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Category: Transport

  • MIL-Evening Report: MyMedicare promises better health care. But only 1 in 10 patients has signed up

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jialing Lin, Research fellow, International Centre for Future Health Systems, UNSW Sydney

    Rose Marinelli/Shutterstock

    MyMedicare is a scheme that encourages patients to register with a regular GP practice to improve their health. But few patients have enrolled.

    Since its launch in October 2023, only about 10% of patients have signed up.

    The Albanese government’s 2023-24 budget allocated A$19.7 million over four years to implement MyMedicare. So if we are to get value for money from the scheme, we need to find out why patients are not signing up, and address any barriers to them doing so.

    Other countries have similar schemes, as we outline in recent research. Here’s what we can learn from these to boost uptake of MyMedicare in Australia.

    What is MyMedicare?

    MyMedicare is a voluntary patient registration scheme. Patients nominate a GP or GP practice as their preferred provider and see the same GP or health-care team over time, a concept known as “continuity of care”.

    Continuity of care is linked to earlier detection of health issues, better management of chronic (long-term) conditions, fewer avoidable hospital visits, and improved patient satisfaction.

    Patients registered for MyMedicare have longer telehealth consultations. People living in residential aged care have more regular visits from their GP. From July this year, GP practices may offer patients more support for their chronic diseases.

    There are also benefits for GP clinics that sign up for MyMedicare. They receive incentives to offer certain patients longer telehealth consultations. Practices also receive incentives to manage the health of registered aged care patients.

    These incentives help practices invest in improved services and resources. From July, this may include better chronic disease management and enhanced team-based care (for instance, better liaison between GPs and allied health workers as part of someone’s health team).

    MyMedicare comes with an extra boost for telehealth.
    fizkes/Shutterstock

    How many patients have signed up?

    Since MyMedicare’s launch in 2023 until March 19 this year, more than 2.6 million patients have registered for MyMedicare, according to Department of Health and Aged Care statistics provided to The Conversation.

    That’s about 10% of Australia’s population. This raises concerns about how aware patients are of the scheme, how engaged they are with it, and possible barriers to registration.

    GP practices that provide services to patients who would benefit from the new longer telehealth services or provide care to people in aged care were encouraged to register those patients in MyMedicare as a priority. So perhaps other patients have yet to sign up.

    GP practices have been quicker to sign up. Since its launch, health department statistics provided to The Conversation show 6,469 practices had registered for MyMedicare until March 19 this year.

    That’s about 80% of GP practices in Australia.

    Who’s most likely to register?

    We don’t know which patient groups sign up for MyMedicare. The health department told The Conversation patients can provide details of their sex, location (such as metropolitan, regional, rural and remote areas), linguistic background, and disabilities when they sign up. But this is voluntary, and these data have only been available for collection since March 2024.

    However, here’s what we learned when we looked at other countries’ patient enrolment schemes:

    • men are less likely to enrol than women, and recent immigrants have significantly lower registration rates compared to long-term residents. These highlight potential barriers to access for certain populations

    • patients in suburban, rural or small urban areas have higher registration rates, whereas those in large metropolitan centres and lower socioeconomic groups register less

    • patients with mental illness or substance use disorders have lower registration rates, pointing to challenges in engaging vulnerable populations.

    Men are less likely to enrol than women.
    DC Studio/Shutterstock

    How do other countries do it?

    We also looked at how other countries set up their schemes to see what we can learn.

    New Zealand: high uptake through financial incentives

    New Zealand has successfully implemented a voluntary patient registration system by offering incentives to enrolled patients. These include lower co-payments for consultations and cheaper prescriptions.

    This approach encourages people to register with a general practice rather than a specific GP. Some 95% of the population was registered by January 2025.

    Quebec, Canada: tailored registration programs, but low uptake

    Quebec has several voluntary registration programs for different groups of patients. These include ones for family medicine, vulnerable patients and a general program.

    However, registration rate remains low, at 14.7-32.2%, depending on the program.

    British Columbia, Canada: incentive-driven registration

    British Columbia offers three voluntary registration programs – one for chronic diseases, another for complex care and a general program.

    These use “capitation funding”, where GPs receive payments based on the number of patients they care for.

    Participation rates vary widely across the three programs, with 45.5-79% of the population registered.

    The differences in registration rates across these systems highlight the importance of how schemes are designed and implemented.

    What can Australia learn?

    If MyMedicare is to improve access and continuity of care, targeted strategies – such as outreach for immigrants and lower-income groups, and better support for people with mental health issues – will be essential.

    Australia could also look to how countries with higher rates of patients signing up have designed their systems. This could include considering whether more financial incentives for patients to enrol is warranted, which has been successful in New Zealand.

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

    – ref. MyMedicare promises better health care. But only 1 in 10 patients has signed up – https://theconversation.com/mymedicare-promises-better-health-care-but-only-1-in-10-patients-has-signed-up-253335

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Reform clock is ticking – the big policy challenges the next government must urgently address

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aruna Sathanapally, Grattan Institute

    The 2025 federal election coincides with a period of profound global uncertainty, as the Trump administration wreaks havoc on the free trade system and longstanding alliances.

    The events of recent months have underscored how, at each election, the voters in a democracy set their country on a path. Here in Australia, voters will be choosing whom to trust with tackling our challenges and making the most of the opportunities before us.

    These turbulent times internationally only reinforce the need for us to be clear-eyed about the challenges facing Australia, and where our strengths lie in addressing them.

    The big five challenges

    We see five overlapping domestic policy challenges that must be tackled by whoever wins the next election, to ensure prosperity for current and future generations.

    First, we must plan and deliver over the next 25 years the economic transformation that accompanies decarbonisation.

    Addressing climate change is not a task we can delay or abandon, but it will be neither easy nor cheap. The next government can either work to build a credible plan, to orient long-term investment in a renewable energy future, or leave a legacy for the next generation of even greater costs and unreliability, and missed opportunities.

    Second, we must increase the availability and affordability of housing in Australia. Housing is a fundamental human need, and when the housing system fails to deliver enough homes in the places people need and want to live, the consequences are both social and economic. In particular, our broken housing system sits at the centre of growing inequality in Australia.

    Third, as the structure of our economy changes, becoming less reliant on routine and manual labour, Australia must deepen its talent pools and boost productivity to meet the needs of our society and lift economic dynamism. We must improve our school systems, expand access to high-quality early childhood education and care, dismantle barriers in the labour market that prevent people from making the most of their skills and experience, and be rapid adopters of the best global practices and technology.

    Fourth, we are in the midst of the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation. An ageing population is placing increasing demands on public services, government budgets and our workforce. We need to get better at tackling chronic disease in our health system, and we need to shore-up our retirement and aged-care systems for the demographic change that we have long known is coming.

    Fifth, we cannot continue to have high expectations for public services and infrastructure, without raising the money to pay for them. Tax reform has sat in the too-hard basket for too long. In particular, income tax breaks for superannuation and housing have become too generous, and unfairly place the tax burden on younger, less wealthy taxpayers.

    And we need to implement sensible savings. Swingeing cuts may seem easy and appealing on the surface, but real savings will take more thinking than that: to make hospitals more efficient, to better target the NDIS, to get smarter in how we spend public money in procuring big infrastructure and defence projects.

    A position of strength

    None of these challenges is new: they were waiting for us as we emerged from the COVID crisis. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch.

    In several areas, the federal government has made a start. But whoever forms government after the 2025 election must stay the course on difficult reforms while also finally confronting the reforms that neither side of politics has effectively tackled since the start of the century.

    Australia occupies a position of relative strength to tackle these challenges. We have a highly educated and skilled population, a more manageable fiscal position than many of our counterparts, stronger public institutions, and less polarisation in our politics.

    The reform clock is ticking

    Why, then, has reform proved so hard in Australia? Perhaps we have taken our strengths for granted, perhaps we have been content to leave problems for our future selves to solve. We cannot continue in this way.

    The fundamentals of Australia’s prosperity have been our success in opening our economy and society to the world, while maintaining a strong social safety net, and ensuring economic benefits are broadly shared and that each new generation sees opportunity to build a rewarding life. Failing to tackle the Big Five challenges above risks unpicking these foundations.

    Vested interests have been successful in thwarting reforms in the public interest for decades in Australia. Or perhaps the politics of opposition have proved so successful as to kill the prospect for bipartisan agreement on necessary, evidence-backed change.

    Equally, it falls to the media to hold politicians to account over the facts and evidence that support their claims. Politicians should be firmly tested on what they propose to do with the power they seek, and how they intend to advance the interests of all Australians. This is one of the most important safeguards against empty promises that will do nothing to make us better off, or even take us backwards.

    The reform clock is ticking. The winner of the 2025 election will have to get to work, quickly, on building a better Australia.

    The Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute’s activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website

    – ref. Reform clock is ticking – the big policy challenges the next government must urgently address – https://theconversation.com/reform-clock-is-ticking-the-big-policy-challenges-the-next-government-must-urgently-address-251343

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Friend, tutor, doctor, lover: why AI systems need different rules for different roles

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brian D Earp, Associate Director, Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy, University of Oxford

    Cybermagician / Shutterstock

    “I’m really not sure what to do anymore. I don’t have anyone I can talk to,” types a lonely user to an AI chatbot. The bot responds: “I’m sorry, but we are going to have to change the topic. I won’t be able to engage in a conversation about your personal life.”

    Is this response appropriate? The answer depends on what relationship the AI was designed to simulate.

    Different relationships have different rules

    AI systems are taking up social roles that have traditionally been the province of humans. More and more we are seeing AI systems acting as tutors, mental health providers and even romantic partners. This increasing ubiquity requires a careful consideration of the ethics of AI to ensure that human interests and welfare are protected.

    For the most part, approaches to AI ethics have considered abstract ethical notions, such as whether AI systems are trustworthy, sentient or have agency.

    However, as we argue with colleagues in psychology, philosophy, law, computer science and other key disciplines such as relationship science, abstract principles alone won’t do. We also need to consider the relational contexts in which human–AI interactions take place.

    What do we mean by “relational contexts”? Simply put, different relationships in human society follow different norms.

    How you interact with your doctor differs from how you interact with your romantic partner or your boss. These relationship-specific patterns of expected behaviour – what we call “relational norms” – shape our judgements of what’s appropriate in each relationship.

    What is deemed appropriate behaviour of a parent towards her child, for instance, differs from what is appropriate between business colleagues. In the same way, appropriate behaviour for an AI system depends upon whether that system is acting as a tutor, a health care provider, or a love interest.

    Human morality is relationship-sensitive

    Human relationships fulfil different functions. Some are grounded in care, such as that between parent and child or close friends. Others are more transactional, such as those between business associates. Still others may be aimed at securing a mate or the maintenance of social hierarchies.

    These four functions — care, transaction, mating and hierarchy — each solve different coordination challenges in relationships.

    Care involves responding to others’ needs without keeping score — like one friend who helps another during difficult times. Transaction ensures fair exchanges where benefits are tracked and reciprocated — think of neighbours trading favours.

    Our relationships with other people fulfil different basic functions – and observe different norms of behaviour.
    PintoArt / Shutterstock

    Mating governs romantic and sexual interactions, from casual dating to committed partnerships. And hierarchy structures interactions between people with different levels of authority over one another, enabling effective leadership and learning.

    Every relationship type combines these functions differently, creating distinct patterns of expected behaviour. A parent–child relationship, for instance, is typically both caring and hierarchical (at least to some extent), and is generally expected not to be transactional — and definitely not to involve mating.

    Research from our labs shows that relational context does affect how people make moral judgements. An action may be deemed wrong in one relationship but permissible, or even good, in another.

    Of course, just because people are sensitive to relationship context when making moral judgements doesn’t meant they should be. Still, the very fact that they are is important to take into account in any discussion of AI ethics or design.

    Relational AI

    As AI systems take up more and more social roles in society, we need to ask: how does the relational context in which humans interact with AI systems impact ethical considerations?

    When a chatbot insists upon changing the subject after its human interaction partner reports feeling depressed, the appropriateness of this action hinges in part on the relational context of the exchange.

    If the chatbot is serving in the role of a friend or romantic partner, then clearly the response is inappropriate – it violates the relational norm of care, which is expected for such relationships. If, however, the chatbot is in the role of a tutor or business advisor, then perhaps such a response is reasonable or even professional.

    It gets complicated, though. Most interactions with AI systems today occur in a commercial context – you have to pay to access the system (or engage with a limited free version that pushes you to upgrade to a paid version).

    But in human relationships, friendship is something you don’t usually pay for. In fact, treating a friend in a “transactional” manner will often lead to hurt feelings.

    When an AI simulates or serves in a care-based role, like friend or romantic partner, but ultimately the user knows she is paying a fee for this relational “service” — how will that affect her feelings and expectations? This is the sort of question we need to be asking.

    What this means for AI designers, users and regulators

    Regardless of whether one believes ethics should be relationship-sensitive, the fact most people act as if it is should be taken seriously in the design, use and regulation of AI.

    Developers and designers of AI systems should consider not just abstract ethical questions (about sentience, for example), but relationship-specific ones.

    Is a particular chatbot fulfilling relationship-appropriate functions? Is the mental health chatbot sufficiently responsive to the user’s needs? Is the tutor showing an appropriate balance of care, hierarchy and transaction?

    Users of AI systems should be aware of potential vulnerabilities tied to AI use in particular relational contexts. Becoming emotionally dependent upon a chatbot in a caring context, for example, could be bad news if the AI system cannot sufficiently deliver on the caring function.

    Regulatory bodies would also do well to consider relational contexts when developing governance structures. Instead of adopting broad, domain-based risk assessments (such as deeming AI use in education “high risk”), regulatory agencies might consider more specific relational contexts and functions in adjusting risk assessments and developing guidelines.

    As AI becomes more embedded in our social fabric, we need nuanced frameworks that recognise the unique nature of human-AI relationships. By thinking carefully about what we expect from different types of relationships — whether with humans or AI — we can help ensure these technologies enhance rather than diminish our lives.

    Brian D Earp receives funding from Google DeepMind.

    Sebastian Porsdam Mann receives funding from a Novo Nordisk Foundation Grant for a scientifically independent International Collaborative Bioscience Innovation & Law Programme (Inter-CeBIL programme – grant no. NNF23SA0087056).

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

    – ref. Friend, tutor, doctor, lover: why AI systems need different rules for different roles – https://theconversation.com/friend-tutor-doctor-lover-why-ai-systems-need-different-rules-for-different-roles-252302

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: NZ Transport Agency and Ashburton District Council working together on second Ashburton Bridge

    Source: New Zealand Transport Agency

    NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) and Ashburton District Council in recent days signed an agreement to manage the construction of the second Ashburton bridge and connecting road as one project.

    NZTA will tender the full work package as a design and build project later this year.

    The NZTA board officially approved the project at its meeting in the past week, allowing the work on the ground to now get underway, says NZTA’s Acting Director Regional Relationships Ian Duncan.

    Central Government will fund the 360-metre bridge plus embankments from Chalmers Ave to Carters Terrace. Ashburton District Council will fund the connecting local road from Carters Terrace to Grahams Road.

    “This second bridge is so important for our community,” says Ashburton Mayor Neil Brown. “I’m excited all the necessary paperwork to get it started is now signed and sealed. The agreement Council has signed with NZTA means we will soon see and approve concept plans for the second bridge and connecting road, and then have regular meetings during the construction period to ask questions and ensure it is done in a timely manner.”

    Ashburton District Council has been buying property for the project since a land designation was confirmed in 2014, and the bridge and connecting road are shown in the District Plan.

    Mayor Brown said the project could be completed away from existing traffic routes, given it will be part of a new local road network, without major disruption to residents and travellers.

    “There’ll be a roundabout at the intersection of South Street and Chalmers Avenue, and another at the end of the new connecting road and Grahams Road, and a footpath on the Tinwald side of the new road.

    “We’re looking forward to seeing physical works starting as early as possible in 2026, and Council will have a better idea of how much the road section will cost once the tender process is complete.”

    Council will talk with the community about how it will fund the road construction once the costs are known, Mr Brown says.

    “The most important thing for everyone to know is that this project can finally begin, and our town will be a lot more resilient and our roads much safer when it is complete.”

    NZTA’s Ian Duncan says he is pleased to see progress on this project, acknowledging the second bridge will provide significant resilience and new road connection across the Ashburton/Hakatere River, using modern design and build techniques.

    The 2021 flood highlighted the vulnerability of the existing SH1 Ashburton bridge and the wider state highway network, so a second bridge provides insurance in the event the SH1 bridge is unable to be used for whatever reason.

    Ashburton people may see geotechnical investigations underway on site in coming days and weeks and the start of the procurement and tendering process.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Ōtaki River Bridge in line for more improvements

    Source: New Zealand Transport Agency

    Ōtaki residents can expect to see more improvements on the main bridge on old State Highway 1 this month.

    Resurfacing work is planned for the bridge to improve its safety and reliability.

    For safety reasons, the bridge will be closed to traffic while the resurfacing is completed. It will be done on the night of Monday, 14 April, from 9 pm to 4:30 am, weather permitting.

    The resurfacing has been deliberately timed to be done at night as there will be fewer vehicles on the road. It means overall disruption for drivers is significantly reduced.

    However, the closure will require significant detours, particularly for Ōtaki and Te Horo residents.

    NZTA/Waka Kotahi and the Wellington Transport Alliance appreciate the work will create travel delays and disruption for drivers and Ōtaki residents.

    Every effort is being made to complete it as quickly as possible, and a full closure on a single night allows the work to be done faster and more efficiently. Doing the work during the day would have a much larger impact on traffic flows and affect more road users.

    Detour information

    • Getting to Ōtaki from The Expressway
      • Northbound vehicles needing to get to Ōtaki from The Expressway will need to travel for approximately five minutes further north to the Ōtaki turnaround/rest area (near Lawlors Road) and turnaround to travel south. This will be well signposted.

    Drivers will then need to travel south towards the Ōtaki southbound offramp to get to Ōtaki township. This is expected to add approximately 10 minutes to travel times.

    • Getting between Ōtaki and Te Horo
      • People travelling between Te Horo and Ōtaki, will need to take longer detours. This will add approximately 25 – 30 minutes to travel times in both directions.
      • Te Horo to Ōtaki vehicles should use the Peka Peka northbound onramp to The Expressway, travel north to the Ōtaki turnaround/rest area to turn around. They should then travel south and take the Ōtaki southbound offramp to get to Ōtaki.
      • Ōtaki to Te Horo vehicles should use the Ōtaki northbound onramp to The Expressway and travel to the Ōtaki turnaround/rest area to turn around. They should then travel south and take the Peka Peka southbound offramp to get to Te Horo.
    • Getting to Waikanae, Peka Peka and Te Horo from The Expressway
      • Residents of Waikanae, Peka Peka and Te Horo can travel as normal from The Expressway, either via Waikanae Beach offramps or via Old State Highway 1 using the Ōtaki offramps.

    More Information

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Shellebrating* groundbreaking turtle research |

    Source: Department of Conservation

    By Krysia Nowak and Karen Middlemiss

    *While leatherback turtles don’t actually have a shell, they have pretty thick skins, so we think they wouldn’t mind the pun.

    A leatherback turtle | Nathan Pettigrew

    What if we told you the largest sea turtles in the world visit Aotearoa New Zealand and that our waters are important to their survival? That they’re Critically Endangered, and that we know almost nothing about how they spend their time here? 

    You might say it’s about time we learn about them, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in our new research collaborating with USA-based Upwell Turtles.  

    Turtles crossing borders 

    Leatherback turtles aren’t worried about international boundaries.  

    The leatherbacks which visit New Zealand waters are part of the Western Pacific population that forage on the US West Coast and then migrate some 12,000km to nesting beaches in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, and the Solomon Islands.  

    Leatherbacks have been tagged for monitoring when they come ashore at nesting beaches overseas, but there aren’t many known foraging areas where it’s possible to tag them in open water and study their movements. The Bay of Plenty is one of those known areas. 

    For the love of jelly(fish)

    We have the opportunity to tag turtles at sea during summer and early autumn when our waters are full of their favourite food – jellyfish! 

    Leatherbacks can weigh more than 350 kilograms and need to eat more than 1/2 their body weight in jellyfish to get enough energy for long trips. The jellyfish-rich waters off the Bay of Plenty are important to leatherback migration success.

    Human for scale: Upwell Executive Director George Shillinger tagging nesting leatherbacks in Playa Grande Costa Rica in 2007 | Upwell Turtles

    Running the gauntlet 

    Leatherbacks face many risks in various countries across the huge distances they travel between foraging grounds and nesting beaches. Threats can include unintentional capture by fisheries (bycatch), the harvesting of adult turtles and eggs, plastic pollution, nesting beach habitat loss, climate change, and vessel strike.

    Currently, the biggest threat to leatherback turtles, globally, is from commercial fishing. Most turtles accidentally caught by fisheries in New Zealand waters are released alive, but we need to learn how to reduce bycatch numbers to better protect them. 

    It’s a minefield for a turtle travelling across international boundaries, and we’ve seen a decline in this population of over 80% in the last 40 years. That’s why international collaboration is so important for their research and conservation if we are to have any chance of recovering the population. 

    Collaborating for conservation  

    We’re working with scientists who have been studying leatherbacks for decades. Being able to work together to study their habitat use in New Zealand waters will be another piece in the migration puzzle for these ancient turtles. 

    Dr George Shillinger, Executive Director of Upwell Turtles, says leatherbacks are among the most highly migratory and transboundary marine species on the planet.  

    “Effective conservation requires international collaboration from nesting beaches all the way to distant foraging habitats.” 

    Some of the leatherback researchers and partners out on the boat | DOC

    Taking to the air 

    Our turtle-team recently took to the air over the Bay of Plenty as a starting point to find out more about leatherbacks in New Zealand waters. We worked with Upwell Turtles, and with support and expertise from NIWA, Monash University (Australia), and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (USA).  

    While we had George and Scott here from Upwell Turtles, they graciously gave us some of their time and expertise, to help develop our own techniques to catch and tag leatherbacks. 

    The international research crew monitoring for leatherbacks from a plane | Sean Williamson

    Practice Makes Perfect 

    Along with our international experts, we assembled an array of technical equipment, and formed a team including Tauranga DOC staff, Tuhua Island kaitiaki, and a local marine conservationist, all eager to embrace the challenge of finding and netting such large animals. 

    Heading out on our DOC boat off the coast of Tauranga on calm, sunny weekend in March we focused our efforts on a large rubber fender co-opted as a ‘pretend’ turtle. Few fenders have had such an exciting couple of days! 

    The team has now honed the required skills and techniques to safely net actual turtles. In future, when we do this for real, we will have a spotter plane in the air and other boats on the water to help us find turtles – leatherbacks can be tricky to spot from sea level. 

    Practicing netting aboard a DOC vessel | DOC
    DOC Senior Marine Science Advisor Dr Karen Middlemiss practicing netting | DOC

    Where to from here? 

    Because leatherback turtles have historically visited the Bay of Plenty, we’re working to build partnerships with local iwi and hapū, and the Bay of Plenty community, as well as collaborating with our research partners. 

    We’re starting to plan our next steps into the world of tagging, aiming for next summer when the turtles and jellyfish have returned to the Bay.  

    Everything we learn from tagging studies of leatherback turtles in our waters will help inform future conservation efforts for this species, which is so ancient we call it the tuatara of our oceans. We’ll be doing our part in the international effort to protect a species on the brink of extinction.   

    How you can help leatherback turtles: 

    • No marine turtles nest on beaches in New Zealand, any turtle on the beach should be reported immediately to 0800 DOC HOT (0800 362 468).
    • Spot a sea turtle in the water around New Zealand? You can report sightings to     turtles@doc.govt.nz 
    • You can help protect leatherbacks and other marine animals by preventing plastics and pollution from reaching our oceans. 

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Pedestrian dies following Henderson crash

    Source: New Zealand Police (District News)

    Police can advise that the pedestrian critically injured in Henderson on Sunday has died.

    A collision involving a vehicle and pedestrian was reported at 10.20am on Lincoln Road.

    The pedestrian was transported to Auckland Hospital in critical condition.

    Sadly, Police can now advise that the man succumbed to injuries and died in hospital on Sunday night, 6 April.

    Our thoughts are with the man’s family.

    An investigation is underway into the circumstances of the crash, and this remains ongoing.

    Anyone who may have witnessed the crash and has yet to speak with Police can do so by calling 105 using the reference number 250406/2570.

    ENDS.

    Jarred Williamson/NZ Police

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI Canada: Westside Road opens to single-lane traffic as washout repair advances

    Drivers are advised that Westside Road is reopening to single-lane-alternating traffic ahead of schedule this afternoon, Sunday, April 6, 2025, as repairs progress following a significant washout on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

    This traffic pattern will be in place 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future while crews continue debris cleanup and complete the installation of new culverts at the washout site.  

    Travellers can expect delays and short closures of as much as 20 minutes at a time. No stopping will be permitted within the slide area at any time, and the road will be closed if rainfall exceeds threshold levels.

    The ministry and its maintenance contractor will be monitoring the site closely 24 hours a day until works are complete. Work is restricted to daylight hours. The ministry will provide updates about the schedule for the full reopening of the road as the work progresses.

    The ministry continues to collaborate with local governments, Indigenous communities and stakeholders to ensure a co-ordinated and safe approach to the repairs.

    For up-to-date information about road conditions, visit DriveBC: https://DriveBC.ca  

    MIL OSI Canada News –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: PM call with Prime Minister Carney of Canada: 6 April 2025

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

    Press release

    PM call with Prime Minister Carney of Canada: 6 April 2025

    The Prime Minister spoke to the Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney this evening.

    The Prime Minister spoke to the Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney this evening.

    They discussed their commitment to working together to maintain global economic stability in the wake of the announcement from the United States this week. An all-out trade war is in no-one’s interest, they agreed. 

    Both agreed on the importance of free and open trade between like-minded nations, and the Prime Minister stated that trading blocs such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership will be important in this new global era. 

    Prime Minister Carney thanked the Prime Minister for his leadership on Ukraine and reaffirmed his commitment to Canada playing a role in the Coalition of the Willing. 

    Looking ahead, the Prime Minister said he was looking forward to travelling to Canada for the G7 Summit in June. 

    They agreed to stay in close contact.

    Updates to this page

    Published 6 April 2025

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Government Cuts – Public Defence Service cuts risk reducing access to justice – PSA

    Source: PSA

    The Public Defence Service (PDS) is proposing to take fewer criminal cases to appeal as Government funding restrictions force it to do more with less, the PSA says.
    “The proposed reduction in appeal cases – signalled in change proposal released to staff late last week – raises serious questions about access to justice,” says Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi National Secretary Fleur Fitzsimons.
    The PDS, which provides lawyers for defendants in criminal trials who have legal aid, is proposing to cut 14 roles (one vacant). The change proposal says this loss of roles would enable a yet to be determined number of lawyers to be hired in the future.
    “These proposed changes undermine the very purpose of the PDS, which is to provide high quality legal representation to everybody – not just a privileged few – and to do so through the use of salaried staff, not contracted lawyers.
    “The proposed changes would disestablish the PDS standalone Appeals Team, with the loss of four out of five roles within the team, and would see the PDS not taking many appeals they have not previously been involved in. This would lead to a decrease in the number of Court of Appeal and Supreme Court cases the PDS accepted each year.”
    The reduction in appeal cases to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, which are more complex and time consuming than other cases the PDS takes, is part of efforts to try and fund a “significantly higher annual case load” within the existing PDS budget.
    “The PDS has developed specialist expertise in criminal appeals, which are a critical way miscarriages of justice are uncovered. This proposal will reduce access to justice for people with limited means,” says Fitzsimons, who is a lawyer.
    It is understood work being done by the Appeals Team, approximately 25 cases last year, will be outsourced to external lawyers.
    “It’s a short-sighted approach forced on the PDS by the Government not adequately funding the justice sector,” says Fitzsimons.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Kids’ physical activity in child care is essential — how an online course equips educators to lead the way

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Myranda Hawthorne, PhD Student, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Western University

    Physical activity — primarily in the form of active play — promotes young children’s physical, mental, emotional and social health. It can also influence how active people will be later in life.

    It’s recommended that pre-school children, aged three to four years, engage in at least three hours of physical activity per day, and that should include one hour of high-intensity, heart-pumping movement. Sedentary screen time should also be limited to less than one hour per day.

    Despite this, many children in Canada and around the world do not meet recommended levels of physical activity and engage in far more sedentary screen time than recommended.

    Early childhood educators (ECEs) play many important roles in helping young children grow and learn, and one of these roles is encouraging engagement in physical activity. Our research in the Child Health and Physical Activity Lab at Western University focuses on promoting physical activity of young children.

    A large part of our research involves working with ECEs to create active child-care settings, where children are supported and encouraged to engage in the physical activity they need for their development. We believe providing physical activity training opportunities for ECEs is an essential first step towards reaching that goal.

    Why kids aren’t moving

    There are many barriers to promoting physical activity in child-care settings, including prioritization of academic outcomes and limited space or equipment.

    For ECEs, the lack of formal training on the integral role of physical activity on children’s learning, health and development may present a key barrier.

    Only 32 per cent of students in early childhood education programs in Canada have taken a course related to physical activity in their post-secondary degree.

    Furthermore, ECEs across Canada have reported a lack of knowledge and confidence in their ability to incorporate physical activity opportunities into daily programming in child-care settings. This is the case even while ECEs have expressed interest in pursuing more training on these important subjects.

    The TEACH course

    We created the TEACH e-learning course (TEACH stands for Training EArly CHildhood educators in physical activity) to help bridge this gap.

    This course aims to educate ECEs on the important role of physical activity in child development, and to provide them with the knowledge and confidence to implement physical activity within child-care environments.

    The TEACH course was developed with both early childhood education experts and physical activity specialists to create comprehensive and relevant course content in four online modules. These include instructive videos, practical tips and “knowledge checks” (encouraging self-reflection on current knowledge and practices) for promoting physical activity and limiting sedentary behaviour in child-care environments.

    Important topics like outdoor and risky play are also covered in the course. It strives to overcome some of the other barriers to physical activity promotion in child-care settings, including suggestions for incorporating movement with limited space or equipment, as well as how to combine physical activities with other important skills like literacy and numeracy.

    The TEACH course is endorsed by the Canada Child Care Federation as a resource which can be used for practising ECEs to help fulfil their annual professional development activity requirements.

    Real-world results show promise

    The course has been tested with 200 practising ECEs and 300 ECE students across Canada, and has been shown to increase ECEs’ knowledge, confidence and intentions to incorporate physical activity during the child-care day.

    Not only that, but the positive changes in self-efficacy and confidence were sustained up to three months after completing the training. This shows that the e-learning course can have a lasting impact.

    Both practising ECEs and those in training benefited from the TEACH course. Practicing ECEs, who could immediately apply their new knowledge and skills to their everyday work, maintained these gains more effectively when compared to the ECEs still in training.



    Read more:
    Outdoor play in shorter, more frequent windows can boost physical activity in early learning settings

    Expanding and integrating the TEACH course

    The online format of the TEACH course increases accessibility of the course, as ECEs can work through the content in their own time, from anywhere. The online format also provides promise for the feasibility of expanding the course to a wider audience to be a cost-effective way to train a large number of ECEs, without much strain on resources.

    Members of the Child Health and Physical Activity Lab have translated the TEACH course into French (TEACH-FR). They’re currently testing its impact on francophone ECEs across the country, to ensure this resource can eventually be made available to both English- and French-speaking ECEs across Canada.

    Children’s engagement in physical activity and healthy movement while at child care matters — and can impact their health and development. The TEACH course can help improve educators’ knowledge and confidence in promoting physical activity opportunities in child-care settings, better equipping them for this challenge.

    By providing training for ECEs on the importance of physical activity behaviours, as well as how to effectively program daily active play opportunities, we can help children to move more during their time in child care. This helps set the stage for future healthy active lives.

    Myranda Hawthorne receives funding from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

    Sophie M Phillips receives funding from Children’s Health Research Institute and Mitacs.

    Trish Tucker receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Children’s Health Research Institute.

    – ref. Kids’ physical activity in child care is essential — how an online course equips educators to lead the way – https://theconversation.com/kids-physical-activity-in-child-care-is-essential-how-an-online-course-equips-educators-to-lead-the-way-251418

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Security: Upper Tantallon — RCMP investigates fatal crash in Upper Tantallon

    Source: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

    RCMP Halifax Regional Detachment is investigating a fatal crash that occurred in Upper Tantallon.

    Yesterday, at approximately 9:25 a.m., RCMP Halifax Regional Detachment, fire, and EHS, responded to a report of a vehicle crash on Hwy. 103, near Exit 5.

    RCMP officers learned that a Toyota Matrix was travelling westbound when it left the roadway and entered the ditch.

    The driver and sole occupant of the vehicle, a 47-year-old woman from Dalhousie Junction, New Brunswick, was pronounced deceased at the scene.

    An RCMP collision reconstructionist attended the location of the crash; the investigation is ongoing.

    A section of Hwy. 103 was closed for several hours but has since reopened.

    Our thoughts are with the victim’s loved ones at this difficult time.

    MIL Security OSI –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Federal election: Conservatives and Liberals are targeting different generations and geographies online

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Philip Mai, Co-director and Senior Researcher, Social Media Lab, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto Metropolitan University

    Amid a Canadian federal election campaign focused in part on the country’s sovereignty, Canada’s two leading political parties are taking sharply different approaches to their advertising strategies. A close analysis of digital ad impressions on Facebook and Instagram reveals that the battleground is not just ideological, but demographic and geographic.

    While both the Conservative and Liberal parties invest ad dollars in Canada’s most populous provinces, their strategies reveal a deeper story: Conservatives bet on Gen Z and Millennial voters, while Liberals double down on older voters and those in Francophone Canada.

    We first observed these divergent strategies as part of an analysis conducted by the Ted Rogers School of Management Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. As part of our Election Transparency and Accountability initiative, we examined Canadian political ad spending on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram, using PoliDashboard, the open-source platform we developed.

    We conducted a detailed analysis of the ad impression data for the campaigns of all major parties. Here, we focus our findings on online ads purchased by the Liberal and Conservative parties, the current frontrunners in the polls.

    Conservatives woo younger voters

    Based on impressions data from Facebook and Instagram during March 23-30, the week after the election announced, there was a clear generational divide in digital outreach. The Conservatives devoted much of their messaging to Canadians under 45, while the Liberals appeared to focus more on those 55 and older.

    A significant portion of Conservative Party Facebook and Instagram ad impressions came from men aged 25 to 34, who accounted for 16 per cent of all Conservative ad views. Additional impressions came from men aged 18 to 24, women aged 25 to 34, and women aged 35 to 44; each of these groups made up 10 per cent of the total impressions. This suggests an apparent effort by the Conservatives to connect with Gen Z and millennial voters.

    In contrast, Liberal ads garnered higher impressions among older demographics, with women aged 65 and over accounting for the largest share (21 per cent) of total impressions. Women aged 55 to 64 and men over 65 each contributed 12 per cent of Liberal ad impressions. This distribution points to a strategic emphasis on older voters, a group known for reliably turning out on election day.

    The estimated percentage of Meta ad impressions for Conservative and Liberals by demographic groups.
    (PoliDashboard/Social Media Lab), CC BY

    While traditional wisdom suggests that young adults favour progressive politics and parties, public polling suggests that young Canadians are increasingly embracing conservatism amid a housing and affordability crisis. The Conservatives appear poised to channel young peoples’ economic dissatisfaction into votes, using online advertising to reach them.

    Meanwhile, the Liberals appear to be consolidating support among those who have a longer history of voting, especially older women, who represent the largest age and gender cohort that is likely to vote for the party. It’s a tale of two electorates, and two very different strategies for winning.

    Impression data alone doesn’t confirm explicit age or gender targeting, nor does it guarantee support. Sometimes, a demographic simply has more affinity for a party’s content, leading to more impressions. These numbers can reflect both how parties aim their ads and how voters gravitate toward what resonates with them most.

    Regional divides

    The differences between the parties extend beyond age and gender, and into geographic territory. Both campaigns prioritize ad spending in Canada’s most populous provinces — British Columbia, Ontario and Québec — but the way they distribute their focus tells its own story.

    The Conservatives receive a larger share of their ad impressions from British Columbia, with 17 per cent of their total ad impressions; in comparison, the Liberals received just 11 per cent. The contrast is even sharper in Ontario, where 54 per cent of all Conservative ad impressions are concentrated, versus only 31 per cent for the Liberals.

    This difference is likely a deliberate strategic targeting tactic. Ontario, home to 122 federal ridings (with about 36 per cent of all seats in the House of Commons), is a pivotal battleground. The Conservatives’ strategy appears to hinge on flipping key seats in the province, particularly in suburban and outer suburban areas that could decide the election. Combined with their reach with younger voters, this approach signals an all-in effort to gain ground where it counts most.

    The Liberal Party, meanwhile, is doubling down in Québec — one of the largest and most culturally distinct provinces in the country — and where the Liberals are clearly on the offensive. Twenty-nine per cent of Liberal ad impressions are located in the province, compared to just three per cent for the Conservatives.

    Québec has long been a stronghold for the Liberals, particularly in urban areas like Montréal. While the province can be volatile and deeply influenced by local issues, the Liberals’ heavy advertising push suggests they’re working to defend the 33 seats they currently hold and possibly add a couple of new seats.

    Two parties, two visions

    Liberals and Conservatives are both vocally aligned in their repudiation of United States President Donald Trump’s frequent allusion to Canada becoming the “51st state,” a sentiment shared by an overwhelming majority of the Canadian public.

    With external pressure mounting from Trump’s tariff threats and democratic norms being tested across the border, this election isn’t just about policies or parties: it’s about protecting Canada’s independence, values and place in the world.

    However, the trends we’ve identified paint a picture of two distinct campaigns playing to different strengths and chasing different voters. The Conservatives are betting on young, digitally engaged Canadians, especially in Ontario. The Liberals are reinforcing their support among older voters, and looking to hold ground in Québec, where cultural identity and party loyalty still carry significant weight.

    Of course, ad impressions are only one part of the equation. Factors like grassroots efforts, candidate appeal and regional dynamics also play a major role. Still, the ad impression numbers provide a unique glimpse into each campaign’s strategy, and reveal the part of Canada each party believes it must win over.

    Philip Mai receives funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage Digital Citizen Contribution Program.

    Anatoliy Gruzd receives funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage Digital Citizen Contribution Program.

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

    – ref. Federal election: Conservatives and Liberals are targeting different generations and geographies online – https://theconversation.com/federal-election-conservatives-and-liberals-are-targeting-different-generations-and-geographies-online-253607

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Kids’ physical activity in child care is essential — how an online course equips educators to lead this

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Myranda Hawthorne, PhD Student, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Western University

    Physical activity — primarily in the form of active play — promotes young children’s physical, mental, emotional and social health. It can also influence how active people will be later in life.

    It’s recommended that pre-school children, aged three to four years, engage in at least three hours of physical activity per day, and that should include one hour of high-intensity, heart-pumping movement. Sedentary screen time should also be limited to less than one hour per day.

    Despite this, many children in Canada and around the world do not meet recommended levels of physical activity and engage in far more sedentary screen time than recommended.

    Early childhood educators (ECEs) play many important roles in helping young children grow and learn, and one of these roles is encouraging engagement in physical activity. Our research in the Child Health and Physical Activity Lab at Western University focuses on promoting physical activity of young children.

    A large part of our research involves working with ECEs to create active child-care settings, where children are supported and encouraged to engage in the physical activity they need for their development. We believe providing physical activity training opportunities for ECEs is an essential first step towards reaching that goal.

    Why kids aren’t moving

    There are many barriers to promoting physical activity in child-care settings, including prioritization of academic outcomes and limited space or equipment.

    For ECEs, the lack of formal training on the integral role of physical activity on children’s learning, health and development may present a key barrier.

    Only 32 per cent of students in early childhood education programs in Canada have taken a course related to physical activity in their post-secondary degree.

    Furthermore, ECEs across Canada have reported a lack of knowledge and confidence in their ability to incorporate physical activity opportunities into daily programming in child-care settings. This is the case even while ECEs have expressed interest in pursuing more training on these important subjects.

    The TEACH course

    We created the TEACH e-learning course (TEACH stands for Training EArly CHildhood educators in physical activity) to help bridge this gap.

    This course aims to educate ECEs on the important role of physical activity in child development, and to provide them with the knowledge and confidence to implement physical activity within child-care environments.

    The TEACH course was developed with both early childhood education experts and physical activity specialists to create comprehensive and relevant course content in four online modules. These include instructive videos, practical tips and “knowledge checks” (encouraging self-reflection on current knowledge and practices) for promoting physical activity and limiting sedentary behaviour in child-care environments.

    Important topics like outdoor and risky play are also covered in the course. It strives to overcome some of the other barriers to physical activity promotion in child-care settings, including suggestions for incorporating movement with limited space or equipment, as well as how to combine physical activities with other important skills like literacy and numeracy.

    The TEACH course is endorsed by the Canada Child Care Federation as a resource which can be used for practising ECEs to help fulfil their annual professional development activity requirements.

    Real-world results show promise

    The course has been tested with 200 practising ECEs and 300 ECE students across Canada, and has been shown to increase ECEs’ knowledge, confidence and intentions to incorporate physical activity during the child-care day.

    Not only that, but the positive changes in self-efficacy and confidence were sustained up to three months after completing the training. This shows that the e-learning course can have a lasting impact.

    Both practising ECEs and those in training benefited from the TEACH course. Practicing ECEs, who could immediately apply their new knowledge and skills to their everyday work, maintained these gains more effectively when compared to the ECEs still in training.



    Read more:
    Outdoor play in shorter, more frequent windows can boost physical activity in early learning settings

    Expanding and integrating the TEACH course

    The online format of the TEACH course increases accessibility of the course, as ECEs can work through the content in their own time, from anywhere. The online format also provides promise for the feasibility of expanding the course to a wider audience to be a cost-effective way to train a large number of ECEs, without much strain on resources.

    Members of the Child Health and Physical Activity Lab have translated the TEACH course into French (TEACH-FR). They’re currently testing its impact on francophone ECEs across the country, to ensure this resource can eventually be made available to both English- and French-speaking ECEs across Canada.

    Children’s engagement in physical activity and healthy movement while at child care matters — and can impact their health and development. The TEACH course can help improve educators’ knowledge and confidence in promoting physical activity opportunities in child-care settings, better equipping them for this challenge.

    By providing training for ECEs on the importance of physical activity behaviours, as well as how to effectively program daily active play opportunities, we can help children to move more during their time in child care. This helps set the stage for future healthy active lives.

    Myranda Hawthorne receives funding from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

    Sophie M Phillips receives funding from Children’s Health Research Institute and Mitacs.

    Trish Tucker receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Children’s Health Research Institute.

    – ref. Kids’ physical activity in child care is essential — how an online course equips educators to lead this – https://theconversation.com/kids-physical-activity-in-child-care-is-essential-how-an-online-course-equips-educators-to-lead-this-251418

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: World Health Day: Focusing on women’s physical and mental health around the world

    Source: United Nations MIL OSI

    Close to 300,000 women continue to die during pregnancy or childbirth each year. More than two million babies die in their first month of life and around two million more are stillborn, says the World Health Organization (WHO) which is kicking off a year-long campaign on maternal and newborn health.

    The data adds up to one preventable death every seven seconds, according to the UN health agency.

    The Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures campaign is asking governments and health policy makers to ramp up efforts to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths, and prioritize women’s longer-term health and well-being.

    Helping every woman and baby survive and thrive

    Through a series of strategic actions, WHO aims to not only save lives but ensure both mothers and infants thrive. In collaboration with partners, it will focus on empowering healthcare professionals and sharing crucial information about healthy pregnancies, safe childbirth, and postnatal care.

    Listening to women

    Access to high-quality, compassionate care is essential for women and families everywhere, WHO emphasises. Health systems must evolve to address a wide range of health concerns, including obstetric complications, mental health issues, non-communicable diseases, and family planning – ensuring that women’s needs are met both before, during, and after childbirth.

    © UNICEF/Eyad El Baba

    Girls affected by the ongoing conflict in Gaza receive a care and protection package distributed by UNICEF.

    Women in war zones

    At the same time, the proportion of women and girls caught in conflict zones has skyrocketed in the past year, with women now making up 40 per cent of all civilian deaths in armed conflicts.

    Today, over 600 million women and girls live in areas affected by violence – an  alarming 50 per cent increase since 2017.

    As conflict intensifies across the globe, women and girls are bearing a heavy mental health toll. From Afghanistan and Gaza to Georgia and Ukraine, millions are grappling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression and trauma, with limited access to support and care.

    Around one in five people affected by a humanitarian crisis will develop long-term mental health conditions. Despite this, only two per cent of those in need receive the care they require. Mental health funding globally represents between one and two percent of health spending.

    Stark divide on mental health

    The gap between high and low-income countries in mental health services is stark. In wealthy nations, there are more than 70 mental health workers for every 100,000 people. In contrast, in low-income countries, that number drops to fewer than one.

    As conflicts drag on, the number of affected women continues to rise, making this crisis even more urgent. UN gender equality agency, UN Women, spoke to women in Afghanistan, Gaza, Georgia, and Ukraine to understand how these conflicts are stoking a mental health crisis.

    © UNFPA Ukraine

    UNFPA’s mobile psychosocial support teams travel across Ukraine, including to the front lines, offering immediate emergency interventions as well as access to longer-term assistance.

    Women in Gaza trapped in trauma

    In Gaza, relentless bombing, displacement, and deprivation have created a humanitarian catastrophe. Living under siege and the constant threat of violence, women and girls face extreme levels of fear, trauma, and exhaustion. 

    Data from UN Women shows that 75 per cent feel regular depression, 62 per cent cannot sleep, and 65 per cent suffer from nightmares and anxiety – most are left to cope alone.

    “My mental and psychological health is suffering,” said one 27-year-old pregnant mother of three from Khan Younis. “Sometimes I go to the toilet just to cry and cry until I feel better.”

    Women are not only dealing with their own trauma – they are also trying to care for their children.

    “I have not prioritized my health because I am the primary caregiver for my children, assuming the roles of both father and mother,” the 27-year-old mother added. 

    Afghanistan: Women Erased from Public Life

    In Afghanistan, the return of the Taliban has dealt a crushing blow to women’s rights and mental health. Alison Davidian, UN Women’s Country Representative, warns that nearly four years of Taliban decrees have “eviscerated” women’s autonomy.

    With no women in leadership roles and 98 per cent reporting no influence over local decisions, many feel trapped in a life of isolation and despair.

    “Three years ago, an Afghan woman could run for president. Now, she may not even be able to decide when to buy groceries,” Davidian says. The result is overwhelming psychological distress, with 68 per cent of women in Afghanistan reporting their mental health as “bad” or “very bad.”

    © IOM/Léo Torréton

    An IOM mental health and psychosocial support counsellor leads a session with women in Paktika province, Afghanistan.

    Georgia: Antidepressant use on the rise

    In Georgia, ongoing displacement and conflict have left many women with no access to adequate mental healthcare. Approximately 200,000 people remain internally displaced, with nearly 40 per cent living in shelters under dire conditions.

    Mental health issues are widespread, with 23 per cent suffering from PTSD, 10 per cent reporting depression, and 9 per cent dealing with anxiety. Yet only about a third of those affected have sought care.

    “We saw a sharp increase in antidepressant use, particularly in areas with high numbers of displaced people,” said Elene Rusetskaia of the Women’s Information Centre. “The mental health problem is very serious, especially among children.”

    Ukraine: Domestic Violence and Depression Soar Amid War

    In Ukraine, the war stemming from Russia’s invasion has pushed women’s mental health into crisis. Gender-based violence has surged 36 per cent since 2022, and women are shouldering more unpaid care work – up to 56 hours per week. Forty-two percent are now at risk of depression, while 23 per cent report needing counseling.

    Displaced women, many of them refugees, are facing some of the worst mental health challenges, with limited access to support services.

    A recent survey by the International Migration Organization (IOM) found that 53 per cent of internally displaced people in Ukraine suffer from depression, yet assistance remains scarce.

    In response, UN Women has provided protection, legal aid, and psychosocial support to more than 180,000 women and girls in Ukraine through the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund.

    Healthcare funding

    The current humanitarian funding crisis, exacerbated by declining health spending in host countries, is affecting the scope and quality of public health and nutrition programmes for refugees and host communities, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has said.

    In Jordan, 335,000 women of reproductive age are at risk of losing essential maternal health. Without enough funding, prenatal care, safe delivery and newborn health services will disappear.

    In Bangladesh, around a million Rohingya refugees face a severe health crisis due to the funding freeze, threatening access to essential medical services. In UNHCR-supported programmes, over 40,000 pregnant women may lose access to critical antenatal care, with 5,000 at risk of delivering in unsafe conditions.

    In Burundi, the suspension of nutrition programmes in several camps means that thousands of refugee children under five may not receive adequate treatment for malnutrition.

    Necessity, not luxury

    For women and girls in conflict zones, mental health care is a critical need, not a luxury. Recovery, dignity, and survival depend on access to trauma care, counseling, and community-based services.

    As conflicts continue to devastate communities, the need for mental health support becomes more urgent than ever. Countries must invest in mental health as a core part of humanitarian response, especially in conflict settings, UN Women, emphasized, calling on governments to listen – and act.

    Listen to an interview with the Representative ad interim of the UN reproductive health agency, UNFPA, in Sudan: 

    Soundcloud

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The graver Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the quieter the BBC grows

    ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

    The BBC’s news verification service, Verify, digitally reconstructed a residential tower block in Mandalay earlier this week to show how it had collapsed in a huge earthquake on March 28 in Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia largely cut off from the outside world.

    The broadcaster painstakingly pieced together damage to other parts of the city using a combination of phone videos, satellite imagery and Nasa heat detection images.

    Verify dedicated much time and effort to this task for a simple reason: to expose as patently false the claims made by the ruling military junta that only 2000 people were killed by Myanmar’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake.

    The West sees the country’s generals as an official enemy, and the BBC wanted to show that the junta’s account of events could not be trusted. Myanmar’s rulers have an interest in undercounting the dead to protect the regime’s image.

    The BBC’s determined effort to strip away these lies contrasted strongly with its coverage — or rather, lack of it — of another important story this week.

    Israel has been caught in another horrifying war crime. Late last month, it executed 15 Palestinian first responders and then secretly buried them in a mass grave, along with their crushed vehicles.

    Israel is an official western ally, one that the United States, Britain and the rest of Europe have been arming and assisting in a spate of crimes against humanity being investigated by the world’s highest court. Fourteen months ago, the International Court of Justice ruled it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a fugitive from its sister court, the International Criminal Court. Judges there want to try him for crimes against humanity, including starving the 2.3 million people of Gaza by withholding food, water and aid.

    Israel is known to have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, in its 18-month carpet bombing of the enclave. But there are likely to be far more deaths that have gone unreported.

    This is because Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s health and administrative bodies that could do the counting, and because it has created unmarked “kill zones” across much of the enclave, making it all but impossible for first responders to reach swathes of territory to locate the dead.

    The latest crime scene in Gaza is shockingly illustrative of how Israel murders civilians, targets medics and covers up its crimes — and of how Western media collude in downplaying such atrocities, helping Israel to ensure that the extent of the death toll in Gaza will never be properly known.

    Struck ‘one by one’
     Last Sunday, United Nations officials were finally allowed by Israel to reach the site in southern Gaza where the Palestinian emergency crews had gone missing a week earlier, on March 23. The bodies of 15 Palestinians were unearthed in a mass grave; another is still missing.

    All were wearing their uniforms, and some had their hands or legs zip-tied, according to eyewitnesses. Some had been shot in the head or chest. Their vehicles had been crushed before they were buried.

    Two of the emergency workers were killed by Israeli fire while trying to aid people injured in an earlier air strike on Rafah. The other 13 were part of a convoy sent to retrieve the bodies of their colleagues, with the UN saying Israel had struck their ambulances “one by one”.

    Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity — which is why it initially tried to black out the story

    More details emerged during the week, with the doctor who examined five of the bodies reporting that all but one — which had been too badly mutilated by feral animals to assess — were shot from close range with multiple bullets. Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “The bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

    Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes, observed that one of the paramedics in the convoy was in contact with the ambulance station when Israeli forces started shooting: “During the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew.

    “The conversation was about gathering the [Palestinian] team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”

    Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs in Palestine, reported that, on the journey to recover the bodies, he and his team witnessed Israeli soldiers firing on civilians fleeing the area. He saw a Palestinian woman shot in the back of the head and a young man who tried to retrieve her body shot, too.

    Concealing slaughter
     The difficulty for Israel with the discovery of the mass grave was that it could not easily fall back on any of the usual mendacious rationalisations for war crimes that it has fed the Western media over the past year and a half, and which those outlets have been only too happy to regurgitate.

    Since Israel unilaterally broke a US-backed ceasefire agreement with Hamas last month, its carpet bombing of the enclave has killed more than 1000 Palestinians, taking the official death toll to more than 50,000. But Israel and its apologists, including Western governments and media, always have a ready excuse at hand to mask the slaughter.

    Israel disputes the casualty figures, saying they are inflated by Gaza’s Health Ministry, even though its figures in previous wars have always been highly reliable. It says most of those killed were Hamas “terrorists”, and most of the slain women and children were used by Hamas as “human shields”.

    Israel has also destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, shot up large numbers of ambulances, killed hundreds of medical personnel and disappeared others into torture chambers, while denying the entry of medical supplies.

    Israel implies that all of the 36 hospitals in Gaza it has targeted are Hamas-run “command and control centres”; that many of the doctors and nurses working in them are really covert Hamas operatives; and that Gaza’s ambulances are being used to transport Hamas fighters.

    Even if these claims were vaguely plausible, the Western media seems unwilling to ask the most obvious of questions: why would Hamas continue to use Gaza’s hospitals and ambulances when Israel made clear from the outset of its 18-month genocidal killing rampage that it was going to treat them as targets?

    Even if Hamas fighters did not care about protecting the health sector, which their parents, siblings, children, and relatives desperately need to survive Israel’s carpet bombing, why would they make themselves so easy to locate?

    Hamas has plenty of other places to hide in Gaza. Most of the enclave’s buildings are wrecked concrete structures, ideal for waging guerrilla warfare.

    Israeli cover-up
     Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity — which is why it initially tried to black out the story.

    Given that it has banned all Western journalists from entering Gaza, killed unprecedented numbers of local journalists, and formally outlawed the UN refugee agency Unrwa, it might have hoped its crime would go undiscovered.

    But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.

    It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine, and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.

    Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?

    Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies — using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?

    If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?

    And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?

    ‘Deeply disturbed’
     All available evidence indicates that Israel killed all or most of the emergency crews in cold blood — a grave war crime.

    But as the story broke on Monday, the BBC’s News at Ten gave over its schedule to a bin strike by workers in Birmingham; fears about the influence of social media prompted by a Netflix drama, Adolescence; bad weather on a Greek island; the return to Earth of stranded Nasa astronauts; and Britain’s fourth political party claiming it would do well in next month’s local elections.

    All of that pushed out any mention of Israel’s latest war crime in Gaza.

    Presumably under pressure from its ordinary journalists — who are known to be in near-revolt over the state broadcaster’s persistent failure to cover Israeli atrocities in Gaza — the next day’s half-hour evening news belatedly dedicated 30 seconds to the item, near the end of the running order.

    This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal

    The perfunctory report immediately undercut the UN’s statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the deaths, with the newsreader announcing that Israel claimed nine “terrorists” were “among those killed”.

    Where was the BBC Verify team in this instance? Too busy scouring Google maps of Myanmar, it would seem.

    If ever there was a region where its forensic, open-source skills could be usefully deployed, it is Gaza. After all, Israel keeps out foreign journalists, and it has killed Palestinian journalists in greater numbers than all of the West’s major wars of the past 150 years combined.

    This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal. It was a chance for the BBC to do actual journalism about Gaza.

    Why was it necessary for the BBC to contest the narrative of an earthquake in a repressive Southeast Asian country whose rulers are opposed by the West but not contest the narrative of a major atrocity committed by a Western ally?

    Missing in action
     This is not the first time that BBC Verify has been missing in action at a crucial moment in Gaza.

    Back in January 2024, Israeli soldiers shot up a car containing a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, and her relatives as they tried to flee an Israeli attack on Gaza City. All were killed, but before Hind died, she could be heard desperately pleading with emergency services for help.

    Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed. It took two weeks for other emergency crews to reach the bodies.

    It was certainly possible for BBC Verify to have done a forensic study of the incident — because another group did precisely that. Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, used available images of the scene to reconstruct the events.

    It found that the Israeli military had fired 335 bullets into the small car carrying Hind and her family. In an audio recording before she was killed, Hind’s cousin could be heard telling emergency services that an Israeli tank was near them.

    The sound of the gunfire, most likely from the tank’s machine gun, indicates it was some 13 metres away — close enough for the crew to have seen the children inside.

    Not only did BBC Verify ignore the story, but the BBC also failed to report it until the bodies were recovered. As has happened so often before, the BBC dared not do any reporting until Israel was forced to confirm the incident because of physical evidence.

    We know from a BBC journalist-turned-whistleblower, Karishma Patel, that she pushed editors to run the story as the recordings of Hind pleading for help first surfaced, but she was overruled.

    When the BBC very belatedly covered Hind’s horrific killing online, in typical fashion, it did so in a way that minimised any pushback from Israel. Its headline, “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”, managed to remove Israel from the story.

    Evidence buried
     A clear pattern thus emerges. The BBC also tried to bury the massacre of the 15 Palestinian first responders — keeping it off its website’s main page — just as Israel had tried to bury the evidence of its crime in Gaza’s sand.

    The story’s first headline was: “Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza”. Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene.

    Only later, amid massive backlash on social media and as the story refused to go away, did the BBC change the headline to attribute the killings to “Israeli forces”.

    But subsequent stories have been keen to highlight the self-serving Israeli claim that its soldiers were entitled to execute the paramedics because the presence of emergency vehicles at the scene of much death and destruction was “suspicious”.

    In one report, a BBC journalist managed to shoe-horn this same, patently ridiculous “defence” twice into her two-minute segment. She reduced the discovery of an Israeli massacre to mere “allegations”, while a clear war crime was soft-soaped as only an “apparent” one.

    Notably, the BBC has on one solitary occasion managed to go beyond other media in reporting an attack on an ambulance crew. The footage incontrovertibly showed a US-supplied Apache helicopter firing on the crew and a young family they were trying to evacuate.

    There was no possibility the ambulance contained “terrorists” because the documentary team were filming inside the vehicle with paramedics they had been following for months. The video was included near the end of a documentary on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, seen largely through the eyes of children.

    But the BBC quickly pulled that film, titled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, after the Israel lobby manufactured a controversy over one of its child narrators being the son of Gaza’s deputy Agriculture Minister, who served in the Hamas-run civilian government.

    Wholesale destruction
     The unmentionable truth, which has been evident since the earliest days of the 18-month genocide, is that Israel is intentionally dismantling and destroying Gaza’s health sector, piece by piece.

    According to the UN, Israel’s war has killed at least 1060 healthcare workers and 399 aid workers — those deaths it has been possible to identify — and wrecked Gaza’s health facilities. Israel has rounded up hundreds of medical staff and disappeared many of them into what Israeli human rights groups call torture chambers.

    One doctor, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, has been held by Israel since he was abducted in late December. During brief contacts with lawyers, Dr Safiya revealed that he is being tortured.

    Other doctors have been killed in Israeli detention from their abuse, including one who was allegedly raped to death.

    Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply

    Why is Israel carrying out this wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health sector? There are two reasons. Firstly, Netanyahu recently reiterated his intent to carry out the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    He presents this as “voluntary migration”, supposedly in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the enclave’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians to other countries.

    There can be nothing voluntary about Palestinians leaving Gaza when Israel has refused to allow any food or aid into the enclave for the past month, and is indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Israel’s ultimate intention has always been to terrify the population into flight.

    Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, was secretly recorded last month stating that “there are no uninvolved in Gaza”— a constant theme from Israeli officials. He also suggested that there should be a “death sentence” for anyone Israel accuses of holding a gun, including children.

    Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has threatened the “total devastation” of Gaza’s civilian population should they fail to “remove Hamas” from the enclave, something they are in no position to do.

    Not surprisingly, faced with the prospect of an intensification of the genocide and the imminent annihilation of themselves and their loved ones, ordinary people in Gaza have started organising protests against Hamas — marches readily reported by the BBC and others.

    Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply, and no one will come to your aid in your hour of need.

    You are alone against our snipers, drones, tanks and Apache helicopters.

    Too much to bear
     The second reason for Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector is that we in the West, or at least our governments and media, have consented to Israel’s savagery — and actively participated in it — every step of the way. Had there been any meaningful pushback at any stage, Israel would have been forced to take another course.

    When David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, let slip in Parliament last month the advice he has been receiving from his officials since he took up the job last summer — that Israel is clearly violating international law by starving the population — he was immediately rebuked by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office.

    Let us not forget that Starmer, when he was opposition leader, approved Israel’s genocidal blocking of food, water and electricity to Gaza, saying Israel “had that right”.

    In response to Lammy’s comments, Starmer’s spokesperson restated the government’s view that Israel is only “at risk” of breaching international law — a position that allows the UK to continue arming Israel and providing it with intelligence from British spy flights over Gaza from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.

    Our politicians have consented to everything Israel has done, and not just in Gaza over the past 18 months. This genocide has been decades in the making.

    Three-quarters of a century ago, the West authorised the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine to create a self-declared Jewish state there. The West consented, too, to the violent occupation of the last sections of Palestine in 1967, and to Israel’s gradual colonisation of those newly seized territories by armed Jewish extremists.

    The West nodded through waves of house demolitions carried out against Palestinian communities by Israel to “Judaise” the land. It backed the Israeli army creating extensive “firing zones” on Palestinian farmland to starve traditional agricultural communities of any means of subsistence.

    The West ignored Israeli settlers and soldiers destroying Palestinian olive groves, beating up shepherds, torching homes, and murdering families. Even being an Oscar winner offers no immunity from the rampant settler violence.

    The West agreed to Israel creating an apartheid road system and a network of checkpoints that kept Palestinians confined to ever-shrinking ghettoes, and building walls around Palestinian areas to permanently isolate them from the rest of the world.

    It allowed Israel to stop Palestinians from reaching one of their holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, on land that was supposed to be central to their future state.

    The West kept quiet as Israel besieged the two million people of Gaza for 17 years, putting them on a tightly rationed diet so their children would grow ever-more malnourished. It did nothing — except supply more weapons — when the people of Gaza launched a series of non-violent protests at their prison walls around the enclave, and were greeted with Israeli sniper fire that left thousands dead or crippled.

    The West only found a collective voice of protest on 7 October 2023, when Hamas managed to find a way to break out of Gaza’s choking isolation to wreak havoc in Israel for 24 hours. It has been raising its voice in horror at the events of that single day ever since, drowning out 18 months of screams from the children being starved and exterminated in Gaza.

    The murder of 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers is a tiny drop in an ocean of Israeli criminality — a barbarism rewarded by Western capitals decade after decade.

    This genocide was made in the West. Israel is our progeny, our ugly reflection in the mirror — which is why Western leaders and establishment media are so desperate to make us look the other way. That reflection is too much for anyone with a soul to bear.

    Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and media critic, and author of many books about Palestine. He is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the Middle East Eye and the author’s blog with permission.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI China: China to accelerate digitalization of eco-environment monitoring network

    Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

    BEIJING, April 6 — China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment has unveiled a plan to further transform the country’s national ecological monitoring network into a digitized and smart system.

    By 2027, China aims to explore a new generation of monitoring networks in key regions, utilizing advanced technologies such as unmanned maintenance and smart sampling, with standardized monitoring operations being carried out nationwide, according to the plan.

    By 2030, China’s eco-environment monitoring network system will be systematically revamped to include an integrated aerial, terrestrial and maritime monitoring network, along with a basically established “smart brain,” it said.

    The move marks a concrete step toward digitalized and smart environmental monitoring, said Jiang Huohua, head of the ministry’s ecological and environmental monitoring department.

    Air and water monitoring will be updated with unmanned operations, as well as smart sampling and analysis. Additionally, biodiversity tracking will leverage advanced smart equipment such as infrared cameras and bird sound recorders to achieve over 85 percent accuracy in species identification.

    In terms of noise monitoring, urban sound environment monitoring equipment will not only be able to track decibel levels but also identify sources of the noise, according to Jiang.

    New technologies like artificial intelligence and satellite remote sensing will play increasingly significant roles in China’s eco-environmental monitoring, with policies rolled out to develop environmental protection robots and remote-operation equipment, he told a press conference last month.

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: 4 actions to support a sustainable democracy: No heroism required

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Wolfgang Linden, Professor Emeritus in Clinical and Health Psychology, University of British Columbia

    The media make an urgent case that democracy is threatened and autocrats are gaining ground. Democracy fatigue is in large part attributable to an inherently slow process, requiring many compromises and engagement by citizens. I argue that we are not helpless and offer action strategies to make the effort required to maintain democracy more palatable.

    As a researcher in psychology, I discovered (as have others) that the basic principles driving human behaviour are remarkably similar across a wide range of domains. They include child development, social psychology, psychotherapy and also politics. Now, as an emeritus professor, I am applying this knowledge to the wider-reaching application of ways to strengthen democracy.

    Using research-based and realistic views of the degree of control we have over politics, I propose four actions for individuals in support of strengthening democracy.

    1. Make voting social and celebratory

    A yardstick of a healthy democracy is election participation, which has dropped over time and hovers around two-thirds of eligible voters, with slightly higher rates in Canada than in the United States. Human beings are by nature social and seek company, and that alone is a perfect reason to go voting together with family and friends; make it an event.

    We know that couples go voting together and thus have greater participation rates than singles. Also, efforts to mobilize reluctant voters have possible spillover effects to other hesitant voters in their nearby environment. Lastly, it makes especially good sense to engage any first-time eligible voter because starting a voting habit early builds habitual voting. You could even encourage this first-time voter to get a (paid) job in the polling station!

    2. Reframe voting probabilities

    Sentiments like “my vote counts for little” are common. Nevertheless, we often see cliff-hanger results where tiny pools of votes count a lot.

    In 2024 in British Columbia, for example, three out of 93 races showed the two leading parties apart by fewer than 225 votes. One of these battles was ultimately won with a 22-vote difference, which really mattered because it was the one seat needed to swing the entire election towards winning a majority in the legislature.

    3. Use the word ‘us,’ challenge use of ‘they’

    Some politicians use fearmongering as a deliberate strategy and label non-supporters or people who differ from them as dangerous. “They” get blamed for the world’s ills, and can be excluded, or worse.

    When people around you overdo the divisiveness, ask them who are “they” and in what ways are they really different? Ultimately, when studied worldwide, all of “us” seek physical safety, supportive social networks, and stable, decent-paying jobs. We hope for fairness and want to support our families.

    Also, when dealing with issues like pollution, for example, remember that dirty air and water or radioactive waste don’t care about politically defined borders. They are all “our” garbage and “our” problem.

    4. How to shift from ‘they’ to ‘we’

    One proposition to help shift from “they” to “we” is to engage in new hobbies that excite you but involve people who are predictably unlike you. If you are a desk jockey by day, you might meet people with very different backgrounds when you join a hiking group or a woodworking co-op.

    Once you build this bridge and better understand others’ worlds, it becomes easier to work on solutions for joint social problems. At the workplace, hiring people with very diverse expertise has been shown to lead to more creative and satisfactory solutions than by drawing experts from a narrow pool.

    Also, by seeking consensus with others, you strengthen your own conflict-resolution skills. They can then be used in other places like marriage, condominium self-government, workplace politics or in holding groups of friends together.

    Yet another way of actively adopting the idea of “us” is to join advocacy groups that work on topics important to you and your community. Participedia is a global platform for anyone interested in public participation and democratic innovation. They have explored hundreds of organizations in 159 countries.

    Bottom line, neither heroic behaviour nor exceptional courage is required to engage in these readily available building blocks of a sustainable democracy.

    Wolfgang Linden is affiliated with Council of Canadians, Fair Vote Canada; both not for profit, not aligned with a political party

    – ref. 4 actions to support a sustainable democracy: No heroism required – https://theconversation.com/4-actions-to-support-a-sustainable-democracy-no-heroism-required-248748

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: 5 tips from an expert for choosing a self-help book that will actually work

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

    With over 15,000 self-help books published yearly, sifting through so many books can be challenging. (Shutterstock)

    The wellness industry is one of the fastest growing markets, with an estimated global value of US$6.3 trillion in 2023. Gen Z and millennials are driving much of this growth, spending more on wellness products and services than older generations.

    The challenge, however, is that the wellness industry has few guardrails, allowing social media influencers and media personalities to position themselves as experts on well-being — sometimes without scientific backing.

    In a space where personal opinions and untested strategies are often presented as facts, it can be difficult to distinguish between helpful guidance and misleading information.

    Self-help books and bibliotherapy

    One form of self-help that has gained attention is bibliotherapy, which uses books to support well-being. If you’re looking to improve your well-being, you may find yourself at your local bookstore or library scouring the shelves for a self-help book.

    The self-help category is one of the largest non-fiction book categories. But not all self-help books contain strategies that are actually tested to determine their efficacy.

    With over 15,000 self-help books published yearly in the United States alone, sifting through so many books can be challenging.

    As a professor of psychology and founder of a book club that selects evidence-based books on well-being and self-improvement, I identify self-help books that rely on research rather than personal opinions or commercialized wellness trends.

    Ready to make a change? The Quarter Life Glow-up is a new, six-week newsletter course from The Conversation’s UK and Canada editions.

    Every week, we’ll bring you research-backed advice and tools to help improve your relationships, your career, your free time and your mental health – no supplements or skincare required. Sign up here to start your glow-up at any time.

    5 tips for choosing self-help books

    Here are five key tips for choosing self-help books that are grounded in reliable evidence:

    1. Consider the author’s credentials

    Check the qualifications of an author before assuming their book is evidence-based. Keep in mind that writing a book doesn’t qualify an author as an expert.

    Some self-help books are based on personal experiences rather than scientific research, and while lived experience can be valuable, it is not the same as strategies that have been tested to determine their efficacy.

    Look for authors with academic credentials, like a PhD or doctor of medicine from a reputable school, rather than those claiming expertise solely through personal experience.

    Many professional writers simply summarize existing research rather having conducted the research they are writing about. This can sometimes lead to oversimplification or misrepresentation of scientific findings.

    A quick online search can help determine whether an author has the necessary expertise to offer credible, science-based advice.

    The self-help category is one of the largest non-fiction book categories.
    (Shutterstock)

    2. Don’t judge a book by its popularity

    Just because a book is a bestseller or endorsed by celebrities doesn’t mean it’s grounded in science or evidence-based. Unlike academic research, which undergoes peer review before publication, self-help books are not always vetted for accuracy.

    A book’s success may be driven by marketing, emotional appeal or trendy ideas rather than solid scientific evidence.

    3. Consider where a book is shelved

    Bookstores and libraries categorize self-help books in a variety of sections, including health, wellness, well-being and new age. While some books in these categories are evidence-based, you might consider looking under the science and nature section instead.

    Exploring beyond traditional self-help sections can increase the likelihood of you finding books based on credible, scientific evidence.

    4. Be open to different topics

    Self-improvement is not limited to a single aspect of life. Well-being is a multifaceted construct with some experts including nine or more dimensions, including but not limited to physical, emotional, social, intellectual, spiritual, financial, environmental, occupational and cultural.

    When searching for a self-help book, consider exploring a well-being dimension that you may not know much about to expand your knowledge. This can contribute to a more well-rounded sense of personal development. Or, consider a topic that you want to know more about from a scientific perspective.

    You might consider looking for wellness books outside the health, wellness, well-being and new age categories.
    (Shutterstock)

    5. Think critically about what you read

    Even evidence-based books may report findings that are surprising or contradictory. If you read something that seems contrary in a book, seek out additional sources to verify the claims for yourself.

    The most credible self-help books will include a list of references to original studies that allow you to verify claims for yourself and draw your own conclusions. The extra-benefit of these references is that they can also serve as a gateway to additional resources on the topic.

    A pathway to better health and well-being

    Reading offers a number of benefits for well-being, including helping cognitive function, reducing stress, improving sleep quality and quantity, improving mood, and decreasing blood pressure.

    Although reading is often considered a solitary activity, it can also be a way to connect with others. Being part of a community can help reduce social isolation, decrease loneliness and increase connectedness.

    Book clubs, in particular, can provide a way for you to reap the benefits of reading and community. I created the the Reading for Well-Being Community Book Club at Carleton University.

    I select evidence-based books on various aspects of well-being and self-improvement as Professor Pozzulo’s Picks. I also interview the authors of the books I select on my Reading for Well-Being podcast.

    Each month, members receive a newsletter announcing my pick and a link to the digital platform where my review is posted including a discussion board where club members can share their thoughts about the book. There are no fees and all are welcome to join.

    Whether reading alone or with a group, the benefits of books extend far beyond their pages. So pick up a book and start your journey toward a healthier and more connected life.

    Happy reading!

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

    – ref. 5 tips from an expert for choosing a self-help book that will actually work – https://theconversation.com/5-tips-from-an-expert-for-choosing-a-self-help-book-that-will-actually-work-252596

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI China: China’s Yunnan rescue team completes quake response in Myanmar

    Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

    KUNMING, April 6 — A 37-member rescue and medical team from southwest China’s Yunnan Province returned from Myanmar on Sunday afternoon, after completing their earthquake relief work.

    A 7.9-magnitude quake struck Myanmar on March 28. At around 6:30 a.m. Beijing time on March 29, the team from Yunnan Province, which borders Myanmar, took off from Kunming — Yunnan’s capital city — to the quake-stricken areas in Myanmar boarding a flight, carrying with them life detectors, seismic warning systems, portable satellite telephones and drones.

    As the first Chinese rescue team to arrive in Myanmar, they immediately joined forces with local firefighters and rescuers to carry out rescue and medical operations in the severely-affected Naypyidaw, which lasted for over 150 hours.

    At 5 a.m. March 30 local time, the team, joined by local forces, rescued an elderly person who had been trapped for nearly 40 hours at a local hospital.

    A China Media Group report said on Wednesday that more than 500 Chinese rescue workers were in Myanmar for rescue and relief missions, all together. As of Thursday, Chinese rescue teams had successfully saved nine survivors from the quake-affected areas.

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: A Dose of History: Excellence In Pharmacy, Excellence In Athletics

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    No One Knows School Spirit Like Pat 

    If you ask Patrick Doherty (PHARM ‘24) what he did during his time at UConn’s School of Pharmacy, you might want to first ask what he didn’t do – because the list of what Pat didn’t do at UConn is quite short.  

    From energizing crowds at basketball games as Jonathan the Mascot, to hurdling teammates through the air as a cheerleader, to working long nights as a bartender at Huskies – all while pursuing his passion for pharmacy – Pat took on every role he could.  

    As a lifelong Husky fan, Pat had his eye on UConn growing up, but it wasn’t until high school that he knew he belonged at UConn’s School of Pharmacy. Interested in science and accessible healthcare during high school, Pat felt compelled to make a difference in his community and be part of something bigger than himself: “Pharmacy is constantly driving innovation in healthcare through new treatments.” With this newfound passion for pharmacy, which he knew would grow stronger at UConn, Pat realized he couldn’t continue to just root for the Huskies – he had to be a Husky! 

    Ben takes a try at Basketball (Emerson Ricciardone)

    Once a pharmacy student at UConn, Pat took his new title as a Husky very seriously. During his freshman year, while getting acclimated to a demanding schedule at the School, he decided to take on the exciting role of being Jonathan the Mascot, trading in his lab coat for a ten-pound Husky head when he needed to de-stress.

    Although he gave out endless high-fives and took picture after picture with fans at action-packed basketball and football games, Pat longed for the sense of camaraderie he had felt while on his high school basketball and golf teams.  This was around the time when a friend of his suggested he try cheerleading, to which he was hesitant: “I’ll admit, I didn’t think cheerleading was a sport before coming to UConn.” But Pat, having never said no to an opportunity before, took a risk and tried out for the cheerleading team. 

    Once a pharmacy student and a cheerleader at UConn, Pat began to feel like UConn was truly his home. “It was almost like having two families – a cheer family and a pharmacy family.” 

    His cheer family took him to the NCA Championships in December (a national cheerleading competition), the 2022 Women’s Final Four, the 2022 Men’s Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden, and countless football games – his favorite being UConn vs. West Point. 

    Ben in the lab with his classmates

    On the other hand, Pat’s pharmacy family provided many academic and professional opportunities: a proud member of Alpha Zeta Omega Pharmaceutical Fraternity (AZO) and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacy, he fostered connections and grew his curiosity. As a Pharmacy Leaders’ Track Scholar and part of No Friends Left Naloxone (a club focused on opioid overdose awareness), Pat also cultivated new interests in the medical field. These involvements, along with the opportunity to create customized dosage forms for patients during an advanced compounding class and his internship at Hartford Hospital – he knew he was destined to work in a hospital setting, helping patients throughout their lives. 

    While Pat enjoyed both his cheer and pharmacy families at UConn, he also made sure to find opportunities outside of these groups, becoming an active member of the Paint Club and intramural basketball. During his sophomore year, Pat decided to pick up a job working as a bouncer at Huskies. The bar quickly realized, however, that Pat was too nice to be cut out for the job, so he was moved behind the bar and worked as a bartender for two years.  

    So, at this point, you might be asking yourself how Pat managed to fit so much into his schedule. To that, Pat emphasizes time management skills and the connections he fostered during his time at UConn. Adhering to a rigid schedule, Pat made sure to keep calendars, to-do lists, and timetables while taking advantage of any downtime he had to study. “Scheduling time to study in between workouts, practice, and class helped me retain the information better and improve my exam scores.” Pat even studied for exams on buses and planes going to games!  

    Ben and his team cheer during a game

    But while strict schedules and calendars helped Pat find the time, it was really the friends and connections he made at UConn that gave him the motivation to pursue his passions. Frequenting the School’s library, Pat would find time to talk to friends between classes and form study groups with close friends. Pat’s first year in the Pharm.D. program year was especially rough, as this was the first year of the pandemic, but his classmates and professors helped him tremendously. “With School of Pharmacy professors, I never felt like just a number.”  

    Now a Yale Health System Pharmacy Administration and Leadership Resident while pursuing a Master’s in Healthcare Administration, Pat manages his time and thrives in his new roles thanks to the lessons he learned at UConn.

    “The School’s curriculum set me up for success, and I learned how to manage my time.” – Pat

    Pat also credits the School and his cheerleading team for teaching him hard work, determination, and the skill of managing interpersonal relationships. In line with all his roles at UConn and now, Pat’s biggest piece of advice for current students at the School is to set unreasonable goals and work on them until they become reasonable. But while transforming unreasonable goals into reasonable ones and inspiring others to do the same, Pat encourages himself and current students to “never take anything too seriously and always find time to laugh.”  

    Being a Husky Isn’t a Title, It’s a Lifestyle: Cathy’s Legacy 

    Just one conversation with Cathy Bouchain (BS PHARM ‘85), and you’ll quickly see how much she is a true testament to ‘Once a Husky, Always a Husky.’ An excellent athlete and scholar in high school, Cathy turned down acceptance to prestigious schools, including Yale, to become one of the founding pioneers of the UConn Basketball legacy while also finding her passion for pharmacy. Forty years later, UConn is grateful Cathy chose to be a Husky – not a bulldog! 

     

    Cathy Bochain during her days as a member of the UConn women’s basketball team (Cyril Morris / UConn Athletics Photo).

    Growing up in Plainfield and graduating third in her class, Cathy balanced schoolwork and athletics with ease. Excelling in science and math but knowing very little about pharmacy, she decided to challenge herself by attending UConn’s School of Pharmacy: “You know, I like challenges, and I heard that pharmacy school was hard.” Although Cathy didn’t have the easiest time adjusting to the academic rigor of the program, she worked hard her first two semesters at UConn, even earning a 4.0 GPA  in her first professional year. Over time, she developed the time management skills and support system that allowed her to thrive, ultimately graduating 8th in her class and as the all-time leader in scoring and steals in university history for women’s basketball.  

    For Cathy, her success on the court and in the classroom was interdependent: “I was a jock in my classes and a nerd on the court.” Because of her busy basketball schedule, Cathy learned to tailor her studying to what mattered, going to professors for advice on the most important material. When she knew the key material, she would form study groups with her classmates and act as a teacher, strengthening her learning through teaching.

    As President of The Rho Chi Society (a National Honor Society for Pharmacy), she grew to be even stronger leader, both for her classmates and teammates. While her classmates sat at the front of the class, furiously jotting down notes, Cathy knew to sit in the back where she could take focused notes and easily come in late or leave early for practice without distracting anyone.  This mutual relationship helped Cathy achieve better grades during her basketball season, as she was so determined to find that perfect balance.  

    Bochain, right, with teammate Mary Ellen Langfield ’83 (UConn Athletics Photo).

    It wasn’t always balancing the two settings that made success possible, Cathy explained, but the people within the environments. During basketball games, her classmates would form their own cheer section with decorated signs. Cathy’s professors even let her join their basketball pickup games, where she grew closer to them and became more comfortable asking for help.

    “I think everybody was rooting for me.” – Cathy 

    And when it came to her team, everyone strived for academic success. From studying on buses to grabbing a bite to eat and studying for a few hours after practice, Cathy’s teammates leaned on each other for support, both as teammates and students of the University. And all this studying paid off: “I remember that during my senior year, our team had the highest GPA in the Big East.” 

    After graduating from the School, where she spent her last two years as a grad assistant to the team while completing rotations and internships, Cathy received her Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy and became a registered pharmacist. Her passions for basketball and pharmacy have been lifelong, creating a successful career in retail pharmacy while playing on a women’s basketball league in Manchester and local travel teams for many years. Aside from playing, Cathy has found adventure in restoring historic homes and hiking the Appalachian trail, and she plans to coach a youth basketball league called Frog Rock after she retires. She has also found adventure in her own family, raising three children with her partner Anne – all of whom are successful in their own endeavors. 

    Cathy talks during a recent interview (UConn Photo)

    Cathy remains strongly connected to UConn’s basketball program, staying close with Chris Dailey, Peggy Walsh Myers, and other basketball greats that remain etched in the Huskies’ basketball legacy.  She is grateful for every opportunity to connect with the program and is especially fond of a recent memory—a basketball alumni dinner at Geno Auriemma’s house. Geno is also fond of Cathy, having been picked up from the airport by her for his initial interview for head coach in 1985.  

    Looking back on all her years of service and leadership within and outside of the UConn community, Cathy remains appreciative of the lessons she learned and the people she met while at the School. Having worked with college-aged pharmacy students throughout her career, and having been one herself, Cathy understands how overwhelming balancing everything can feel. Her biggest message? “One day at a time.” If you take college one day at a time, Cathy advises, you don’t have to look at the whole picture. And when needed, always ask for help!

    Ben: From a UConn Family, Creating a UConn Family 

    For Ben Gottsche (PHARM ‘28), being a Husky wasn’t just a choice – it was destiny. Growing up in a small Connecticut town with parents who both attended UConn, blue was in his blood even before he was born. Ben was confident that UConn would be a perfect combination of “academics, athletics, and personal connection.” As a junior, actively involved in the School of Pharmacy and UConn’s Men’s Club Lacrosse Team, he’s a testament of this ideal combination.  

    Not only was UConn part of Ben’s family legacy – pharmacy was, too. Growing up, Ben saw firsthand how his dad thrived as a pharmacist and his mom as a nurse. With both parents in healthcare, Ben gradually became interested in the mix of science, problem-solving, and patient care the field of pharmacy offers. While looking at pharmacy programs in high school (with a little help from his dad, who graduated in 1997 from UConn’s School of Pharmacy, ), Ben picked UConn – or more accurately, UConn picked Ben. 

    Headshot of Ben in his professional attire (Spencer Sloan)

     Now, as a junior at the School, Ben is proving why UConn picked him. An active member of AZO and the Dean’s Student Liaison Committee (DLSC), he prides himself on his connections with alumni, professors, and classmates while also coordinating communication between Dean Hritcko and fellow classmates. Most proud of the relationships he’s built during his time at UConn, Ben also serves as a peer advisor for pre-professional students, mentoring students first starting out in the program who are eager to build connections of their own.   

    Ben isn’t just a leader in the School – he’s a leader on the field. A lifelong lacrosse player, Ben was initially drawn to the sport because of its sense of family. “What initially drew me to the sport was the camaraderie – there’s something about the way a team comes together and relies on each other that really interests me.” When Ben started playing lacrosse at six years old, he had no idea where it would take him. But now, as president of the Men’s Club Lacrosse Team, he’s making his six-year-old self proud. From managing league regulations to navigating brand deals, Ben handles all the logistical components of the team. His favorite memory with the team has been their trip to New Orleans, where they had the opportunity to play against LSU, Texas Tech, and Tulane, all while finding time to explore Bourbon Street and the city’s culture and food.  

    Ben can’t pick just one favorite memory when it comes to the School of Pharmacy, though many of his best memories revolve around attending class and studying with a small, dedicated group of classmates and friends. It’s this close-knit community that provided him with support during his first semester in the Pharm.D. program. During this challenging transition, Ben leaned on his AZO community, connecting with older students and learning time management skills.  

    Ben on the lacrosse field (Louis Magnuson)

    When asked about balancing his time between academics and athletics, Ben emphasizes the connections he’s made above all else: “Everyone is interconnected in ways that you wouldn’t imagine.” Through these connections, Ben has formed two families – referring to his lacrosse family as “mom and dad” and his pharmacy family as “brother and sister.” Whether it’s pushing each other at practice, traveling for games, or spending time together off the field, Ben finds the friendships with his lacrosse team to be a huge source of support. This support, in turn, has helped him connect to his pharmacy family. With his class consisting of only around 70 students, Ben has forged meaningful relationships with his classmates who share similar goals. And when he does face difficulties, he takes advantage of the School’s support system, including the Student Educational Assistance (SEA) study resources, which have helped him stay on top of coursework while managing his commitments and participating in various study groups within the School.   

    Ben receives an award from Dean Hritcko (Spencer Sloan)

    Because Ben still has three more years as a Husky, he’s looking forward to more opportunities to expand his passions. He plans to use his knowledge and network to establish a presence in the pharmacy industry by seeking out internships and opportunities that will help him gain hands-on experience.

    He’s also excited about broadening his interests by taking a sign language class: “I’ve had an interest in it and thought it would be a fun and useful skill to learn.” Currently, Ben works for Hartford Healthcare in the emergency department, helping with patient medications and deliveries. In the future, he plans to explore the pharmacy industry’s manufacturing side. 

    As a leader in his many roles, Ben is no stranger to giving advice. When talking about the students in the School of Pharmacy and student-athletes, he emphasizes the importance of time management and building strong social networks: “Plan ahead, set priorities, and don’t be afraid to ask for help when needed.” Whether it’s teammates, classmates, or mentors, having a solid support system can make all the difference in staying motivated and feeling connected. To be successful, Ben surrounds himself with people who inspire and challenge him. 

    “Surround yourself with people who push you to succeed both on and off the field.” – Ben

    From energizing the crowds at Gampel to setting records and shooting high, to being both a player and president of a team, these students – past, present, and future – continue to make UConn’s School of Pharmacy proud, truly embodying their blue blood in academics and athletics   

      

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI China: Japanese fishing vessel expelled for unlawfully entering waters of China’s Diaoyu Dao

    Source: China State Council Information Office

    A China Coast Guard (CCG) spokesperson on Sunday said that a Japanese fishing vessel had been expelled for unlawfully entering into the territorial waters of China’s Diaoyu Dao.

    The CCG has taken necessary control measures in accordance with the law, issued warnings and drove the Japanese fishing vessel away after it illegally entered the waters between Saturday and Sunday, according to spokesperson Liu Dejun.

    Emphasizing that Diaoyu Dao and its affiliated islands are China’s inherent territory, Liu urged the Japanese side to immediately cease all illegal activities in these waters.

    The CCG will continue to carry out law enforcement operations in the territorial waters of Diaoyu Dao to safeguard China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, he added. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: UK and US hit major milestone in development of hypersonic weapons

    Source: United Kingdom – Government Statements

    Press release

    UK and US hit major milestone in development of hypersonic weapons

    UK hypersonic research, which could see weapons travelling at several thousand miles per hour, has reached a landmark moment after successful completion of a major testing programme.

    Hypersonic engine being tested

    • UK scientists complete major hypersonic propulsion test, enabled by close collaboration between UK government, industry and US government.
    • The propulsion system is set to power a cutting-edge hypersonic cruise missile concept.
    • 233 test runs were carried out at a number of hypersonic speeds, marking a critical step forward in UK Defence capabilities.

    This research aims to support delivery of a hypersonic weapon technology demonstrator by 2030 through the MOD’s Team Hypersonics (UK) programme. This will provide a transformational capability that delivers operational advantage for the future UK armed forces.

    National security is a foundation of this government’s Plan for Change and today’s news comes after the Prime Minister announced the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War. 

    A joint team led by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) together with the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and supported by industry partners including UK SME Gas Dynamics Ltd, carried out 233 successful static test runs at the NASA Langley Research Centre in Virginia, USA.

    This extensive testing was part of the UK’s Hypersonic Weapons Programme, and took place over six weeks involving real-time data analysis to refine design aspects and boost propulsive performance.

    The trial explored several design variations, ensuring the propulsion system’s readiness for future system design updates. The engine is poised to power a cutting-edge hypersonic cruise missile concept and successfully demonstrated the performance of the high-speed air-breathing engine – enabling greater ranges than a conventional rocket – advancing the UK’s hypersonic weapon capabilities.

    The tests spanned the full flight Mach number range from supersonic to hypersonic speeds, validating the robustness of the engine design and paving the way for future upgrades.

    Defence Secretary, John Healey MP said:

    We are living in a more dangerous world and it has never been more important for us to innovate and stay ahead of our adversaries, equipping our forces with the technologies of the future.

    This milestone moment on hypersonics research, supported by British scientists and British small businesses, demonstrates another crucial area where we are working in lockstep with the United States to bolster our Armed Forces and strengthen our deterrence.

    Dstl’s Chief Executive, Paul Hollinshead said:

    This milestone represents a critical advancement in the UK’s defence capabilities and reinforces our standing in the AUKUS hypersonic weapon development collaboration. The success of these tests highlights the UK’s commitment to technological leadership and innovation in this crucial area.

    Updates to this page

    Published 6 April 2025

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Woman-to-woman marriage in west Africa: a vanishing tradition of power and agency

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Bright Alozie, Assistant Professor, Portland State University

    Marriage in west Africa has played a central role in shaping aspects of society, and has evolved over time. While traditional heterosexual unions dominate discussions, a lesser-known but significant practice – woman-to-woman marriage – has existed for centuries.

    In my research, I examined this institution, which allows a woman to assume the role of a husband by marrying another woman. There’s evidence of woman-to-woman marriage in more than 40 societies across west Africa, including the Igbo of Nigeria, the Frafra of Ghana and the Dahomeans of present-day Benin.

    How it works is that a woman – often wealthy or of high status – pays a bride price and takes on a wife who is expected to bear children. A male relative or chosen partner, known as the genitor, fathers the children. The children will legally belong to the female husband and are considered part of her lineage. This reinforces kinship structures, or family ties within traditional communities and clans, vital to west African societies.

    Unlike romantic same-sex unions, these are social contracts. They aim to preserve lineage, secure inheritance, and enhance a woman’s economic and political agency.

    Female husbands gain significant control over property by assuming the role of head of household. This enables them to own and manage assets independently, a right typically reserved for men.

    Securing heirs through their wives ensures the continuation of their lineage and the inheritance of their property and status. It solidifies their long-term agency and influence within the community.

    The union also grants them more legal standing – they can enter into contracts, resolve disputes, and represent their family in legal matters, further empowering them in a patriarchal society.

    This all translates into considerable influence. Female husbands can hold positions of authority, and command respect. They challenge traditional gender roles.

    Colonial distortions and modern misconceptions have obscured the meaning and function of this historically prevalent practice. Despite its important role, it has declined over time. With growing stigma, the old customs have become less common.

    My research seeks to underscore the historical value of woman-to-woman marriage. It offers a lens for understanding the complexities of African gender systems, female agency and social structures.

    Tradition rooted in kinship and social stability

    Using a combination of oral interviews, archival research and literature reviews, I found that there are various scenarios in which woman-to-woman marriage is practised in west Africa.

    In Okrika, in Nigeria’s Rivers State, for example, I was told how a married woman who has no male child in her family is allowed to marry a woman so that a male child can be born into the family. If her marriage does not produce a male child and she has money, the culture allows her to marry more than one wife as long as she can take care of them and the union can produce a male child to carry the name of her family.

    In my interview with Chief Nkemjirika Njoku, of the Mbaise Igbo in Nigeria, he described another scenario. He explained that if a man died without male heirs, his daughters could pay a bride price for a woman to bear children in his name. This ensured his lineage did not disappear.

    Similarly, among the Frafra people of Ghana one study shows how:

    a wealthy woman may marry one or more women for her husband by providing the bridewealth. These women bear children in her name in the event of her being childless or to offer extra labour.

    These accounts illustrate how marriage and kinship complement each other and how this practice provided women with economic influence and social mobility, often rivalling men’s.

    Colonial disruptions and modern challenges

    Despite the tradition’s important role, during the 19th century European colonial officials and Christian missionaries misunderstood and condemned the practice.

    Viewing it through a Victorian moral framework – rigid and conservative values of 19th-century Britain which emphasised strict gender roles, sexual restraint and moral purity – they mistakenly equated it with homosexuality and sought to outlaw it. For instance, in 1882 British colonial authorities in Ghana criminalised same-sex relations. These laws included woman-to-woman marriages, despite their deeply rooted cultural significance.

    The practice persisted in various forms, however, but did become less prevalent.

    In some cases, the unions were subtly restructured to avoid colonial scrutiny. Participants framed them more as business partnerships or familial arrangements rather than marriages. For instance, many prominent traders would use the unions to expand their wealth and business networks. Among the Hausa-Fulani textile traders of the Sokoto Caliphate, for example, a wealthy widow could marry a woman to manage her trade. This ensured that children born within the union inherited her wealth.

    Subverting or reinforcing patriarchy?

    Today, woman-to-woman marriage remains misunderstood. Some argue it reinforces patriarchal structures, while others conflate it with lesbian relationships.

    The growing influence of Christianity and Islam has led to its stigmatisation. Meanwhile modern legal systems fail to recognise the unions, leaving female husbands and their children vulnerable in inheritance disputes.

    Advancements in reproductive technology provide alternative means for childbearing, reducing the need for these marriages.

    In my opinion, though, this tradition remains a valuable and powerful system. It highlights the ingenuity of African societies in creating alternative structures of power, kinship and economic security – especially for women.

    Based on my research I concluded that woman-to-woman marriage is an example of flexible African gender constructs. Gender is not strictly tied to biological sex but to social roles and responsibilities. African societies have creatively adapted marriage and kinship to meet economic and social needs.

    More than a marriage practice, woman-marriage has been an assertion of female agency, an economic strategy, and a means of preserving lineage.

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

    – ref. Woman-to-woman marriage in west Africa: a vanishing tradition of power and agency – https://theconversation.com/woman-to-woman-marriage-in-west-africa-a-vanishing-tradition-of-power-and-agency-251919

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Do African MPs reflect the people who vote for them? We studied 17 countries to find out

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Robert Mattes, Professor in Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, and Adjunct Professor in the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town, University of Strathclyde

    By the end of 2025, 42 African countries will have held national elections in the previous 24 months. But do these elections produce parliaments that accurately reflect the societies they serve? Aside from studies of women in Africa’s legislatures, there is surprisingly little information about this important issue.

    Elected parliaments are the essence of representative democracy. Law makers are more likely to know what voters need and want if they are alike in age, gender, language, education or occupation.

    As scholars of African politics, we wanted to find out if African legislators actually represented their voters. We compared the results of two separate surveys conducted between 2009 and 2012 across the same 17 African countries.

    The first comes from the African Legislatures Project. This interviewed 823 elected representatives (MPs). The second was produced by Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network.

    Our study found wide gaps between citizens and their representatives in some respects, but a high degree of similarity in others.

    Compared to ordinary African citizens, African legislators possess much higher levels of education. They are also far more likely to be older, male and to come from professional or business backgrounds. Yet the overall profile of legislators closely matches that of the voters in terms of ethnicity and religion.

    Religion and ethnicity

    One of the most striking findings is the match between the religious, language and ethnic make-up of African legislatures and voters.

    Across all 17 countries, the proportion of law makers who are either Muslim or Christian closely resembles their electorates. They are also similar at the level of religious denomination (for example Catholic, Methodist or Pentecostal).

    Legislatures closely mirror the languages spoken by citizens in their countries. In some countries the overlap is very high. In Lesotho, for example, almost all MPs and citizens speak the same language (Sesotho). In Zimbabwe, the distribution of Shona and Ndebele speaking MPs is much the same as it is for the public.

    There’s less overlap in Tanzania (where many more parliamentarians point to Swahili as their home language than Kisukuma, which most citizens speak). And in Namibia and South Africa, most MPs claim English as their home language rather than the otherwise dominant Oshiwambo or Zulu, respectively.

    Many scholars argue that proportional representation voting systems (where people vote for party lists, rather than candidates) are necessary to reflect ethnic diversity. Our findings demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case. We found high levels of correspondence in diverse societies that elect members from “first past the post” single member districts, such as Zimbabwe, Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. This is because political parties will strategically select candidates who reflect the religious and ethnic identities of specific constituencies so that candidates are seen as “one of us”.

    Where presented with a choice between candidates of differing religious or ethnic backgrounds, voters will tend to prefer the one similar to them. They feel that candidates who come from their area, or speak their language, are more likely to understand their needs and preferences.

    Education and occupation

    Our study also established that African elections produce legislatures that are older, more male, far more educated and wealthier than their voters.

    While only 9% of citizens possessed a university degree across these 17 countries in the years under review, 58% of MPs had one. In Uganda, this figure climbed to 90%: a substantial educational disparity.

    Occupational backgrounds also reveal a pronounced skew. A large proportion of parliamentarians come from business (24%) or professional (27%) sectors. Average citizens are likely to be blue collar or agricultural workers.

    Gender and age

    Despite making up roughly 50% of African societies, just 18% of the parliamentarians we interviewed were women.

    Proportional representation voting systems do increase gender balance. This shows in Mozambique (40% of parliamentarians are female), Namibia (35%) and South Africa (28%). But other mechanisms such as gender quotas in the governing party nomination process (Tanzania, 32%), or reserved seats (Uganda, 27%), also increase women’s representation.

    Finally, elected legislatures are almost always older than their electorate. But African legislators appear to be especially venerable. While the median age of the over-18 citizen population across these 17 societies is 33, the median age of our sample of MPs was 53. This raises questions about the ability of older legislators to fully understand and address the concerns of younger generations.

    Are parliamentarians an unaccountable ‘power elite’?

    We also wondered whether the social and economic advantages provided by higher education and experience in business and the professions might keep MPs in power, and out of touch with the needs of citizens.

    Two factors appear to work against this outcome.

    First, we examined potential markers of status and influence: university education; high-status occupational background; and previously held positions in party leadership, national government, or local government. It turns out that the average MP had only accumulated two of these things.

    Second, consistent with other studies of African legislatures that find surprising levels of turnover of individual parliamentarians, the typical law maker in our surveys had been in office for just five years. Whatever status or privilege they carry with them into the legislative chamber does not guarantee a long stay.

    What can we learn from this?

    These results provide some insights for the continent’s next election season.

    Most ruling parties were humbled at the polls in 2024, and several lost their majority in parliament (Botswana, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal and South Africa). The trend of high legislator turnover seems likely to continue.

    Thus, newly elected parliamentarians are unlikely to form a coherent “power elite”. The real challenge seems to be to harness the impressive skills African MPs bring to their jobs to enable them to play a more meaningful role in writing laws and holding their executives to account.

    Robert Mattes is co-founder and Senior Advisor to Afrobarometer.

    Matthias Krönke is affiliated with Afrobarometer.

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

    – ref. Do African MPs reflect the people who vote for them? We studied 17 countries to find out – https://theconversation.com/do-african-mps-reflect-the-people-who-vote-for-them-we-studied-17-countries-to-find-out-252055

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Government-branded merchandise and away days banned

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

    Press release

    Government-branded merchandise and away days banned

    Spending taxpayer money on unnecessary branded merchandise and staff ‘away days’ will be banned in the latest crackdown on wasteful spending across departments

    • Government doing away with costly away days and pricy merchandise
    • Every pound of taxpayer money targeted on securing Britain’s future through the Plan for Change, delivering security for working people and renewal for our country
    • Part of crackdown on wasteful spending in government in favour of a more productive and agile state

    Spending taxpayer money on unnecessary branded merchandise and staff ‘away days’ will be banned in the latest crackdown on wasteful spending across departments.

    Staff training and development are key to boosting productivity, but officials will now be instructed to hold training and team-building exercises and ‘away days’ in government buildings that are available for free, instead of hiring external venues.  

    Thousands of pounds have also been spent in recent years on goods branded with department logos or slogans—including mugs, jumpers, water bottles, and even fidget cubes. 

    Such spending will be banned, focusing funding where it matters to working people such as rebuilding the NHS and strengthening our borders.

    Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden MP, said:

    By cutting wasteful spending we can target resources at frontline public services with more teachers, extra hospital appointments and police back on the beat.

    We will use taxpayers’ money to deliver our Plan for Change, kick-starting economic growth, rebuilding the NHS and strengthening our borders.

    The Cabinet Office has set out requirements for all departments to review their policies on procuring corporate-branded and non-essential merchandise, with a view to restricting future purchases. 

    These stricter rules will permit government merchandise only when essential for delivering the government’s agenda, for example, in overseas trade and diplomacy, to promote growth.

    Further measures will require departments to ensure that external venues for away days are only used when space in government buildings is unavailable.  

    This announcement builds on plans to significantly reduce the approximately 20,000 government credit cards in circulation. Last week, all departments and their public bodies were instructed to freeze their cards, with cardholders required to reapply under tighter new guidelines.

    Updates to this page

    Published 6 April 2025

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Celebrating the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –

    The International Day of Sport for Development and Peace was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2013. The date of 6 April was chosen to commemorate the opening day of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

    The theme of this year’s celebration is aimed at combating stereotypes, promoting equal opportunities and ensuring inclusive sport for everyone, regardless of age, gender or nationality. Sport is an ideal means of promoting ideas of tolerance, solidarity, cooperation and social integration at the interpersonal, national and international levels, even though it has become overly politicized in recent years.

    The State University of Management congratulates the staff of the Department of Physical Education, the Department of Management in Healthcare and Sports Industry, as well as the Student Sports Club of the State University of Management and, of course, all students who defend the honor of the university at various competitions or simply play sports for their own pleasure on this international holiday. The sports facilities of the State University of Management are always open to you, to guests from other universities and to residents of the Vykhino-Zhulebino district. Always follow the rules, respect your opponents and take care of your health. May only victories accompany you!

    You can follow the schedule and results of all competitions in which our athletes participate in the VKontakte community of the Student Sports Club of the State University of Management.

    Subscribe to the TG channel “Our GUU” Date of publication: 04/06/2025

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Greenpeace Statement – ‘Anchor Rainforest Killer’ palm kernel protest continues in New Plymouth

    Source: Greenpeace

    Greenpeace activists remain on the roof of an Agrifeeds palm kernel storage warehouse in Port Taranaki despite police intervention to remove other protestors inside the facility.

    Two orangutans have attached a 70-metre banner reading ‘Anchor Rainforest Killer’ to the roof and have locked themselves to the building. They are now entering their tenth hour on the roof of the building.
    Greenpeace is also suing Fonterra for misleading claims on Anchor Butter packaging. The packaging claims that the butter is ‘100% New Zealand grass-fed’, however, a Fonterra dairy cow’s diet can be composed of up to 20% palm kernel – a product linked to rainforest destruction in Indonesia.
    From inside the Agrifeeds storage shed, Greenpeace spokesperson Sinéad Deighton-O’Flynn said, “Fonterra markets its Anchor butter as ‘grass-fed’, but this is a deception. Every year, dairy cows in New Zealand are fed almost two million tonnes of palm kernel imported from Southeast Asia.
    “Rainforests are being burned, peatlands are being drained, and rows of palm trees are being planted in their place to feed Fonterra’s oversized dairy herd.
    “This facility here in New Plymouth has been linked to illegal palm plantations in Indonesia, connecting Anchor butter and other Fonterra products with the destruction of lush rainforests and the wildlife that depend on them.
    “As more and more evidence emerges of New Zealand’s link to destructive palm kernel, Fonterra must ban the use of this blood-soaked animal feed on all their farms across Aotearoa.”
    In Taranaki, New Zealand – Greenpeace activists dressed as orangutans climbed onto the roof of Fonterra’s biggest palm kernel supplier, where they deployed a 500 square meter banner that reads ‘Anchor Rainforest Killer’. Meanwhile, three more activists inside the Agrifeeds facility locked themselves to pillars, stopping a ship from Indonesia carrying 30 thousand tonnes of palm kernel expeller from unloading. The Greenpeace activists are protesting against the use of palm kernel as cow feed on Fonterra farms due to the product’s links to illegal palm plantations and deforestation of paradise rainforests in Southeast Asia.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI China: China reports record daily number of rail passenger trips

    Source: China State Council Information Office 3

    China reported a total of 20.09 million railway passenger trips on Friday, a single-day record for the year to date, the country’s railway operator said on Saturday.

    The latest high of 2025 was seen on Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, which was also the first day of a national three-day holiday.

    On Saturday, China’s national railway system is expected to handle 13.55 million passenger trips, facilitated by an additional 622 scheduled passenger trains, according to China State Railway Group Co., Ltd..

    On the Xi’an-Chengdu high-speed railway, special flower-viewing train services — similar to bus services — have been organized to facilitate sightseers traveling to scenic regions such as Han Zhong, Cheng Gu and Yang Xian, China Railway Xi’an Group Co., Ltd. said.

    Traditionally a time during which Chinese people pay tribute to the dead and worship their ancestors, the three-day Qingming holiday also provides a short break for Chinese residents to take spring outings or go sightseeing.

    Earlier this week, China Railway said that the travel rush during the holiday is set to span a total of five days, and that it expects 84.5 million passenger trips to be made from April 3 to 7, averaging 16.9 million trips each day. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Repeat drink driver caught by police in St Helens

    Source: New South Wales Community and Justice

    Repeat drink driver caught by police in St Helens

    Sunday, 6 April 2025 – 1:51 pm.

    A 29-year-old Warrane man has been apprehended and charged with drink driving and other serious traffic charges for the third time in Northern Tasmania.
    Just after midnight, police officers from St Helens apprehended the man after he allegedly attempted to evade officers conducting a random breath test.
    Inspector Luke Manhood said the man reportedly fled on foot before being caught by officers and subsequently returning a reading of 0.095.
    “He has been charged with evading police, exceeding 0.05, and driving whilst disqualified, and his vehicle has been clamped for 28 days.
    “This is the third time in recent months the man has been apprehended for similar offences on Tasmania’s East Coast.
    “On 31 December 2024, the man was apprehended by police on the Esk Highway, Fingal, where he returned a reading of 0.122 and was charged with evading police, stating a false name, speeding, driving with a suspended licence, and exceeding 0.05.
    “Then on 25 January 2025, he was intercepted by St Helens Police, where he returned a reading of 0.088, was charged with exceeding 0.05 and driving with a suspended licence.
    “This type of dangerous and repeat behaviour is unacceptable and places the community at serious risk.
    “This pattern of behaviour may result in significant legal consequences,” said Mr Manhood.
    “We remain committed to road safety and want everyone to get home safely.
    “Our message is simple – if you drink and drive, it’s only a matter of time before you get caught. We could be anywhere, at any time,” Mr Manhood added.
    Anyone who witnesses dangerous driving or suspects someone may be driving under the influence is urged to contact police on 131 444, or Triple Zero (000) in an emergency.

    MIL OSI News –