customers rarely turned to chatbots for questions related to shipping or payment, seemingly preferring human agents when their issue involves more detailed or sensitive information.
The second analysis measured how closely the language used by customer service agents — both human and bot agents — matched the language of the customers they were interacting with. It found human agents showed a higher degree of linguistic similarity to customers than chatbots did.
This result was unexpected. Given the sophistication of today’s AI, I had anticipated chatbots would be able to closely mimic customer language. Instead, the findings suggest human agents are better able to follow customers’ varied and dynamically changing language use.
Customers want to feel understood and supported — and for now, that often still means talking to a real person. (Shutterstock)
The third analysis tested the thesis that similarity breeds liking — a concept that suggests human agents’ similarity with customers should increase customer’s engagement.
I measured customer engagement by the average number of seconds between a customer’s consecutive messages during a chat. The results show that when human agents displayed higher linguistic similarity, customers responded more quickly and frequently. The more the customer felt “understood,” the more engaged they were.
Recommendations for companies
My research findings make three recommendations to companies. First, companies should identify the reason behind each customer inquiry before assigning that customer to a chatbot or a human agent. The reason should determine whether the company matches the customer to a bot agent or a human agent.
Second, both chatbots and human agents should be trained to adapt their language and communication style to match that of the customer. For human agents, this kind of mirroring may come naturally, but for chatbots, it must be programmed.
My research shows that customers are more engaged when they feel that the agent they are chatting with understands them and communicates in a similar way. Doing this will keep customers engaged and lead to more effective and efficient interactions.
Third, businesses should ask technology companies for evidence on how much their chatbots increase effectiveness and efficiency relative to human agents. Specifically, how do their chatbots compare to human agents in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction? Only if the metrics exceed a certain threshold should companies consider using chatbots.
Customers want to feel understood and supported — and for now, that often still means talking to a real person. Rather than seeing chatbots as a wholesale replacement, companies should treat them as part of a hybrid approach that respects customer preferences and aligns the right tool with the right task.
Vivek Astvansh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Canada faces a massive shortage of physicians. According to recent reports, Canadians require about 23,000 family doctors to meet current and emerging needs.
In the absence of effective solutions, mayors and municipal councils across the country are competing with each other to entice doctors to their communities.
It seems insurmountable, but options do exist and, no doubt, multiple approaches will be needed. What’s possible?
My clinical, administrative and educational roles over the years have provided an opportunity to work within and examine the doctor “pipeline” from multiple perspectives. There’s a disconnect between that pipeline and the urgent and growing need for doctors, which was a major motivation for my book The Doctors We Need: Imagining a New Path for Physician Recruitment, Training, and Support. Based on all this, at least seven approaches seem possible. All have their pros and cons.
In Canada, doctors are in demand and enjoy an excellent standard of living. Immigration to Canada, if offered, would likely be seen as a very attractive option.
Option 2: Short-track qualification of foreign-trained physicians already in Canada
Many foreign-trained doctors have already immigrated to Canada and are working at non-medical jobs, hoping to gain residency status that would allow them to undertake examinations or complete their training.
This approach would have many of the same disadvantages as above, but at least ensures these individuals already have some familiarity with Canadian work environment and a better awareness of the expectations facing physicians.
Option 3: Repatriate Canadians who have trained (or are training) abroad
It’s generally acknowledged that there are at least as many Canadians studying medicine outside Canada as within. These are people who were unsuccessful or chose not to engage in our highly competitive admission processes that annually turn away thousands of highly qualified students. They tend to enrol in well-established medical schools in countries such as Australia, Ireland and England.
Although no rigorous analysis or statistics are available, it’s increasingly recognized that the majority remain and practise in the countries where they trained, having established relationships and support structures. In fact, many are actively recruited to take up much needed primary care positions in those countries.
Attracting them back to Canada will require a targeted recruitment strategy and expansion of available post-graduate training positions. All that being said, this is potentially a workforce already prepared and willing to address Canadian health-care needs.
Option 4: Increase the efficiency and capacity of our current physicians
All doctors, particularly family physicians, face a burden of paperwork and administrative tasks that drastically reduces their capacity to assess and treat patients. Developing innovative processes and collaborations that allow them to focus their time on direct patient care will expand their impact and reduce the number of physicians required.
Option 5: Supplement doctor roles with non-physicians
We’re already seeing this strategy play out with nurses and pharmacists providing some primary care that was previously provided only by physicians.
This approach has many merits and can allow physicians to concentrate on key essential roles, as for Option 4, above. The keys will be to ensure that the health-care teams co-ordinate and integrate their work effectively, and that all essential services are provided.
Option 6: Collaborate with high-quality medical schools outside Canada to facilitate entry and training of willing and qualified Canadian students
If we’re not able to train sufficient physicians through our own medical school structure, we could partner with foreign, well-functioning medical schools to promote access for Canadians who wish to return to Canada and engage the types of practices that are in such demand.
This would require identifying appropriate schools and developing partnerships ensuring that the admission standards, curriculum and clinical training meet Canadian standards.
Option 7: Increase medical school admissions and training in Canada
The most obvious and intuitively appealing approach would be to simply ramp up the training pipeline within Canada’s medical schools. After all, we have excellent schools and certainly no shortage of very willing and capable applicants.
There are currently 18 medical schools in Canada. Plans are in place to expand to 20 schools over the next few years, but this will not be effective unless we change the current processes of training.
The supply of family doctors provided by our current admission and training processes falls far short of our needs. Recent studies also demonstrate that graduates from our current training programs are increasingly turning away from the comprehensive and community-based practices so much in need.
Consequently, even a dramatic expansion within the current training paradigm will fall far short of addressing our needs. To be effective, expansion must occur in conjunction with new approaches to admissions and training.
The major drawback of this approach, of course, is that it will take time to even begin to address the shortfall. However, it addresses the fundamental problem most directly and establishes a framework for ongoing sustainability.
While there is no single perfect solution, there are a number of approaches, all of which have potential to relieve Canada’s medical workforce crisis. It’s time to explore and pursue them all. It’s time to develop and empower a multi-disciplinary, pan-Canadian panel to decide which mix of the options will build the reliable, sustainable physician workforce that Canada needs and deserves.
Anthony Sanfilippo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics, McGill University
Many companies have turned to chatbots to manage customer service interactions.(Shutterstock)
Customers contact companies regularly to purchase products and services, inquire about orders, make payments and request returns. Until recently, the most common way for customers to contact companies was through phone calls or by interacting with human agents via company websites and mobile apps.
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen the profileration of a new kind of interface: chatbots. A chatbot is an intelligent software program that can carry out two-way conversations with customers.
Spurred by the potential of chatbots to communicate with customers round-the-clock, companies are increasingly routing customers to chatbots. As such, the worldwide chatbot market has grown from US$370 million in 2017 to about US$2.2 billion in 2024.
As these tools become more embedded in customer service systems, understanding customer preferences and behaviours is crucial.
Most companies today use chatbots as the first point of contact. Only when a chatbot cannot answer a question or a customer asks to speak with someone does the conversation shift to a human agent. (Shutterstock)
Most companies today use chatbots as the first line of customer support. Only when a chatbot fails to provide the necessary information or a customer asks to speak with someone does the conversation shift to a human agent.
While efficient, this one-size-fits-all approach may be sub-optimal because customers may prefer a human agent for some types of services and a chatbot for others.
I used machine learning methods to conduct three analyses on the chat transcripts.
The first focused on why customers reach out to customer service in the first place. I found most inquiries fell into six main categories: orders, coupons, products, shipping, account issues and payments. Customers rarely turned to chatbots for questions related to shipping or payment, seemingly preferring human agents when their issue involves more detailed or sensitive information.
The second analysis measured how closely the language used by customer service agents — both human and bot agents — matched the language of the customers they were interacting with. It found human agents showed a higher degree of linguistic similarity to customers than chatbots did.
This result was unexpected. Given the sophistication of today’s AI, I had anticipated chatbots would be able to closely mimic customer language. Instead, the findings suggest human agents are better able to follow customers’ varied and dynamically changing language use.
Customers want to feel understood and supported — and for now, that often still means talking to a real person. (Shutterstock)
The third analysis tested the thesis that similarity breeds liking — a concept that suggests human agents’ similarity with customers should increase customer’s engagement.
I measured customer engagement by the average number of seconds between a customer’s consecutive messages during a chat. The results show that when human agents displayed higher linguistic similarity, customers responded more quickly and frequently. The more the customer felt “understood,” the more engaged they were.
Recommendations for companies
My research findings make three recommendations to companies. First, companies should identify the reason behind each customer inquiry before assigning that customer to a chatbot or a human agent. The reason should determine whether the company matches the customer to a bot agent or a human agent.
Second, both chatbots and human agents should be trained to adapt their language and communication style to match that of the customer. For human agents, this kind of mirroring may come naturally, but for chatbots, it must be programmed.
My research shows that customers are more engaged when they feel that the agent they are chatting with understands them and communicates in a similar way. Doing this will keep customers engaged and lead to more effective and efficient interactions.
Third, businesses should ask technology companies for evidence on how much their chatbots increase effectiveness and efficiency relative to human agents. Specifically, how do their chatbots compare to human agents in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction? Only if the metrics exceed a certain threshold should companies consider using chatbots.
Customers want to feel understood and supported — and for now, that often still means talking to a real person. Rather than seeing chatbots as a wholesale replacement, companies should treat them as part of a hybrid approach that respects customer preferences and aligns the right tool with the right task.
Vivek Astvansh 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.
The U.S. Capitol is seen shortly after the Senate passed its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic tax and spending package, many critics are wondering how the president retained the loyalty of so many congressional Republicans, with so few defections.
Just three Republican senators – the maximum allowed for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to still pass – voted against the Senate version of the bill on July 1, 2025. In the House, only two Republicans voted against the bill, which passed the chamber on July 3.
Trump is not the first president to bend Congress to his will to get legislation approved.
Presidential supremacy over the legislative process has been on the rise for decades. But contrary to popular belief, lawmakers are not always simply voting based on blind partisanship.
Increasingly, politicians in the same political party as a president are voting in line with the president because their political futures are as tied up with the president’s reputation as they have ever been.
Even when national polling indicates a policy is unpopular – as is the case with Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, which an estimated 55% of American voters said in June they oppose, according to Quinnipiac University polling – lawmakers in the president’s party have serious motivation to follow the president’s lead.
Or else they risk losing reelection.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to reporters at the Capitol building on July 3, 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Lawmakers increasingly partisan on presidential policy
Over the past 50 years, lawmakers in the president’s party have increasingly supported the president’s position on legislation that passes Congress. Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, are increasingly united against the president’s position.
These patterns are unheard of in the modern Congress. In 2022, for example – a year of significant legislative achievement for the Biden administration – the Democratic majority in Congress voted the same way as the Democratic president 99% of the time. Republicans, meanwhile, voted with Biden just 19% of the time.
Elections can tell us why
Over the past half-century, the two major parties have changed dramatically, both in the absolutist nature of their beliefs and in relation to one another.
Both parties used to be more mixed in their ideological outlooks, for example, with conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans playing key roles in policymaking. This made it easier to form cross-party coalitions, either with or against the president.
A few decades ago, Democrats and Republicans were also less geographically polarized from each other. Democrats were regularly elected to congressional seats in the South, for example, even if those districts supported Republican presidents such as Nixon or Ronald Reagan.
These changes have ushered in a larger phenomenon called political nationalization, in which local political considerations, issues and candidate qualifications have taken a back seat to national politics.
Ticket splitting
From the 1960s through most of the 1980s, between one-quarter and one-half of all congressional districts routinely split tickets – meaning they sent a politician of one party to Congress while supporting a different party for president.
These are the same few districts in Nebraska and New York, for example, that supported former Vice President Kamala Harris for president in 2024 but which also elected a Republican candidate to the House that same year.
Since the Reagan years, however, these types of districts that could simultaneously support a Democratic presidential nominee and Republicans for Congress have gone nearly extinct. Today, only a handful of districts split their tickets, and all other districts select the same party for both offices.
The past two presidential elections, in 2020 and 2024, set the same record low for ticket splitting. Just 16 out of 435 House districts voted for different parties for the House of Representatives and president.
Members of Congress follow their voters
The political success of members of Congress has become increasingly tied up with the success or failure of the president. Because nearly all Republicans hail from districts and states that are very supportive of Trump and his agenda, following the will of their voters increasingly means being supportive of the president’s agenda.
Not doing so risks blowback from their Trump-supporting constituents. A June 2025 Quinnipiac University poll found that 67% of Republicans support the bill, while 87% of Democrats oppose it.
These electoral considerations also help explain the unanimous opposition to Trump’s legislation by the Democrats, nearly all of whom represent districts and states that did not support Trump in 2024.
Thanks to party polarization in ideologies, geography and in the electorate, few Democrats could survive politically while strongly supporting Trump. And few Republicans could do so while opposing him.
But as the importance to voters of mere presidential support increases, the importance of members’ skill in fighting for issues unique to their districts has decreased. This can leave important local concerns about, for example, unique local environmental issues or declining economic sectors unspoken for. At the very least, members have less incentive to speak for them.
Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The U.S. Capitol is seen shortly after the Senate passed its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic tax and spending package, many critics are wondering how the president retained the loyalty of so many congressional Republicans, with so few defections.
Just three Republican senators – the maximum allowed for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to still pass – voted against the Senate version of the bill on July 1, 2025. In the House, only two Republicans voted against the bill, which passed the chamber on July 3.
Trump is not the first president to bend Congress to his will to get legislation approved.
Presidential supremacy over the legislative process has been on the rise for decades. But contrary to popular belief, lawmakers are not always simply voting based on blind partisanship.
Increasingly, politicians in the same political party as a president are voting in line with the president because their political futures are as tied up with the president’s reputation as they have ever been.
Even when national polling indicates a policy is unpopular – as is the case with Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, which an estimated 55% of American voters said in June they oppose, according to Quinnipiac University polling – lawmakers in the president’s party have serious motivation to follow the president’s lead.
Or else they risk losing reelection.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to reporters at the Capitol building on July 3, 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Lawmakers increasingly partisan on presidential policy
Over the past 50 years, lawmakers in the president’s party have increasingly supported the president’s position on legislation that passes Congress. Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, are increasingly united against the president’s position.
These patterns are unheard of in the modern Congress. In 2022, for example – a year of significant legislative achievement for the Biden administration – the Democratic majority in Congress voted the same way as the Democratic president 99% of the time. Republicans, meanwhile, voted with Biden just 19% of the time.
Elections can tell us why
Over the past half-century, the two major parties have changed dramatically, both in the absolutist nature of their beliefs and in relation to one another.
Both parties used to be more mixed in their ideological outlooks, for example, with conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans playing key roles in policymaking. This made it easier to form cross-party coalitions, either with or against the president.
A few decades ago, Democrats and Republicans were also less geographically polarized from each other. Democrats were regularly elected to congressional seats in the South, for example, even if those districts supported Republican presidents such as Nixon or Ronald Reagan.
These changes have ushered in a larger phenomenon called political nationalization, in which local political considerations, issues and candidate qualifications have taken a back seat to national politics.
Ticket splitting
From the 1960s through most of the 1980s, between one-quarter and one-half of all congressional districts routinely split tickets – meaning they sent a politician of one party to Congress while supporting a different party for president.
These are the same few districts in Nebraska and New York, for example, that supported former Vice President Kamala Harris for president in 2024 but which also elected a Republican candidate to the House that same year.
Since the Reagan years, however, these types of districts that could simultaneously support a Democratic presidential nominee and Republicans for Congress have gone nearly extinct. Today, only a handful of districts split their tickets, and all other districts select the same party for both offices.
The past two presidential elections, in 2020 and 2024, set the same record low for ticket splitting. Just 16 out of 435 House districts voted for different parties for the House of Representatives and president.
Members of Congress follow their voters
The political success of members of Congress has become increasingly tied up with the success or failure of the president. Because nearly all Republicans hail from districts and states that are very supportive of Trump and his agenda, following the will of their voters increasingly means being supportive of the president’s agenda.
Not doing so risks blowback from their Trump-supporting constituents. A June 2025 Quinnipiac University poll found that 67% of Republicans support the bill, while 87% of Democrats oppose it.
These electoral considerations also help explain the unanimous opposition to Trump’s legislation by the Democrats, nearly all of whom represent districts and states that did not support Trump in 2024.
Thanks to party polarization in ideologies, geography and in the electorate, few Democrats could survive politically while strongly supporting Trump. And few Republicans could do so while opposing him.
But as the importance to voters of mere presidential support increases, the importance of members’ skill in fighting for issues unique to their districts has decreased. This can leave important local concerns about, for example, unique local environmental issues or declining economic sectors unspoken for. At the very least, members have less incentive to speak for them.
Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Now imagine living that kind of isolation all the time.
For millions of Americans with serious mental health conditions, being unable to engage in meaningful activities is not just a temporary crisis – it’s daily life.
Community inclusion refers to everyone’s right to participate in meaningful social roles. This includes working, going to school, practicing one’s faith or simply connecting with others in shared activities.
Yet, for the estimated 15.4 million U.S. adults living with significant mental health conditions – about 6% of the adult population – community inclusion is far from guaranteed. Compared with the general population, they are far less likely to be involved in social activities that bring purpose and connection, as well as health benefits.
I am a psychologist who has worked in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric settings, and I directed a federally funded research and training center at Temple University in Philadelphia for more than 20 years that focuses on independent living and participation of people with serious mental illnesses.
My colleagues and I have conducted research which demonstrates that people with such conditions want to participate in their community just like everyone else. We also found that they can do so – with proper supports like medications, therapy, rehabilitation services and communities making reasonable accommodations for them. And furthermore, they should: Community inclusion is good for their health.
Benefits of community life
Community involvement gets people with mental illness out of bed and out of the house. It encourages movement and activity, which enhances physical health.
Some people may assume that people with severe mental illnesses are restricted from active participation in their communities solely due to the mental health symptoms themselves.
For example, they might think that cognitive issues related to schizophrenia make it too difficult for people to work or go to school; or that mania, anxiety and depression prevent them from having good relationships with others.
But environment also plays a major role.
The social model of disability suggests that people are not disabled by their diagnosis. Instead, they experience a disability through limitations in their communities because of physical, structural and social barriers.
For example, someone with anxiety or depression may be penalized in a college class that deducts points for students who do not speak up.
A person with a disability that causes fluctuating moods or low energy might not succeed in a rigid nine-to-five job without accommodations.
And a churchgoer who talks to themselves or has to walk around during services because their medications make them jittery – a condition called akathisia – or who is known to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia might be asked to leave because their presence makes others uncomfortable.
The result is that people are unable to participate not simply because of an impairment, but because of an environment that does not accommodate or appreciate their unique attributes.
Helping people with mental illness rejoin community life
Some programs here in Pennsylvania are working to change that.
Education Plus helps Philadelphia residents with mental health conditions complete college and financial aid application forms, obtain school accommodations for their disability, and develop good study habits or learn to ask for help from their instructors.
Pathways to Housing PA offers transitional job opportunities to people who have been homeless, and organizes picnics, trips to Phillies baseball games and other fun activities that create a sense of community belonging.
A voter access initiative at an inpatient psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania helps patients check their voter registration status, register to vote and apply for mail-in ballots.
The nonprofit Compeer in suburban Philadelphia connects community volunteers to people with mental illnesses to engage in mutual leisure or educational interests. This oftentimes leads to long-term friendships.
And a current study I am conducting is examining ways to support faith communities in Montgomery County to be more welcoming and embracing of individuals with mental illnesses.
Family members, friends and mental health professionals can simply ask people with mental illnesses about their interests – whether it’s employment, going to school, dating or making new friends – and then encourage and support them in pursuing those interests.
Creating inclusive communities means not just offering services to people with serious mental illness, but also changing negative beliefs and behaviors toward them. This includes embracing people who might express emotions differently, require flexibility or simply behave in ways we’re not used to.
For example, say you’re in a coffee shop and encounter a person who is muttering to themselves and may not have bathed in a few days. Maybe you make eye contact, smile and say hello. Certainly reconsider complaining.
It takes empathy, open-mindedness and patience to create a community that welcomes people with mental illness and increases the likelihood that they can participate in society like everyone else.
Mark Salzer receives funding from the National Institute on Disabilities, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. He previously served on the Board of Directors for Pathways to Housing PA and works closely with Horizon House, including in the development of the Education Plus program mentioned in the article.
Somalia ranks among the lowest scoring countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. The index of 195 countries is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, years of schooling, and access to a decent standard of living. Ali A. Abdi, a scholar of social development education, examines Somalia’s failure to advance social development programmes.
What is socio-economic development and how does Somalia stack up?
Despite the pomp and circumstance, though, the country’s social development indicators are dismal.
Social development generally means visible improvements in the quality of life. People’s well-being is based on aspects of national progress like:
universally available good quality education and adequate healthcare
employment opportunities that generate liveable incomes and upward socioeconomic mobility
governance structures that protect people’s rights to security.
Somalia has failed to meet these human development targets.
Its low score in the UN index can be understood by looking at the statistics relating to education and health. In any society these act as foundational blocks for social development. But in Somalia:
children can expect to get an average of 1.72 years of education (the continental African average is 7.7 years)
the capital city, Mogadishu, with a population of 2.8 million, has only two fully public hospitals and they lack specialist services; patients who require specialist care must go to private hospitals
With these social development liabilities, it’s no wonder that the country is the biggest per capita producer of both global refugees and internally displaced persons.
How did Somalia come to this?
The Somali state collapsed as a cohesive national entity in 1991. The military government that had been in power since 1969 was overthrown by armed opposition forces. The country slowly fragmented into quasi-self-governing regions. Transitional national governments have come and gone.
The current federal political structure came into being in August 2012. The Federal Republic of Somalia comprised five founding member states (there are now six).
The depressed social development situation is not the only obstacle facing Somalia. Other complexities include:
A governance system built on cronyism and political loyalty: Somalia’s national political leadership entrenched cronyism. In fairness, the same selectively applies to sub-national, federal member states leadership. This corrupt system has found traction in a country where professionals, young graduates and traditional leaders lack legitimate sources of income. This undermines good governance while creating discord within and among the federal government and federal member states.
Discord at national level and between national and sub-national leaders: The most recent example of this revolves around the national leadership’s 2024 attempt to change the interim constitution. The unilaterally proposed one-person-one-vote proposal runs counter to the 2012 framework through which the current federal system was created. This has fuelled yet another national controversy with less than a year to the next presidential election.
Externally constructed political and economic interventions: Somalia receives significant international aid to address political and developmental challenges. But the strings attached include the management of these funds by external entities. These donor priorities can be detached from immediate social development needs. And aid creates and sustains dependency and entrenches poverty.
What should the government prioritise and why?
The political class always says fighting terrorism is the top policy priority. This thinking, while viable for the current situation, ignores the potential to minimise terrorism by putting the basic needs of the public first, and especially the youth.
Somali leaders are duty-bound to shift focus. A good place to start is the basis of social development: security, education and healthcare. It falls upon them to marshal the country’s resources and capacities to improve the well-being of its citizens.
The national leadership also needs to restructure its relationship with federal member states. Distribution of development resources (including foreign aid) must be fair, not based on political alliances.
Somalia also needs to reform the government’s policy on public appointments. People must get jobs based on their educational background, professional experience, incorruptible character and institutional accountability.
The country has impressive natural resources. There’s huge untapped potential for fisheries and agriculture, which is the country’s economic backbone. The country also has untapped minerals and hydrocarbons wealth.
The above observations are not to say that the federal government should lose sight of the fight against the terrorist organisations. But the welfare of people, including job creation for young people, must be equally prioritised. That will surely advance much needed social development while also reducing the appeal of terrorism among the youth.
Ali A. Abdi 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.
Speedballing – the practice of combining a stimulant like cocaine or methamphetamine with an opioid such as heroin or fentanyl – has evolved from a niche subculture to a widespread public health crisis. The practice stems from the early 1900s when World War I soldiers were often treated with a combination of cocaine and morphine.
As these dangerous combinations of drugs increasingly flood the market, I see an urgent need and opportunity for a new approach to prevention and treatment.
Why speedballing?
Dating back to the 1970s, the term speedballing originally referred to the combination of heroin and cocaine. Combining stimulants and opioids – the former’s “rush” with the latter’s calming effect – creates a dangerous physiological conflict.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, stimulant-involved overdose fatalities increased markedly from more than 12,000 annually in 2015 to greater than 57,000 in 2022, a 375% increase. Notably, approximately 70% of stimulant-related overdose deaths in 2022 also involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids, reflecting the rising prevalence of polysubstance involvement in overdose mortality.
The rise in speedballing is part of a broader trend of polysubstance use in the U.S. Since 2010, overdoses involving both stimulants and fentanyl have increased 50-fold, now accounting for approximately 35,000 deaths annually.
The conflicting effects of stimulants and opioids can also exacerbate mental health issues. Users may experience heightened anxiety, depression and paranoia. The combination can also impair cognitive functions, leading to confusion and poor decision-making.
Speedballing can also lead to severe cardiovascular problems, including hypertension, heart attack and stroke. The strain on the heart and blood vessels from the stimulant, combined with the depressant effects of the opioid, increases the risk of these life-threatening conditions.
Addressing the crisis
Increasing awareness about the dangers of speedballing is crucial. I believe that educational campaigns can inform the public about the risks of combining stimulants and opioids and the potential for unintentional fentanyl exposure.
Implementing harm reduction strategies by public health officials, community organizations and health care providers, such as providing fentanyl test strips and naloxone – a medication that reverses opioid overdoses – can save lives.
These measures allow individuals to test their drugs for the presence of fentanyl and have immediate access to overdose-reversing medication. Implementing these strategies widely is crucial to reducing overdose deaths and improving community health outcomes.
Andrew Yockey 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.
In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.
Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”
Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.
Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.
Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)
Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.
Plestia Alaqad. Plestia
These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.
The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.
The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.
More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.
The work of testimony
The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.
They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.
They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.
The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.
In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?
She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.
Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.
There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30,
all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.
But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.
It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.
“The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”
She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.
In the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.
Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.
Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive.
They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.
You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?
You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.
Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.
50 letters from Gaza
The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.
In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.
This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.
Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.
The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.
In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.
The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.
But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.
There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)
In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:
this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.
But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.
Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”
When comparing agony, only one can live
Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.
Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.
In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:
On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.
In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.
In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.
To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.
Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.
In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.
Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.
“While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.
As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.
And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.
Surviving the October 7 attacks
Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.
Amir Tibon and his family survived the Oct 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border. Scribe
In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.
Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.
Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?
Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.
In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.
The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.
In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.
The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.
The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.
If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.
Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.
Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.
But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.
His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.
Empty land?
This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.
As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.
In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.
The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.
After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.
By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).
The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.
The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.
Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.
He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)
Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.
Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.
A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.
Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”
In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.
The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.
Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.
The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.
Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?
The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.
We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.
If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.
A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?
Stories, awakening and halting the bombs
Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.
Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”
But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.
Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.
This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.
Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:
tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.
If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.
Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.
Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.
Juliet Rogers 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.
European Commission Press release Brussels, 04 Jul 2025 Today, the European Commission announced that six pioneering electric vehicle (EV) battery cell manufacturing projects will receive a total of €852 million in grants from the Innovation Fund, using revenues from the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS).
Statistics Canada is pleased to announce that the questions for the 2026 Census of Population and the 2026 Census of Agriculture have been published in the Canada Gazette and are now available to all Canadians on the Statistics Canada website.
Every five years, Canadians and agricultural businesses are invited to participate in the census to help paint a portrait of Canada. The information they provide allows us to better understand Canada’s economy and society.
Between each census cycle, Statistics Canada conducts comprehensive research, consultations and extensive testing to ensure the census fully captures the diversified profiles of Canadians and agriculture businesses.
Statistics Canada is committed to keeping the questions relevant, accessible, and as easy to answer as possible for all respondents. This ensures that each census provides the high-quality data that Canadians rely on to make informed decisions. See the backgrounderfor more details on how content for the 2026 Census questionnaires is determined.
Collection for the 2026 Census will begin in May 2026, except for the most northern and remote areas of the country where collection will begin in February 2026.
“Every five years, the Census of Population and the Census of Agriculture capture the most complete and accurate portrait of Canada, providing invaluable insights about our country. These are data that matter, and it all begins by asking the right questions. A lot of work and consultation go into the development of the census questionnaires. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who contributed to this work by sharing their feedback and taking part in census tests. This will ensure the census continues to deliver the reliable data Canadians have come to expect.”
Source: People’s Republic of China in Russian – People’s Republic of China in Russian –
Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News
ALMATY, July 4 (Xinhua) — In 2024, the volume of investment in fixed assets in Kazakhstan from all sources of financing amounted to 19,461.3 billion tenge (about 37.49 billion U.S. dollars), an increase of 8 percent compared to the previous year, the Bureau of National Statistics (BNS) of Kazakhstan reported on Friday.
According to the bureau, the main share of investment in fixed capital in 2024 will be in industry – 40 percent /including mining and quarrying – 18.7 percent, manufacturing – 10.7 percent/, real estate transactions – 18.8 percent, transportation and warehousing – 18.6 percent, and education – 5.9 percent.
“Budget funds accounted for 21.6 percent of the total volume of investments in fixed assets, while increasing by 40.4 percent compared to 2023. The share of the banking sector in financing the real sector of the economy in the total volume of investments in fixed assets is 4 percent, other borrowed funds – 11.5 percent,” the BNS report states. –0–
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Press release
Energy Secretary approves largest Irish Sea offshore wind farm
Mona offshore wind farm given the green light by the Energy Secretary.
Mona offshore wind farm has the potential to power the equivalent of more than 1 million homes with clean, secure, homegrown power
developer estimates project will support thousands of jobs over the life of the project – delivering on Plan for Change
approval another step forward for energy security and making Britain a clean energy superpower
More clean, homegrown, secure energy will be delivered for the British people as the Energy Secretary today (Friday 4 July) gives the green light to the largest offshore wind farm in the Irish Sea.
It is estimated the Mona Offshore Wind Farm could generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than 1 million British homes, providing a major boost for the national mission to become a clean energy superpower.
Situated in the Irish Sea, the project will power growth across the country by building supply chain opportunities, with the developer launching a portal where local companies can offer their skills to deliver the project, boosting local communities in Wales and across the UK.
The developer estimates it will support thousands of jobs, contributing to the up to 100,000 jobs supported by the offshore wind sector in Great Britain by 2030.
Jobs are expected to include engineers and maintenance operations during the construction phase, driving industrial renewal in proud manufacturing communities as part of the Plan for Change.
One year since taking office the government has made progress on delivering for the British people as part of the Prime Minister’s mission to become a clean energy superpower. This year’s actions lay the foundations for clean power by 2030 – all part of the mission to get energy bills down for good.
In its first year this government has consented new clean energy projects that can generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of almost 2 million homes. Mona will add to this by powering the equivalent of more than a million homes.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said:
This government was elected to take back control of our energy- and in our first year we have shown that the clean power revolution is here to stay.
Whether it’s offshore wind, solar or nuclear, we are backing the builders not the blockers so we deliver the clean homegrown power this country needs to protect family finances through our Plan for Change.
Mona homes powered estimate: Our homes powered estimate reflects the equivalent number of homes that could be powered based on an estimate of the annual generation from the Mona offshore wind farm, assuming generating capacity equivalent to its maximum grid connection (1.5 GW). The estimate is calculated using household consumption estimates sourced from the published Subnational Electricity and Gas Consumption Report and the 2024 average offshore wind specific load factors published in the department’s Energy Trends statistical publication (table 6.1). The actual generation will vary based on site specific factors.
Consented homes powered estimate: Our homes powered estimate reflects the equivalent number of homes that could be powered from the roughly 4 GW offshore wind and solar capacity consented by this government before this decision. It is based on a combination of published load factors (solar PV – 2023 Electricity Generation Costs Report) and developer estimates (offshore wind – Rampion 2), combined with the above household consumption data.
Jobs supported by Mona: The developer (bp and EnBW) estimates the project will support thousands of jobs and represent a significant economic opportunity for the UK. More information on their estimates is published here: Supporting the local, regional and national economy.
Up to 100,000 jobs supported by offshore wind in Great Britain by 2030: This includes direct and indirect jobs. Information on the methodology underpinning this estimate can be found here: Job estimates for wind generation by 2030: methodology note.
Actual generation will vary somewhat based on site-specific factors. It is not possible to continuously power a home through intermittent renewables – this capacity will work alongside the rest of the electricity system to power homes and businesses.
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Speech
Reception Year Quality RISE Conference Keynote
The Education Secretary’s keynote on Reception Year Quality, setting out the case for early intervention and school readiness reform
Hello everyone, thank you so much for being with us today.
And thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to put today together.
How wonderful it is that we can meet here at home in the North East!
I grew up not seven miles from here. Brendan Foster could have run it in half an hour on a good day.
And it’s lovely to be hosted here at the Stadium of Light.
A great location to discuss where we can help every child shine.
Early years education is vital to that.
To helping every child shine at school, to making sure they all have an equal shot at success.
To building a strong and fair society.
That journey begins early.
But right now, I think we all know it’s not working as it should.
You’ll know that at the end of reception we measure the share of children reaching a good level of development.
Can they communicate properly? Are they doing well socially, emotionally, physically? Are they getting to grips with numbers and words?
It reflects how well families are getting their children ready for school. And the effectiveness of early education.
This government’s Plan for Change sets a target of a record 75% of children reaching a good level of development.
On average, 2 in 3 children meet that already.
But new stats show that for children in need – children in social care, or facing other challenges – it’s 38%.
And for children on free school meals, it’s barely above half.
So, we have to ask ourselves, how can there be a fair race to success in our society when whole groups of children start so far behind?
And these gaps between backgrounds – they’re not shrinking, they’re growing.
They dig their nails in deep, and then they grow with the child.
40% of the disadvantage gap at age 16 is already there by age 5.
It breaks my heart that, for these children, here in our country, a quarter of the way through the 21st century –
background still means destiny.
It’s a national scandal.
Our story of a fairer society, the one we like to tell ourselves,
where every child has an equal shot at success,
where what counts is determination, not background,
talent, not privilege,
how hard you work, not how much your parents earn.
By failing these children at the start of their lives, we’re ripping up that story.
We’re saying that success isn’t for people like them.
As Secretary of State, it’s my mission to change that.
To give every child the best start in life.
To lay the foundations for a stronger and fairer society, right from the very start.
That’s where the biggest difference can be made,
that’s where my biggest priority lies,
and that’s where we’ll begin to break the link between background and success.
But you’ll be the first to tell me that to do that, we can’t wait until children reach school.
Because the years before, the earliest years of their lives, they are some of the most important.
For our children, and for our society.
From the day a baby is brought home from hospital.
Her start in life matters so much.
Because from her first day in this world, an invisible score is being kept, on the factors that will either hold her back or propel her forward.
Is her home stable, warm, loving?
Is there enough food in the fridge, enough money in the meter?
Does her family get the right support?
Are they able to devote enough time to play with her in the mornings,
to read to her in the evenings,
to share in the love and curiosity that will be the bedrock of her development?
And is she getting those crucial early opportunities to start learning?
Is there a great nursery at the end of the road?
With wonderful teachers that will share the right resources to help her shine?
The answers to all these questions, and many more, will shape more than her first few years.
They’ll mould her chances of success at school, her opportunities in life too.
And it’s bigger than that. If we zoom out, these are the issues that will define that stronger and fairer society we want to build.
Early years can be the driving force for the change this country needs.
New data out today from the Study of Early Education and Development is yet more proof of that.
Yet more proof that excellent early years education leads to academic success later on.
And yet more proof that the link is strongest for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The lower the family income, the higher the impact of early years.
And the bigger the opportunity to reach those children and change their path in life.
But I’m sorry to say that, at the moment, we’re missing too many of those opportunities.
Our early years workforce are heroes. They guide the youngest members of our society with passion, expertise and commitment.
But we need to back them by modernising our system, boosting family support and working together with parents and the sector.
Because far too many children are arriving for their first day in your schools simply not ready to learn.
A quarter not fully toilet trained.
A third can’t follow instructions.
Half can’t sit still.
A source of collective alarm for all of us as a society.
It holds those children back, of course.
But it holds the whole class back as well.
Teachers lose up to two and a half hours catching these children up.
Not per month.
Not even per week.
Two and a half hours per day.
Lost.
Precious opportunities, gone and not coming back.
Schools can be such a force for good. But they can’t do it alone. We need to make sure children are ready to go on day one.
So we’ve got to transform school readiness in our country.
In the year this government has been in power we’ve fixed the foundations and begun delivering the change children and parents need.
We’ve delivered the biggest ever uplift in early years funding for disadvantaged children.
It’s a system that backs parents too.
Because we are rolling out the entitlement to 30 hours of government-funded childcare, starting in September.
Putting up to £7,500 a year back in working parents’ pockets.
Before long, 80% of childcare will be government-backed.
And we’re forging ahead with our school-based nurseries. To deliver the places parents need, where they need them.
And to introduce children to school early on,
forming partnerships between early years settings and schools, exchanging knowledge and expertise to support children’s transitions into school.
I want to thank all the providers who are working with us to deliver the change families need.
And that includes the private, voluntary and independent providers, which I know will do an amazing job.
Like at Hindley Green Community Primary in Wigan, where the private provider is working to expand the school nursery.
And our free breakfast clubs are already rolling out in 750 early adopter primary schools too.
On top of that, last month I announced the biggest expansion of free school meal eligibility in England in a generation.
Children eating together, learning together, growing together. It’s good for behaviour, it’s good for attendance, it’s good for attainment.
But we know there’s much more to do.
Still so much we need to do.
We’ll soon publish our Best Start in Life Strategy.
Putting children’s outcomes right at the heart of government.
And delivering on our target to get 75% of children achieving a good level of development by age 5 will be front and centre.
But, like so much of our ambition, we can’t get there alone.
And alongside parents, schools and the whole early years sector, local government has a key role to play too.
I know many councils share our commitment to boosting the number of 5-year-olds reaching a good level of development.
And through this new strategy, we will embed targets for local government, in law.
This is too important. We’ve got to turn this around. And we can’t leave it to chance.
To drive the change we need, we’re starting early.
And that will include our reform of the SEND system.
Early intervention will be a core pillar of that reform. Identifying needs early, and working to support every child to achieve and thrive in the classroom.
But the transition from those early years into school is just as vital.
I see the wonderful work you are all doing to help children take their first steps into school.
Reception teachers go above and beyond, day after day, despite all the challenges, to set children off on the right foot.
But, if we’re honest – government just hasn’t taken reception year seriously enough in the past.
Rather than building a bridge between nursery and school, reception has fallen through the gap.
So just when children should be racing ahead, despite your best efforts, they end up treading water.
For too long, the first year has been the forgotten year.
So we’ve got to put that right.
That’s why reception year quality is one of the four national priorities for our new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams.
It’ll form a key part of our universal offer to raise standards in all schools. We’ll identify and share great practice – just as we’re doing today through this conference.
And we’re developing a brand-new digital tool to support school and MAT leaders.
Modelled data on where the evidence suggests your school should be in terms of its overall Good Level of Development score.
It’ll show where schools are ahead, and where they need to catch up.
Reception is a time for children to begin finding their voice.
Language development really needs to click into gear.
And that’s why we’re continuing to fund the Nuffield Early Language Intervention – for the 11,000 schools already registered, and any primary school that wants it.
NELI helps spot and sort problems early, supporting more than 50,000 children a year.
It speeds up progress for all children.
But, again, the impact is strongest for disadvantaged children. They make 7 months of extra progress on language development.
For the others, it’s 4 months.
It’s fully funded for schools, and great value for money for government – a reminder that good interventions don’t have to break the bank.
The programme has worked wonders at Gillas Lane Primary Academy – just down the road from here in my constituency.
Gillas Lane serves a disadvantaged community. The share of children on free school meals is double the local average.
Many children arrive at the school behind with their language development, but NELI helps catch them up.
The data shows that children on the programme come on leaps and bounds in their speaking, listening and communications.
It’s making such a difference in their lives – that’s why we’re determined to back early language development across the country.
But we must match that with early writing skills too.
Because learning to write can unlock learning across the board.
It helps children begin to explore their thoughts on the page; it helps them begin to make their mark on the world.
But last year 174,000 children missed the early learning goal in writing.
Nearly three quarters of 5-year-olds with special educational needs are behind on writing.
Nearly half of 5-year-olds on free school meals are behind.
It’s a huge barrier to learning.
So next week my department will publish a new writing framework.
Practical support for teachers to build strong writing skills for children.
Where our language programmes will help children find their voice, our writing framework will help them write it down.
But we’ve got to start early on maths too.
Maths is the language of the universe, at the centre of our understanding of the world around us.
But for too many children it’s the language of fear and frustration.
And we can’t let a fear of numbers follow our children into adulthood.
So, we’re working with our partners to more than double the Maths Champions programme, reaching up to 1,800 more early years settings.
To give every child the best start in life,
to make sure every child can succeed in school,
we’ve all got to recognise our responsibilities.
As government we have ours. As school leaders you have yours.
And parents have responsibilities too.
To make sure their children arrive at school ready to learn.
Whether that’s their first day in reception, or the last day in year 11.
Our Best Start in Life Strategy will support parents to do just that – and to do much more for their children as they move into school and beyond.
Periods of transition are important – for children at school, and for our cities and country too.
The summer of 1997 was a summer of change. The UK had a new Labour government, and Sunderland had a new football stadium – the one we are in today.
Sunderland played their first game here on the 30th of July – against the Dutch team Ajax.
I’m reliably told it was a drab nil-nil.
Although my Sunderland-mad advisor Ben, who’s here today, insists I also point out that Sunderland won their first league match here two weeks later, beating Man City 3-1.
But at midnight the night before the Ajax game, Bob Murray, the chairman of Sunderland, released a statement announcing the name of the new stadium.
It was to be called the Stadium of Light.
Bob explained that for more than 150 years, right next door to where we are today, miners at Wearmouth Colliery carried with them a Davy Lamp to light the way through their dark working days.
The stadium was named for them.
In Bob’s words, it was to let ‘this light shine forever’ – a torch that ‘illuminates the way forward’.
That’s how I feel about education – lighting the way ahead. And it’s how the miners felt too.
That’s why the miners’ halls in my constituency down the road and across our region where they had libraries and newspapers.
Why so many of the banners they hoisted each year at the Big Meeting proclaimed the truth that knowledge is power.
They knew how crucial a good education today was to a bright future tomorrow.
So now is the time to revolutionise early years,
to light those lamps of learning, right from the start,
and to give each and every child the start in life they deserve.
Amid growing setbacks on gender equality and increasing financial constraints, African policymakers, gender experts, and development specialists are calling for renewed collaboration and sustained investment in national gender data systems across the continent.
This is the message of the ongoing Seventh Africa Gender Statistics Forum taking place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
The Forum was co-organized by Côte d’Ivoire’s National Statistics Agency, the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank Group, the Economic Commission for Africa, UN Women, and Open Data Watch, with funding support from the Korea-Africa Economic Cooperation Trust Fund.
The Forum is exploring Africa’s gender data systems, ways to build statistical capacity, and policies to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment across the continent.
Representatives from host country Côte d’Ivoire said the country has made notable progress in recent years in collecting, analyzing and using gender data to guide public policy.
“These statistics are essential to understand the lived realities of girls and women and to design effective programs and policies that eliminate inequality,” Thiekoro Doumbia, Director General of Côte d’Ivoire’s National Statistics Agency, told attendees.
Held under the theme “Sound Statistics for ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality and Empowerment,” the Forum has attracted more than 150 participants from 40 African countries, covering a diversity of sectors – including government representatives, statisticians, civil society, and development organizations.
At the forum, participants have reflected on Africa’s journey in gender statistics since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – a landmark international agreement aimed at advancing women’s rights and gender equality.
“Statistics provide a solid foundation for good decision-making, and gender statistics are crucial for identifying vulnerabilities among women, girls, men, and boys and responding appropriately,” said William Muhwava, Chief for Demographic and Social Statistics Section of the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
The high-level panels, technical and networking sessions have focused on priority issues ranging from gender-based violence statistics and inclusive data systems to social protection, migration, and sets of standards, principles, and rules that guide behavior and decision-making.
During the forum, the African Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa’s Africa Gender Index 2023 Analytical Report, was showcased – a flagship publication that measures the state of gender equality across the continent.
According to the Index, African women and girls continue to be left behind in economic, social and political spheres, despite progress in some sectors.
“This Forum is a unique opportunity to turn numbers into narratives, analysis into action, and data into social justice for all African women and girls,” said Nathalie Gahunga, Manager of the Gender and Women Empowerment Division at the African Development Bank.
“Data is the key to change. Yet, in 15 African countries, only 52 percent of gender-related indicators clearly differentiate between women and men. This gap undermines progress in maternal health, political participation, and violence prevention,“ she added.
According to UN Women and the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century PARIS21, African countries have achieved just over 50 percent of their potential gender data capacity. While some countries are performing above the global average, the continent lags behind.
“An Africa that is people-driven needs sound data that accurately reflects the realities of women and girls,” said Aberash Tariku Abaye Africa, Coordination Statistics Expert at the African Union Institute for Statistics.
“Including women in Africa’s development is therefore critical for sustainable economic growth and social development,” said Adjaratou Ndiaye, Country Representative, UN Women, Cote Ivoire. “We can’t achieve that without strong gender data and this calls for countries and sectors to work closely together to identify and address gaps for stronger data systems across the region.”
The Forum is expected to conclude with recommendations aimed at supporting institutions, processes, and resources to produce, disseminate, and utilize gender-related data. This will ensure coordination between gender data producers and users, grounding policies across Africa in solid evidence and real-life data.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Development Bank Group (AfDB).
Media Contact: African Development Bank Group: Raissa Girondin, Communications Specialist, email: media@afdb.org
TALLINN, Estonia, July 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitcoin Solaris, a next-generation blockchain platform built on dual-layer architecture, has officially announced the upcoming release of its flagship Solaris Nova App, designed to democratize crypto mining across mobile and desktop devices. This launch coincides with the final phase of the project’s explosive 90-day presale, which has already raised over $6 million and onboarded more than 13,650 participants globally.
Bitcoin Solaris: Tech-Powered, Wealth-Driven
Bitcoin Solaris is here to amplify its value. Built with a hybrid dual-layer architecture, BTC-S fuses the security of Proof-of-Work with the efficiency of Delegated Proof-of-Stake. The result is a blockchain that handles up to 10,000 transactions per second with just 2-second finality.
Key features include:
A dual-layer blockchain with a secure PoW base and lightning-fast DPoS upper layer.
A validator rotation system that maximizes decentralization and minimizes attack vectors.
Energy-efficient infrastructure that uses 99.95% less energy than traditional Bitcoin mining.
Full smart contract capability for DeFi, NFT, and enterprise-grade applications.
This is not just tech hype. This is the foundation for scalable, global adoption. And with bitcoin solaris gearing up for launch, the infrastructure is already live-tested and rapidly evolving.
Mining for Everyone: Welcome to the Mobile Era
Remember when crypto mining required an industrial warehouse and a stack of GPUs? Bitcoin Solaris throws that model out the window. Through the exciting release of the upcoming Solaris Nova App, users can mine BTC-S directly from their smartphone, laptop, or desktop.
This isn’t a toy app. It’s a full-fledged mining solution with adaptive algorithms, energy-saving options, and smart device optimization. And it doesn’t stop there:
Leaderboards and gamified missions.
Built-in tutorials for beginners.
In-app wallet integration and stats tracking.
Support for both entry-level and pro users.
For those curious about their potential income, the BTC-S mining calculator gives a real-time estimate of what daily mining returns could look like depending on device and time.
The Presale Storm: One of Crypto’s Fastest Rallies
Bitcoin Solaris is in phase 10 of its limited 90-day presale. At just $10 per token with a $20 launch price, the potential 150% return is making early buyers rethink their entire portfolio.
This isn’t your usual sleepy presale. With over $6 million already raised and more than 13,650 users onboard, BTC-S is setting records. It’s one of the shortest and most explosive presales crypto has seen in years.
Only around 4 weeks left before launch.
Over 11,000 participants are already locked in.
Fastest-growing Web3 Telegram and X discussions.
To receive your tokens on launch day, Bitcoin Solaris recommends using Trust Wallet or Metamask for smooth delivery.
And if you’re looking to multiply your tokens before the clock runs out, BTC-S offers a powerful referral program that gives 5% back to both the inviter and the invited. It’s a win-win. No fine print.
Liquid Staking: Passive Income, Full Control
Beyond mining, Bitcoin Solaris also introduces a game-changing feature, liquid staking. Unlike traditional lock-up models, BTC-S lets users stake their tokens and receive sBTC-S in return, which can be traded or used in DeFi without forfeiting staking rewards.
Highlights include:
Reward generation without sacrificing liquidity.
Compatibility with decentralized applications.
Integration into the Solaris Nova App for ease of use.
Strengthened network security through validator engagement.
In addition, BTC-S added daily mini-games to boost engagement and rewards. If you’re holding tokens, don’t miss your shot; all the info is right here.
The hype isn’t just retail-driven. Influencers are circling in. A detailed review by Token Galaxy recently broke down Bitcoin Solaris’s architecture, mining advantages, and real potential to follow a Bitcoin-like trajectory.
Security? Verified. With smart contract audits completed by Cyberscope and Freshcoins, BTC-S ticks the box for safety-conscious investors.
And the community? Thriving. The project’s Telegram and growing X presence are filled with real users, asking smart questions, and onboarding faster than most centralized exchanges.
About Bitcoin Solaris
Bitcoin Solaris is a next-gen blockchain protocol built with a dual-layer hybrid consensus model combining Proof-of-Work and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS). Designed for high transaction speed, energy efficiency, and global accessibility, the platform enables decentralized finance, NFT creation, and mainstream crypto participation from mobile and desktop environments.
Disclaimer:This content is provided by Bitcoin Solaris. The statements, views, and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the content provider and do not necessarily reflect the views of this media platform or its publisher. We do not endorse, verify, or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information presented.We do not guarantee any claims, statements, or promises made in this article.This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or trading advice. Investing in crypto and mining-related opportunities involves significant risks, including the potential loss of capital.It is possible to lose all your capital. These products may not be suitable for everyone, and you should ensure that you understand the risks involved. Seek independent advice if necessary. Speculate only with funds that you can afford to lose.Readers are strongly encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. However, due to the inherently speculative nature of the blockchain sector—including cryptocurrency, NFTs, and mining—complete accuracy cannot always be guaranteed. Neither the media platform nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any fraudulent activities, misrepresentations, or financial losses arising from the content of this press release.In the event of any legal claims or charges against this article, we accept no liability or responsibility. Globenewswire does not endorse any content on this page.
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Amid growing setbacks on gender equality and increasing financial constraints, African policymakers, gender experts, and development specialists are calling for renewed collaboration and sustained investment in national gender data systems across the continent.
This is the message of the ongoing Seventh Africa Gender Statistics Forum taking place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
The Forum was co-organized by Côte d’Ivoire’s National Statistics Agency, the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank Group, the Economic Commission for Africa, UN Women, and Open Data Watch, with funding support from the Korea-Africa Economic Cooperation Trust Fund.
The Forum is exploring Africa’s gender data systems, ways to build statistical capacity, and policies to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment across the continent.
Representatives from host country Côte d’Ivoire said the country has made notable progress in recent years in collecting, analyzing and using gender data to guide public policy.
“These statistics are essential to understand the lived realities of girls and women and to design effective programs and policies that eliminate inequality,” Thiekoro Doumbia, Director General of Côte d’Ivoire’s National Statistics Agency, told attendees.
Held under the theme “Sound Statistics for ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality and Empowerment,” the Forum has attracted more than 150 participants from 40 African countries, covering a diversity of sectors – including government representatives, statisticians, civil society, and development organizations.
At the forum, participants have reflected on Africa’s journey in gender statistics since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – a landmark international agreement aimed at advancing women’s rights and gender equality.
“Statistics provide a solid foundation for good decision-making, and gender statistics are crucial for identifying vulnerabilities among women, girls, men, and boys and responding appropriately,” said William Muhwava, Chief for Demographic and Social Statistics Section of the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
The high-level panels, technical and networking sessions have focused on priority issues ranging from gender-based violence statistics and inclusive data systems to social protection, migration, and sets of standards, principles, and rules that guide behavior and decision-making.
During the forum, the African Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa’s Africa Gender Index 2023 Analytical Report, was showcased – a flagship publication that measures the state of gender equality across the continent.
According to the Index, African women and girls continue to be left behind in economic, social and political spheres, despite progress in some sectors.
“This Forum is a unique opportunity to turn numbers into narratives, analysis into action, and data into social justice for all African women and girls,” said Nathalie Gahunga, Manager of the Gender and Women Empowerment Division at the African Development Bank.
“Data is the key to change. Yet, in 15 African countries, only 52 percent of gender-related indicators clearly differentiate between women and men. This gap undermines progress in maternal health, political participation, and violence prevention,“ she added.
According to UN Women and the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century PARIS21, African countries have achieved just over 50 percent of their potential gender data capacity. While some countries are performing above the global average, the continent lags behind.
“An Africa that is people-driven needs sound data that accurately reflects the realities of women and girls,” said Aberash Tariku Abaye Africa, Coordination Statistics Expert at the African Union Institute for Statistics.
“Including women in Africa’s development is therefore critical for sustainable economic growth and social development,” said Adjaratou Ndiaye, Country Representative, UN Women, Cote Ivoire. “We can’t achieve that without strong gender data and this calls for countries and sectors to work closely together to identify and address gaps for stronger data systems across the region.”
The Forum is expected to conclude with recommendations aimed at supporting institutions, processes, and resources to produce, disseminate, and utilize gender-related data. This will ensure coordination between gender data producers and users, grounding policies across Africa in solid evidence and real-life data.
Somalia ranks among the lowest scoring countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. The index of 195 countries is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, years of schooling, and access to a decent standard of living. Ali A. Abdi, a scholar of social development education, examines Somalia’s failure to advance social development programmes.
What is socio-economic development and how does Somalia stack up?
Despite the pomp and circumstance, though, the country’s social development indicators are dismal.
Social development generally means visible improvements in the quality of life. People’s well-being is based on aspects of national progress like:
universally available good quality education and adequate healthcare
employment opportunities that generate liveable incomes and upward socioeconomic mobility
governance structures that protect people’s rights to security.
Somalia has failed to meet these human development targets.
Its low score in the UN index can be understood by looking at the statistics relating to education and health. In any society these act as foundational blocks for social development. But in Somalia:
children can expect to get an average of 1.72 years of education (the continental African average is 7.7 years)
the capital city, Mogadishu, with a population of 2.8 million, has only two fully public hospitals and they lack specialist services; patients who require specialist care must go to private hospitals
With these social development liabilities, it’s no wonder that the country is the biggest per capita producer of both global refugees and internally displaced persons.
How did Somalia come to this?
The Somali state collapsed as a cohesive national entity in 1991. The military government that had been in power since 1969 was overthrown by armed opposition forces. The country slowly fragmented into quasi-self-governing regions. Transitional national governments have come and gone.
The current federal political structure came into being in August 2012. The Federal Republic of Somalia comprised five founding member states (there are now six).
The depressed social development situation is not the only obstacle facing Somalia. Other complexities include:
A governance system built on cronyism and political loyalty: Somalia’s national political leadership entrenched cronyism. In fairness, the same selectively applies to sub-national, federal member states leadership. This corrupt system has found traction in a country where professionals, young graduates and traditional leaders lack legitimate sources of income. This undermines good governance while creating discord within and among the federal government and federal member states.
Discord at national level and between national and sub-national leaders: The most recent example of this revolves around the national leadership’s 2024 attempt to change the interim constitution. The unilaterally proposed one-person-one-vote proposal runs counter to the 2012 framework through which the current federal system was created. This has fuelled yet another national controversy with less than a year to the next presidential election.
Externally constructed political and economic interventions: Somalia receives significant international aid to address political and developmental challenges. But the strings attached include the management of these funds by external entities. These donor priorities can be detached from immediate social development needs. And aid creates and sustains dependency and entrenches poverty.
What should the government prioritise and why?
The political class always says fighting terrorism is the top policy priority. This thinking, while viable for the current situation, ignores the potential to minimise terrorism by putting the basic needs of the public first, and especially the youth.
Somali leaders are duty-bound to shift focus. A good place to start is the basis of social development: security, education and healthcare. It falls upon them to marshal the country’s resources and capacities to improve the well-being of its citizens.
The national leadership also needs to restructure its relationship with federal member states. Distribution of development resources (including foreign aid) must be fair, not based on political alliances.
Somalia also needs to reform the government’s policy on public appointments. People must get jobs based on their educational background, professional experience, incorruptible character and institutional accountability.
The country has impressive natural resources. There’s huge untapped potential for fisheries and agriculture, which is the country’s economic backbone. The country also has untapped minerals and hydrocarbons wealth.
The above observations are not to say that the federal government should lose sight of the fight against the terrorist organisations. But the welfare of people, including job creation for young people, must be equally prioritised. That will surely advance much needed social development while also reducing the appeal of terrorism among the youth.
– Somalia at 65: what’s needed to address its dismal social development indicators – https://theconversation.com/somalia-at-65-whats-needed-to-address-its-dismal-social-development-indicators-258307
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region
Statistics on Code on Access to Information for third quarter of 2024 The total number of requests received since the introduction of the Code in March 1995 and up to the end of September 2024 amounted to 130 935. Of these, 8 226 requests were subsequently withdrawn by the requestors and 6 482 requests covered cases in which the bureaux/departments concerned did not hold the requested information or cannot confirm or deny the existence of information. As at September 30, 2024, 790 requests were still being processed by bureaux/departments.
Among the 115 437 requests which covered information held by bureaux/departments and which the bureaux/departments had responded to, 112 104 requests (97.1 per cent) were met, either in full (109 073 requests) or in part (3 031 requests), and 3 333 requests (2.9 per cent) were refused.Issued at HKT 18:22
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region – 4
The Land Registry today (July 4) released its statistics for the first half of 2025.
Land registration ——————- * The number of sale and purchase agreements for all building units received for registration for the first half of 2025 was 36 848 (+12.0 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +5.0 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The total consideration for these agreements for the first half of 2025 was $277.03 billion (+9.4 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 but -1.4 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The number of assignments of building units for the first half of 2025 was 46 150 (+5.7 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +30.3 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The total consideration for these assignments for the first half of 2025 was $283.12 billion (+4.2 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +32.5 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
Land search ————- * The number of searches of land registers made by the public for the first half of 2025 was 2 247 438 (-0.2 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 but +3.5 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region – 4
The Land Registry today (July 4) released its statistics for the first half of 2025.
Land registration ——————- * The number of sale and purchase agreements for all building units received for registration for the first half of 2025 was 36 848 (+12.0 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +5.0 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The total consideration for these agreements for the first half of 2025 was $277.03 billion (+9.4 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 but -1.4 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The number of assignments of building units for the first half of 2025 was 46 150 (+5.7 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +30.3 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
* The total consideration for these assignments for the first half of 2025 was $283.12 billion (+4.2 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 and +32.5 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
Land search ————- * The number of searches of land registers made by the public for the first half of 2025 was 2 247 438 (-0.2 per cent compared with the second half of 2024 but +3.5 per cent compared with the first half of 2024).
LONDON, UK – 4 July – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has announced the winners of its fifth annual Solve for Tomorrow competition, which aims to uncover the most promising tech inventions from young people by asking 16-25 year olds to come up with ideas that help solve societal challenges.
The ideas showcased the passion young people have for future innovation and their drive to design a better world – exploring how technology can solve the issues they care about while tackling broader societal challenges. Nottingham based Eseose Okotako (23) of team Athena was announced as the winner in the 18-25 category with their impressive idea, a haptic collar that syncs with any audio to translate music into tailored vibrations, allowing deaf users to feel melody, rhythm and emotion.
Meanwhile, in the 16-18 category, Manchester based trio Daniel Aju (18), Harris Asif (18) and Nahom Ghirmay (18) of team Sanoband were announced in first place following their idea of a device that aims to help individuals with alcohol addiction by detecting cravings early, preventing relapse and supporting long-term recovery.
This year marked the first time the competition shortlisted 100 young people for workshops and mentoring stage, an increase from 24 to 49 teams in total, nearly doubling the number of participants. Samsung also supported every shortlisted young person with Samsung products.
Entries this year ranged from an assistive glove that replaces the lost dexterity within people with immobile hands, to an AI-driven breast health app that syncs with wearables to guide self-exams, track changes, and generate clinician-ready reports. An app, designed by team HeartAware that uses an AI-powered tool on your phone to detect heart risks, also received critical acclaim from the judges.
On top of this, team Zera, who designed a thermoelectric device to ease menopausal symptoms also won the People’s Choice Award – the best of the finalist submissions, which was voted on by over 2,000 people on Samsung’s social channels.
The 100 were shortlisted by a panel of Samsung experts and tech-for-good founders who reviewed submissions from 508 eligible applicants across the country, 49 teams took part in a programme of design thinking, market research and a newly introduced physical and digital prototyping workshop. Throughout the process, they also received mentoring, support and guidance from Samsung colleagues to help bring their ideas to life.
The programme follows statistics released that show nearly two-thirds (60%) of young people across the UK are considering a career in technology. Yet, 96% of respondents believe there are barriers to entering the industry and 65% feel their personal background impacts their ability to harness their creativity through tech.[1] The Solve for Tomorrow programme exists to prove that young people from all walks of life can come up with ideas that can make a difference in the world through the use of technology.
The existing partnerships between Samsung UK and organisations such as InnovateHer and the Social Mobility Foundation are essential to this mission, helping to reach and support young people who aren’t currently in education, employment or training.
The shortlisted ten teams were invited to Samsung’s head offices to showcase their ideas and formally pitch to a panel of Samsung experts and tech entrepreneurs. This was followed by the annual Solve for Tomorrow awards ceremony, where the winners were crowned.
Speaking about this year’s Solve for Tomorrow competition, Soohyun Jessie Park, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Samsung Electronics UK, said: “Solve for Tomorrow continues to empower young people to reflect on what truly matters to them whilst simultaneously channelling these passions into tangible action. It’s phenomenal to witness what young people are capable of even within the space of four months on the programme. Their commitment and passion is an inspiration and we’re so excited to support Eseose and team Sanoband to bring their ideas closer to the communities they care about.”
Eseose from team Athena, said: “It was an amazing experience being a part of this year’s Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition. You don’t need qualifications or a team to enter – just a great idea! The experience has been incredibly valuable and helped with my confidence, and I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to give it a go. I’m glad I did!”
More details on how to enter the next Solve for Tomorrow competition will be announced later this year.
For more information on Solve for Tomorrow visit: https://www.samsung.com/uk/solvefortomorrow/
[1] Consumer research was commissioned to 1,000 UK teenagers aged 13-19 between the 4th and 10th October 2024 by OnePoll. Onepoll are members of ESOMAR and comply with the ESOMAR guidelines for online research.
