The founding members of Black Sabbath were awarded the Freedom of the City of Birmingham at a ceremony in the Council House on Saturday.
At the ceremony, the original band members of Terence “Geezer” Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bill Ward were presented with their Freedom of the City scrolls and medals by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Councillor Zafar Iqbal.
The Freedom of the City honour is the one of the oldest traditional ceremonies in the country and recognises people’s exceptional service to the city.
This honour recognises Black Sabbath’s significance to the cultural and musical identity of Birmingham, their strong association with the city and continued influence as pioneers of heavy metal in both Birmingham and beyond.
As part of the Freedom of the City, each band member received the title of Honorary Freeman and an engraving of their names on the Freedom of the City marble board was also unveiled at the ceremony.
The scrolls were produced by local company Hilton Studios and the medals were produced by Jewellery Quarter based business Fattorini.
The medal design was created by competition winner Toby Williams, a student studying in the School of Jewellery at Birmingham City University.
Toby’s winning design was inspired by the themes of industry and community, reflecting the people of Birmingham
Black Sabbath formed in Aston in 1968, going on to create eight albums and selling over 75 million albums worldwide. They are considered pioneers of the heavy metal genre and are one of the most commercially successful heavy metal bands.
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, awarded a Lifetime Ivor Novello Songwriting Award in 2015 and were presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
Speaking on receipt of the award, Terence “Geezer” Butler said: “This is a great working class city, and we’re all working class, from Aston. We weren’t given a chance when we started out, but Birmingham has always been behind us. People used to make fun of our accents, but we’re all proud Birmingham people and we love this city. It’s one of the greatest cities ever, it’s given the world so much and we’re proud to be here.”
Tony Iommi added: “It’s a great thing to receive. Birmingham is our home, and we love what Birmingham has done for us. We’ve got the bridge and the bench, things like that. We’re very grateful.”
Ozzy Osbourne said: “I first put an advert in a music store in town. If these guys hadn’t come to my door, I wouldn’t be sitting here now. It seems to have flown by so quickly. It’s amazing. I think about my dad, who went into debt to buy me a microphone. If only he could be here now. I think he would be very proud. I’m a Brummie and I always will be a Brummie. Birmingham Forever!”
Bill Ward added: “It’s completely overwhelming. I’m so proud to be an Astonian. That’s where I got my attitude. It was a blessed – and cursed! – to meet Tony when I was 15, and I’m so proud that I got to know Geezer and Ozzy. They’re my brothers. I love them very much and we love our city very much.”
The engravings in the Council House building joins Black Sabbath bridge on Broad Street as a permanent tribute to the band and their accomplishments.
Cllr Sharon Thompson, Deputy Leader of the city council said “From the streets of Aston to global success, the ceremony has been a fitting celebration of their achievements and connection to our city, showcasing the band’s incredible career as pioneers of heavy metal and recognising their continued legacy as part of Birmingham’s rich musical identity.
Black Sabbath are global ambassadors of our city, and their music continues to inspire musicians across the world, so it has been wonderful to recognise the band with this honour.”
Councillor Zafar Iqbal, Lord Mayor of Birmingham: “It is a pleasure to pronounce Terence “Geezer” Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bill Ward as Freemen of the City of Birmingham.
The Freedom of the City is one of the oldest civic honours and given in recognition of exceptional service to Birmingham.
Conferring these honours on Black Sabbath’s founding members, who are proud Brummies, is a fitting tribute to the band, marking their importance to Birmingham’s cultural landscape and the pride of our city as their hometown.
Professor David Mba, Vice Chancellor, at Birmingham City University, said: “We’re proud that our University – and particularly the iconic School of Jewellery – has played such an instrumental role in this special recognition of a very special band.
“The creation of these remarkable medals is a golden demonstration of how BCU – as rooted in Birmingham as Black Sabbath themselves – continues to answer the call of the city, standing alongside willing partners like the City Council.
“Congratulations to Ozzy, Geezer, Tony and Bill. We hold great pride in your peerless representation of Birmingham on a global stage.”
Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –
On June 27, the Graduation Ceremony of the students of the Pre-University of the State University of Management took place in the concert hall of the State University of Management.
Vice-Rector of the State University of Management Dmitry Bryukhanov congratulated the students on completing their studies and wished them successful admission to the university.
“Thank you to the parents, grandparents, and, of course, the teachers who helped the children not only to master scientific knowledge, but also to become worthy people. Over the years, GUU has become your home. All this would not have been possible without the help of teachers under the sensitive guidance of Marina Yuryevna. The admission campaign began on June 20, just the day before GUU earned a high place in the National Employment Ranking. We hope that on September 1 you will become students of the first management university in the country. See you at GUU,” concluded Dmitry Bryukhanov.
Also, together with the director of the Pre-University of the State University of Management, Marina Grigorieva, the vice-rector presented gold medals to 11 graduates.
Another 13 students received silver medals, and three students wrote the Unified State Exam for 100 points. In total, 114 students graduated from the Pre-University this year.
In addition, Marina Yuryevna presented letters of gratitude to the parents of graduates.
“Thank you very much for supporting us these two years, for your wonderful children and for always being there. Graduation from Pre-University is just the beginning. There is still admission ahead, higher education and so on. Dear children, may your road to success be straight and all your dreams, even the most incredible ones, come true,” Marina Yuryevna wished.
In turn, the parents prepared a video for the song “Mother Earth,” and 15 pairs of graduates performed a complex choreographic number, full of grace and sadness.
Let us recall that the Pre-University of the State University of Management began its work in 2020. Training is provided free of charge in three profiles: socio-economic, humanitarian and technical (IT-focused).
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.
Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –
On June 27, the State University of Management held the opening of the first stream of “University Shifts” in 2025.
The opening was attended by the Vice-Rector of the State University of Management Pavel Pavlovsky, who told the children about the upcoming events and wished them to get the most out of this trip.
Over the course of ten days, 46 children of special military operation participants from Vologda will undergo a rich educational program.
The children will have a fascinating introduction to Moscow: they will visit the iconic VDNKh, take a sightseeing tour of the capital and immerse themselves in history at the Museum of the Defense of Moscow.
As part of the career guidance block, participants will have meetings with GUU teachers, master classes from leading experts and practical acquaintance with modern professions.
“University Shifts” is a project that helps schoolchildren and students see the structure of universities from the inside and get acquainted with the educational programs and opportunities of higher education institutions.
Let us recall that the State University of Management has been participating in the project from the very beginning.
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.
Once asbestos enters the lungs, it doesn’t leave. Its sharp, microscopic fibres scar tissues, trigger inflammation and can cause deadly diseases like mesothelioma, lung cancer and laryngeal cancer. That’s why over 60 countries have banned it – and why the US mostly phased it out.
In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) moved to ban all industrial uses. But on June 17, the agency said it would revisit the Biden‑era ban.
Asbestos is a naturally occurring silicate mineral made of thin, fibrous crystals. It is fire-resistant, durable, lightweight, flexible and insulating. This unique blend of properties resulted in its widespread use over millennia. Indeed, asbestos fibres have been found woven into pottery and textiles from 2500BC.
Its resistance to friction and electricity made it desirable during the Industrial Revolution for use in boilers and steam engines. In the 20th century, the useful mix of physical properties resulted in asbestos becoming ubiquitous in the construction and automotive industries, peaking in the 1970s.
Although the properties of asbestos at the macroscopic level are beneficial, at the microscopic level it’s anything but. When dust from asbestos (0.1 to tens of microns) is inhaled, it deposits throughout the respiratory system, causing inflammation and scarring of lung tissue.
While the adverse health effects associated with asbestos exposure were observed in ancient Rome, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the full extent of harm was realised. Specifically, asbestos exposure is linked to numerous respiratory diseases, including mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis.
It took a long time for people to understand how dangerous asbestos really is. The main reason is that the illnesses it causes often don’t show up for decades. This long delay makes it very hard to link exposure to the disease it causes.
Making this connection is also made more difficult when those most familiar with it, including manufacturers such as Johns-Manville and industry groups such as the Asbestos Information Association (AIA) were actively denying the connection, and suppressing reports demonstrating the link.
By the 1970s, the volume of evidence showing the harms of asbestos had become overwhelming. The AIA evolved its argument, claiming that the practices in the industry had changed and that the risks were from a bygone era “when the dust control equipment in use was not as efficient or as sophisticated”. Although the association never explicitly admitted that asbestos caused harm.
Since it can take decades for the health effects of asbestos exposure to fully manifest, the full extent of the damage caused by asbestos exposure from the 1970s and onward, an era where the dust control equipment was claimed to be “efficient and sophisticated”.
The Asbestos Information Association, once a key industry group promoting the safe use of asbestos, quietly disbanded in the early 2000s as litigation and public health evidence mounted.
History of asbestos.
What type of asbestos is the US considering unbanning?
The EPA is considering unbanning chrysotile asbestos, also called white asbestos. This type of asbestos is often used in things like brake pads, gaskets and industrial equipment. In March 2024 the EPA banned it, stopping new uses and imports. The ban also included a gradual phase-out plan.
Who is pushing for the unbanning and why now?
From the outset, industry groups such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) raised concerns about the EPA’s ban, warning that “a prohibition of an estimated 52% of annual production volume … that rapidly, could have substantial supply chain impacts”, particularly if manufacturers were bound by existing contracts or chose to cease production entirely.
According to former ACC employee and current senior official in EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Lynn Ann Dekleva, they want to consider if the ban “went beyond what is necessary to eliminate the unreasonable risk and whether alternative measures — such as requiring permanent workplace protection measures – would eliminate the unreasonable risk”.
What industries still want to use this type of asbestos?
Each year, around 40,000 deaths in the US and about 5,000 in the UK are attributed to asbestos exposure. If lifted, it’s possible that the number in the US could increase over the coming decades while those in the UK will continue to fall.
Does this mean asbestos could make a comeback elsewhere too?
Unlikely. While global consensus moves toward stricter regulation, the US now finds itself at a crossroads, between scientific evidence and pressure from industry.
Allen Haddrell 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.
Nato leaders agreed to ramp up defence spending to 5% of their countries’ economic output by 2035 at a summit in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 25. US president Donald Trump, who has spent months saying Europe should take more responsibility for its own security, described the pledge as “a monumental win for the US” and a “big win” for western civilisation.
A few months earlier, in March, the EU also launched its long-awaited white paper on defence. This provides a blueprint for improving Europe’s readiness to respond to military threats by 2030. On top of the fact that global military spending has surged in the past ten years, these developments indicate that the world’s largest nations now prioritise military over economic diplomacy.
One of the main ideas behind military diplomacy is that increased defence spending acts as a deterrent to future conflicts. The nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union during the cold war provides some support for this argument. The prospect of mutual destruction was so great that it acted as a deterrent to nuclear war.
But is increased defence spending really the necessary price for greater peace and prosperity? My research on interactions between firms, geopolitics and the political economy of defence indicates that this is no “big win” for society or economic productivity.
Deterrence requires a level of brinkmanship if it is to work. But as American economist Thomas Schelling pointed out in his 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, the problem with brinkmanship is that it relies on deliberately allowing a situation to get somewhat out of hand, with the intention of forcing the other party to back down.
This can result in strategic blunders. Efforts by the former US president, Richard Nixon, to engineer such a situation in 1969 by threatening to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam failed to gain credibility with the Soviets and North Vietnamese. This undoubtedly helped convince North Vietnam that it could survive the war and locked the US into a much longer conflict.
The recent confrontation between Israel and Iran also showed that brinkmanship can produce situations where there are significant casualties and no clear long-term resolution. Iran has long recognised that keeping itself near the threshold of nuclear weapons capability would offer a deterrent against external threats.
But this strategy created many opportunities for error. Israel claimed that Iran was too close to building a nuclear weapon and, alongside the US, launched strikes that they say inflicted significant damage on Iranian nuclear enrichment capabilities and military leadership.
Beyond this, it is unclear just how much military spending is needed to deter aggression. Nato allies have now committed to a big increase in defence spending – thanks largely to pressure from Trump.
However, even Nato’s previous objective that countries commit 2% of their national income to defence has proved unattractive for many governments. This has even been the case in post-conflict areas such as the Balkans, where Nato has had a heavy involvement.
A costly alternative
Boosting defence spending falls short on delivering economic prosperity, too. Analysing US military spending in the Vietnam war, economist Les Fishman noted in 1967 that military diplomacy was far more costly than its economic equivalent.
Military production requires continuously high levels of investment to maintain technological progress. This sucks public investment from other parts of the economy.
That’s not to say defence spending has an entirely negative effect on the economy. Studies have found evidence that US federal funding of military research and development results in significant increases in private business research in sectors such as chemicals and aerospace.
And, over the past decade, the value of venture capital deals in the US defence industry has grown 18-fold. This far outstrips sectors such as energy and healthcare. But such investment in military-related research and development is also often acknowledged as inefficient and not necessarily the best way to boost productivity.
Fishman pointed out that the Marshall Plan, which provided substantial economic aid to western Europe after the second world war, had a far higher return for the US.
Economic stabilisation kept the Soviet Union at bay for relatively small outlay compared to the Vietnam war, where casualties were of such a magnitude that it made any cost-benefit analysis meaningless.
Boosting defence spending also represents a lost opportunity to invest in more socially beneficial projects. This will worsen the climate crisis.
According to a study shared with the Guardian in May, the initial rearmament planned by Nato alone could have increased greenhouse gas emissions by almost 200 million tonnes a year. The expanded defence commitment will only increase this further.
Unlike defence, where the repurposing of civilian technologies for military uses carries a cost to society, many green investments involve beneficial substitutions that reduce the cost of a green transition.
The substitution of conventional fossil fuel heating and transport systems with heat pumps and electric vehicles, for example, is far more socially beneficial than repurposing civilian satellites for missile systems.
A final point is that military diplomacy is itself geopolitically destabilising. US efforts to contain communism in Asia during the 1950s and 1960s are a good example. Not only did such efforts see China align its trade with other communist states, it also ensured that self-reliance became a cornerstone of China’s economic strategy.
This all suggests that the current drive for deterrence-based military spending carries with it a huge cost for society that could ultimately prove economically wasteful and geopolitically destabilising.
Damian Tobin 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.
Nato leaders agreed to ramp up defence spending to 5% of their countries’ economic output by 2035 at a summit in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 25. US president Donald Trump, who has spent months saying Europe should take more responsibility for its own security, described the pledge as “a monumental win for the US” and a “big win” for western civilisation.
A few months earlier, in March, the EU also launched its long-awaited white paper on defence. This provides a blueprint for improving Europe’s readiness to respond to military threats by 2030. On top of the fact that global military spending has surged in the past ten years, these developments indicate that the world’s largest nations now prioritise military over economic diplomacy.
One of the main ideas behind military diplomacy is that increased defence spending acts as a deterrent to future conflicts. The nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union during the cold war provides some support for this argument. The prospect of mutual destruction was so great that it acted as a deterrent to nuclear war.
But is increased defence spending really the necessary price for greater peace and prosperity? My research on interactions between firms, geopolitics and the political economy of defence indicates that this is no “big win” for society or economic productivity.
Deterrence requires a level of brinkmanship if it is to work. But as American economist Thomas Schelling pointed out in his 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, the problem with brinkmanship is that it relies on deliberately allowing a situation to get somewhat out of hand, with the intention of forcing the other party to back down.
This can result in strategic blunders. Efforts by the former US president, Richard Nixon, to engineer such a situation in 1969 by threatening to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam failed to gain credibility with the Soviets and North Vietnamese. This undoubtedly helped convince North Vietnam that it could survive the war and locked the US into a much longer conflict.
The recent confrontation between Israel and Iran also showed that brinkmanship can produce situations where there are significant casualties and no clear long-term resolution. Iran has long recognised that keeping itself near the threshold of nuclear weapons capability would offer a deterrent against external threats.
But this strategy created many opportunities for error. Israel claimed that Iran was too close to building a nuclear weapon and, alongside the US, launched strikes that they say inflicted significant damage on Iranian nuclear enrichment capabilities and military leadership.
Beyond this, it is unclear just how much military spending is needed to deter aggression. Nato allies have now committed to a big increase in defence spending – thanks largely to pressure from Trump.
However, even Nato’s previous objective that countries commit 2% of their national income to defence has proved unattractive for many governments. This has even been the case in post-conflict areas such as the Balkans, where Nato has had a heavy involvement.
A costly alternative
Boosting defence spending falls short on delivering economic prosperity, too. Analysing US military spending in the Vietnam war, economist Les Fishman noted in 1967 that military diplomacy was far more costly than its economic equivalent.
Military production requires continuously high levels of investment to maintain technological progress. This sucks public investment from other parts of the economy.
That’s not to say defence spending has an entirely negative effect on the economy. Studies have found evidence that US federal funding of military research and development results in significant increases in private business research in sectors such as chemicals and aerospace.
And, over the past decade, the value of venture capital deals in the US defence industry has grown 18-fold. This far outstrips sectors such as energy and healthcare. But such investment in military-related research and development is also often acknowledged as inefficient and not necessarily the best way to boost productivity.
Fishman pointed out that the Marshall Plan, which provided substantial economic aid to western Europe after the second world war, had a far higher return for the US.
Economic stabilisation kept the Soviet Union at bay for relatively small outlay compared to the Vietnam war, where casualties were of such a magnitude that it made any cost-benefit analysis meaningless.
Boosting defence spending also represents a lost opportunity to invest in more socially beneficial projects. This will worsen the climate crisis.
According to a study shared with the Guardian in May, the initial rearmament planned by Nato alone could have increased greenhouse gas emissions by almost 200 million tonnes a year. The expanded defence commitment will only increase this further.
Unlike defence, where the repurposing of civilian technologies for military uses carries a cost to society, many green investments involve beneficial substitutions that reduce the cost of a green transition.
The substitution of conventional fossil fuel heating and transport systems with heat pumps and electric vehicles, for example, is far more socially beneficial than repurposing civilian satellites for missile systems.
A final point is that military diplomacy is itself geopolitically destabilising. US efforts to contain communism in Asia during the 1950s and 1960s are a good example. Not only did such efforts see China align its trade with other communist states, it also ensured that self-reliance became a cornerstone of China’s economic strategy.
This all suggests that the current drive for deterrence-based military spending carries with it a huge cost for society that could ultimately prove economically wasteful and geopolitically destabilising.
Damian Tobin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The founding members of Black Sabbath were awarded the Freedom of the City of Birmingham at a ceremony in the Council House on Saturday.
At the ceremony, the original band members of Terence “Geezer” Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bill Ward were presented with their Freedom of the City scrolls and medals by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Councillor Zafar Iqbal.
The Freedom of the City honour is the one of the oldest traditional ceremonies in the country and recognises people’s exceptional service to the city.
This honour recognises Black Sabbath’s significance to the cultural and musical identity of Birmingham, their strong association with the city and continued influence as pioneers of heavy metal in both Birmingham and beyond.
As part of the Freedom of the City, each band member received the title of Honorary Freeman and an engraving of their names on the Freedom of the City marble board was also unveiled at the ceremony.
The scrolls were produced by local company Hilton Studios and the medals were produced by Jewellery Quarter based business Fattorini.
The medal design was created by competition winner Toby Williams, a student studying in the School of Jewellery at Birmingham City University.
Toby’s winning design was inspired by the themes of industry and community, reflecting the people of Birmingham
Black Sabbath formed in Aston in 1968, going on to create eight albums and selling over 75 million albums worldwide. They are considered pioneers of the heavy metal genre and are one of the most commercially successful heavy metal bands.
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, awarded a Lifetime Ivor Novello Songwriting Award in 2015 and were presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
Speaking on receipt of the award, Terence “Geezer” Butler said: “This is a great working class city, and we’re all working class, from Aston. We weren’t given a chance when we started out, but Birmingham has always been behind us. People used to make fun of our accents, but we’re all proud Birmingham people and we love this city. It’s one of the greatest cities ever, it’s given the world so much and we’re proud to be here.”
Tony Iommi added: “It’s a great thing to receive. Birmingham is our home, and we love what Birmingham has done for us. We’ve got the bridge and the bench, things like that. We’re very grateful.”
Ozzy Osbourne said: “I first put an advert in a music store in town. If these guys hadn’t come to my door, I wouldn’t be sitting here now. It seems to have flown by so quickly. It’s amazing. I think about my dad, who went into debt to buy me a microphone. If only he could be here now. I think he would be very proud. I’m a Brummie and I always will be a Brummie. Birmingham Forever!”
Bill Ward added: “It’s completely overwhelming. I’m so proud to be an Astonian. That’s where I got my attitude. It was a blessed – and cursed! – to meet Tony when I was 15, and I’m so proud that I got to know Geezer and Ozzy. They’re my brothers. I love them very much and we love our city very much.”
The engravings in the Council House building joins Black Sabbath bridge on Broad Street as a permanent tribute to the band and their accomplishments.
Cllr Sharon Thompson, Deputy Leader of the city council said “From the streets of Aston to global success, the ceremony has been a fitting celebration of their achievements and connection to our city, showcasing the band’s incredible career as pioneers of heavy metal and recognising their continued legacy as part of Birmingham’s rich musical identity.
Black Sabbath are global ambassadors of our city, and their music continues to inspire musicians across the world, so it has been wonderful to recognise the band with this honour.”
Councillor Zafar Iqbal, Lord Mayor of Birmingham: “It is a pleasure to pronounce Terence “Geezer” Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bill Ward as Freemen of the City of Birmingham.
The Freedom of the City is one of the oldest civic honours and given in recognition of exceptional service to Birmingham.
Conferring these honours on Black Sabbath’s founding members, who are proud Brummies, is a fitting tribute to the band, marking their importance to Birmingham’s cultural landscape and the pride of our city as their hometown.
Professor David Mba, Vice Chancellor, at Birmingham City University, said: “We’re proud that our University – and particularly the iconic School of Jewellery – has played such an instrumental role in this special recognition of a very special band.
“The creation of these remarkable medals is a golden demonstration of how BCU – as rooted in Birmingham as Black Sabbath themselves – continues to answer the call of the city, standing alongside willing partners like the City Council.
“Congratulations to Ozzy, Geezer, Tony and Bill. We hold great pride in your peerless representation of Birmingham on a global stage.”
La Virgen de la Puerta behind a glass window at the pinnacle of the church.Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch
Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, is also claimed by the Peruvian people whom he served for over two decades as one of their own.
Then known as Robert Francis Prevost, he lived and worked in the cities of Trujillo and Chiclayo in northern Peru. In Chiclayo he served as bishop from 2015-2023. Trujillo is a few hours south of Chiclayo, where the pope lived for a decade.
His ministry there is particularly exciting to me because I also lived in northern Peru, during a service year with the Marianist Family between my undergraduate experience at the University of Dayton and my first year of full-time ministry. The Marianist Family was founded in response to specific needs in postrevolutionary French society. Composed of lay people and vowed religious sisters, brothers and priests, it emphasizes devotion to Mary and a communal lifestyle as a distinctive way of living out one’s Roman Catholicism.
About a two-hour bus ride away from Trujillo lies the mountainous town of Otuzco, where I lived with other members of the Marianist Family – a place that would later become a significant focus of my research as a lay Marianist and Mariologist. An image of Mary – La Virgen de la Puerta – now housed in a shrine church, has been venerated and revered in the community for over 300 years.
The shrine church of La Virgen de la Puerta.
The majority of those who maintain a devotional relationship with this image, both local or from the surrounding villages, are part of the Catholic religious majority in Peru. But some other Peruvians – including non- Catholics, some members of the LGBTQ+ community, and others who are marginalized, such as former prisoners and migrants – also revere her. Many of the devotees do not live near Otuzco but maintain a spiritual relationship with La Virgen de la Puerta.
The founding of Otuzco
The Augustinians – the religious congregation of brothers and priests that Leo XIV is a member of – settled in Otuzco in 1560.
As part of the founding of the town, the Augustinian Fathers placed the town under the protection of Mary, the mother of Jesus. They acquired a Spanish image, a statue of Mary made mostly of wood, and selected Dec. 15 to celebrate her locally. This tradition has continued since 1664, about 100 years after the Augustinian Fathers settled in Otuzco.
A Virgen de la Puerta procession in the evening in the streets of Otuzco. Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch
During one particular threat to their safety, around 1670, they took this image into the streets in procession to protect their town. They placed this image of Mary above the door of the church in the center of town and called the image “Nuestra Señora de la Puerta” – transliterated into English: “Our Lady of the Door.”
Contemporary pilgrimage in Otuzco
In modern times, the fiesta of La Virgen de la Puerta is lavishly celebrated in the town of Otuzco, where thousands of faithful descend upon the mountain community for the multiday fiesta patronal, a festive celebration that honors the patron saint to whom a site is dedicated or entrusted.
The fiesta patronal of La Virgen de la Puerta begins annually on Dec. 14, with the principal day observed on Dec. 15, and concludes on Dec. 16.
During the days of the fiesta, the road between Trujillo and Otuzco is transformed into a pilgrimage route. The purpose of the journey can vary from pilgrim to pilgrim, yet it often reflects a deeply personal act of devotion.
Some pilgrims arrive from Otuzco, Trujillo and neighboring villages, while others travel long distances – in Peru or from abroad – to honor La Virgen de la Puerta. Some pilgrims journey the roughly 50 miles (over 80 kilometers) between Trujillo and Otuzco on foot.
I personally made this journey with a group of fellow pilgrims, the very people I was living among and ministering with during my service year in Peru. My pilgrimage involved a backpack with basic medical supplies for the group. After an overnight walk to Otuzco in camping pants, a T-shirt, hat and sneakers, I arrived before the image of Mary with quarter-size blisters on my feet.
La Virgen de la Puerta procession through the streets of Otuzco. Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch
Some pilgrims, unlike me, mark the final kilometers of their journey by advancing to the shrine through the streets on their knees.
Devotion outside Otuzco
In addition to the thousands who descend on the town of Otuzco each year for the celebration, there are those who are deeply devoted to La Virgen de la Puerta but do not or cannot make the journey to the shrine. Their celebrations take place at times at a great distance from Otuzco.
Among them are members of the LGBTQ+ community, who to this day remain marginalized in broader Peruvian and Catholic culture. Although members of the LGBTQ+ community reside throughout Peru, the neighborhood of Cerro El Pino in Lima has historically been the site of a festive celebration in honor of La Virgen de la Puerta, which many community members observe.
Differing communities come with differing needs to La Virgen de la Puerta. The LGBTQ+ community in this particular neighborhood believes she has protected them throughout their history. During the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, when over 10% of the male population in Lima was infected by HIV, members of this community sought the protection of La Virgen de la Puerta for their physical health. Although some people died from AIDS, others continued to participate in the rituals of the fiesta to honor her protection over time, even amid their suffering. They wore special costumes, sang and performed the dances that have been part of the fiesta patronal for over 300 years.
Francisco Rodríguez Torres is a Peruvian photographer who lives in the capital city, Lima, but has roots in the northern region where the image of La Virgen de la Puerta is located. He is one of those who has documented the activities of the fiesta patronal both in Otuzco and in Lima in his text La Mamita de Otuzco.
He writes both about the local faithful as well as those who venerate the image from a distance. In his Spanish language text, he has documented that La Virgen de la Puerta is considered a mother by groups who find themselves on the margins of society. These groups include those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, the poor, former prisoners and migrants. They “hope to find in her gaze a consolation,” he explains.
Devotees bring their special petitions before La Virgen de la Puerta: They ask for her support in making decisions and for their everyday needs. Some even pray for miraculous healing.
Echoing this sentiment of finding hope in La Virgen de la Puerta, Pope Francis, during his apostolic journey to Peru, crowned La Virgen de la Puerta and gave her the title of Mother of Mercy and Hope. In his address during a special prayer service in Trujillo on Jan. 20, 2018, Francis recounted that La Virgen de la Puerta has defended and protected all of her children throughout history.
Leo, following the example of Francis, has focused on the importance of dialogue and peace. In his first message from the balcony upon being announced pope he said that members of the Catholic Church must build “bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”
I believe that La Virgen de la Puerta – a source of mercy and hope for all her devotees, regardless of whether they have been historically marginalized or excluded – offers an example to the world community of the greater unity with one another that Leo XIV is seeking to prioritize.
Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, Research Fellow at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson appear on the red carpet prior to the screening of ‘Die, My Love’ at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2025.Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
Cannes reminded guests to follow the standard black-tie dress code for evening events at the Grand Theatre Lumière – “long dresses and tuxedos” – while highlighting acceptable alternatives, such as cocktail dresses and pantsuits for women, and a black or navy suit with a tie for men.
The real stir, however, came from two additions to the formal guidelines: a ban on nudity “for decency reasons” and a restriction on oversize garments.
But I study the cultural and economic forces behind fashion and media, and I think a lot of the criticism of Cannes is unfounded. To me, the festival isn’t changing its identity. It’s reasserting it.
Red carpet control
Concerns about indecency on the red carpet have appeared before – most notably during the first televised Academy Awards in 1953.
In 1952, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a censorship code in response to concerns about television’s influence on young audiences. Among its rules for “decency and decorum” were guidelines against revealing clothing, suggestive movements or camera angles that emphasized body parts – all to avoid causing “embarrassment” to the viewers.
Actress Inger Stevens at the 39th Academy Awards in 1967, a year before she was reprimanded for her skimpy attire. Bettmann/Getty Images
In my book “Fashion on the Red Carpet,” I explain how Head equipped backstage staff with kits to deal with any sartorial emergencies that might arise. That same year, the balcony cameras at the Pantages Theatre accidentally peeked down into the actresses’ cleavage as they walked to the stage. From then on, a supply of tulle – a type of versatile fabric that can easily cover revealing openings that expose too much skin – was kept backstage.
However, in the 1970s, the Oscars eliminated Head’s fashion consultant position. Despite maintaining its black-tie dress code, the absence of a fashion consultant opened the door to some provocative attire, ranging from Cher’s see-through, sheer outfits, to Edy Williams’ provocative, barely-there getups.
Once the fashion consultant position was eliminated for the Oscars, many attendees – like actress Edy Williams – tried to stand out from the crowd with provocative attire. Fotos International/Getty Images
Old rules in a new era
Racy red carpet appearances have since become a hallmark of awards shows, particularly in the digital age.
And in an era when red carpet looks are carefully curated ahead of time through partnerships with fashion brands, many celebrities expressed frustration about being unable to sport the outfits they had planned to wear at Cannes.
Stylist Rose Forde lamented the restrictions, saying, “You should be able to express yourself as an artist, with your style however you feel,” while actress Chloë Sevigny described the code as “an old-fashioned archaic rule.”
But I still can’t see the Cannes rules as part of any sort of broader conservative backlash.
Cape Verdean model Leila Depina arrives for the screening of the film ‘Asteroid City’ during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images
The festival has routinely reminded guests of its dress code, regardless of the cultural zeitgeist.
The “decency” rule, for example, is actually required by French law. Article 222-32 of the French Criminal Code classifies showing private parts in public as a sexual offense, and can lead to a year in prison and a fine. While the legal definition hinges on intent and setting, the festival, as a public event, technically has to operate within that framework.
Compared to white-tie events like the Nobel Prize ceremony or a state banquet, Cannes’ black-tie requirement is relatively flexible. It allows for cocktail-length dresses and even accommodates pants and flat sandals for women.
Meanwhile, the worry about voluminous clothes points to a practical issue: the movement of bodies in tight spaces.
Unlike the Met Gala – where the fashion spectacle is the focus, and its red carpet is a stage for photo-ops – Cannes is a film festival. The red carpet is the main path thousands of people use to enter the theater.
A dramatic gown – like the one worn at the Met Gala by Cardi B in 2024 – could block others and cause delays. While a photo-op may be the primary goal for celebrities and the brands they promote, the festival has a screening schedule to stick to, and attendees must be able to easily access the venue and their seats.
Red carpet rules are fluid. Sometimes they adapt to cultural shifts. Sometimes they resist them. And sometimes, they’re there to make sure you can fit in your seat in the movie theater.
Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén received funding from Fulbright (2023-2024)
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Katherine LeMasters, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Boulder
The people most impacted by Colorado’s fentanyl criminalization bill have divergent views on the role of the legal system in curbing the opioid epidemic.Erik McGregor/GettyImages
Colorado passed the Fentanyl Accountability and Prevention Bill in May 2022. The legislation made the possession of small amounts of fentanyl a felony, rather than a misdemeanor.
Felonies are more likely than misdemeanors to result in a prison sentence.
In 2023, lawmakers in 46 states passed legislation similar to Colorado’s. They introduced more than 600 bills related to fentanyl criminalization and enacted over 100 other laws to attempt to curb the opioid epidemic.
Possession of small amounts of ketamine, GHB and other criminalized drugs is also a felony in Colorado.
I’m an assistant professor of medicine, social epidemiologist and community researcher who studies mass incarceration as a public health threat. I am a member of the Right Response Coalition, which advocates for community rather than criminal-legal responses to behavioral health needs in Colorado. Recently, my work has focused on how increasing criminal penalties for fentanyl possession in Colorado affects the individuals and communities most impacted by such laws.
Our team conducted 31 interviews with Colorado policymakers, peer support specialists, law enforcement, community behavioral health providers and people providing behavioral health in prisons and jails to explore a variety of perspectives on Colorado’s Fentanyl Accountability and Prevention Bill and the role of the criminal-legal system in addressing substance use and overdose.
Most of our interviewees agreed that criminalization alone wouldn’t solve the opioid epidemic.
“You can’t incarcerate yourself to sobriety,” said a rural law enforcement officer. “You can’t incarcerate yourself out of the drug problem in America.”
People recently released from incarceration are more likely to overdose than the general public because their tolerance is greatly reduced following forced abstinence and there are not enough community-based treatment options. Erik McGregor/GettyImages
All 31 of the participants in our study supported policies to prevent fentanyl overdoses. However, most thought that use of police and incarceration as avenues to do so was misguided.
“It just seems like there’s no getting away from [the police], they’re everywhere,” said an urban peer support specialist. “I got arrested by the same cops, I don’t know how many times. And then it makes you want to try to be avoidant or run because they’re not going to help you.”
Participants worried that the policy has an inadvertent chilling effect, deterring individuals from calling 911 when an overdose occurs.
“Most people with substance abuse are not trying to report anything or get help for fear of going to jail,” one rural provider said. “It’s so stigmatized that everyone’s just scared to do that.”
Study participants worried that the Colorado fentanyl criminalization bill will deter people from reporting an overdose for fear of being arrested. Spencer Platt/GettyImages
Participants largely thought that counties were using incarceration as a default treatment setting and that it wasn’t an ideal solution.
“[I] don’t want to see [people] incarcerated, but I don’t want ‘em to die either,” said an urban peer support specialist.
Colorado’s fentanyl bill did more than just increase penalties. It also provided additional funding for a state naloxone program and required that all jails provide medications for opioid use disorder.
Along with increasing penalties, Colorado’s bill increased access to naloxone, an opioid-reversal drug. Hyoung Chang/GettyImages
Based on our study’s findings, my study co-authors and I believe increased criminal penalties should not be the solution for linking individuals to treatment. Instead, there should be more investment in long-term community solutions.
One such solution is Denver’s Substance Use Navigation Program. The program sends behavioral health specialists to emergency calls to prevent legal involvement when someone is experiencing distress related to mental health, poverty, homelessness or substance use. In many cases, those individuals are then routed to services rather than jails.
Our findings also lead us to believe there is a need for more participatory policymaking processes when it comes to fentanyl legislation, and that policymakers should more closely work with the people who will be most impacted by new legislation. Most of our participants agree.
“[I] don’t think that [the] state realized how difficult it is,” said a rural provider about giving medication-assisted treatment in jail, an increasing need as more people are arrested for fentanyl possession. “They probably should come here and visit us.”
Katherine LeMasters received funding from the Colorado Department of Human Services, Behavioral Health Administration. Katherine LeMasters is part of the Right Response Coalition.
In the early days of the second Trump administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and documents that included sexual orientation and gender identity from its webpages. For example, data codebooks for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System were replaced with versions that deleted gender identity variables. The Trump administration also ordered the CDC to delete gender identity from the National Violent Death Reporting System, the world’s largest database for informing prevention of homicide and suicide deaths.
For many people, sexual orientation and gender identity may seem private and personal. So why is personal information necessary for public health?
Decades of research have shown that health problems affect some groups more than others. As someone who has studied differences in health outcomes for over 15 years, I know that one of the largest health disparities for LGBTQ+ people is suicide risk. Without data on sexual orientation and gender identity, public health cannot do the work to sound the alarm on and address issues that affect not just specific communities, but society as a whole.
Clinicians are concerned about the purging of health data that is essential to patient care.
Alarms and benchmarks
Health is determined by the interplay of several factors, including a person’s genetics, environment and personal life. Of these types of health information, data on personal lives can be the most difficult to collect because researchers must rely on people to voluntarily share this information with them. But details about people’s everyday lives are critical to understanding their health.
Consider veteran status. Without information that identifies which Americans are military veterans, the U.S. would never have known that the rate of suicide deaths among veterans is several times higher than that of the general population. Identifying this problem encouraged efforts to reduce suicide among veterans and military service personnel.
Studying the rates of different conditions occurring in different groups of people is a vital role of public health monitoring. First, rates can set off alarm bells. When people are counted, it becomes easier to pick up a problem that needs to be addressed.
Second, rates can be a benchmark. Once the extent of a health problem is known, researchers can develop and test interventions. They can then determine if rates of that health problem decreased, stayed the same or increased after the intervention.
My team reviewed available research on how sexual orientation and gender identity are related to differences in mortality. The results were grim.
Of the 49 studies we analyzed, the vast majority documented greater rates of death from all causes for LGBTQ+ people compared with people who aren’t LGBTQ+. Results were worse for suicide: Nearly all studies reported that suicide deaths were more frequent among LGBTQ+ people. A great deal of other research supports this finding.
Without data on sexual orientation and gender identity, these issues are erased.
Lost data costs everyone
Higher death rates among LGBTQ+ people affect everyone, not just people in the LGBTQ+ community. And when suicide is a major driver of these death rates, the costs increase.
There are societal costs. Deaths from suicide result in lost productivity and medical services that cost the U.S. an estimated $484 billion per year. There are also human costs. Research suggests that for every suicide death, about 135 people are directly affected by the loss, experiencing grief, sadness and anger.
President Donald Trump’s targeting of research on sexual orientation and gender identity comes at a time when more Americans than ever – an estimated 24.4 million adults – identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. That’s more than the entire population of Florida.
Stopping data collection of sexual orientation and gender identity does not protect women, or anyone else, as the Trump administration claims. Rather, it serves to weaken American public health. I believe counting all Americans is the path to a stronger, healthier nation because public health can then do its duty of detecting when a community needs help.
John R. Blosnich receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. He is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however all time and effort into writing this piece was done outside of his work with the VA. The opinions expressed are those of Dr. Blosnich and do not necessarily represent those of his institution, funders, or any affiliations.
You stayed up too late scrolling through your phone, answering emails or watching just one more episode. The next morning, you feel groggy and irritable. That sugary pastry or greasy breakfast sandwich suddenly looks more appealing than your usual yogurt and berries. By the afternoon, chips or candy from the break room call your name. This isn’t just about willpower. Your brain, short on rest, is nudging you toward quick, high-calorie fixes.
While anyone can suffer from sleep loss, essential workers and first responders, including nurses, firefighters and emergency personnel, are especially vulnerabledue to night shifts and rotating schedules. These patterns disrupt the body’s internal clock and are linked to increased cravings, poor eating habits and elevated risks for obesity and metabolic disease. Fortunately, even a few nights of consistent, high-quality sleep can help rebalance key systems and start to reverse some of these effects.
Ghrelin, produced primarily in the stomach, signals that you are hungry, while leptin, which is produced in the fat cells, tells your brain that you are full. Even one night of restricted sleep increases the release of ghrelin and decreases leptin, which leads to greater hunger and reduced satisfaction after eating. This shift is driven by changes in how the body regulates hunger and stress. Your brain becomes less responsive to fullness signals, while at the same time ramping up stress hormones that can increase cravings and appetite.
These changes are not subtle. In controlled lab studies, healthy adults reported increased hunger and stronger cravings for calorie-dense foods after sleeping only four to five hours. The effect worsens with ongoing sleep deficits, which can lead to a chronically elevated appetite.
Sleep is as important as diet and exercise in maintaining a healthy weight.
In simple terms, your brain becomes more tempted by junk food and less capable of resisting it. Participants in sleep deprivation studies not only rated high-calorie foods as more desirable but were also more likely to choose them, regardless of how hungry they actually felt.
Your metabolism slows, leading to increased fat storage
Sleep is also critical for blood sugar control.
When you’re well rested, your body efficiently uses insulin to move sugar out of your bloodstream and into your cells for energy. But even one night of partial sleep can reduce insulin sensitivity by up to 25%, leaving more sugar circulating in your blood.
If your body can’t process sugar effectively, it’s more likely to convert it into fat. This contributes to weight gain, especially around the abdomen. Over time, poor sleep is associated with higher risk for Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, a group of health issues such as high blood pressure, belly fat and high blood sugar that raise the risk for heart disease and diabetes.
On top of this, sleep loss raises cortisol, your body’s main stress hormone. Elevated cortisol encourages fat storage, especially in the abdominal region, and can further disrupt appetite regulation.
Sleep is your metabolic reset button
In a culture that glorifies hustle and late nights, sleep is often treated as optional. But your body doesn’t see it that way. Sleep is not downtime. It is active, essential repair. It is when your brain recalibrates hunger and reward signals, your hormones reset and your metabolism stabilizes.
So the next time you find yourself reaching for junk food after a short night, recognize that your biology is not failing you. It is reacting to stress and fatigue. The most effective way to restore balance isn’t a crash diet or caffeine. It’s sleep.
Sleep is not a luxury. It is your most powerful tool for appetite control, energy regulation and long-term health.
Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On May 22, 2025, the House of Representatives narrowly approved the tax, spending and immigration bill. The legislation, which passed without any support from Democrats, is designed to reduce federal Medicaid spending by requiring anyone enrolled in the program who appears to be able to get a job to either satisfy work requirements or lose their coverage. It’s still unclear, however, whether Senate Republicans would support that provision.
As I explain in my book, “Living Off the Government? Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare,” work requirements place extra burdens on low-income families but do little to lift them out of poverty.
Work requirements for TANF
TANF gives families with very low incomes some cash they can spend on housing, food, clothing or whatever they need most. The Clinton administration launched it as a replacement for a similar program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in 1996. At the time, both political parties were eager to end a welfare system they believed was riddled with abuse. A big goal with TANF was ending the dependence of people getting cash benefits on the government by moving them from welfare to work.
Many people were removed from the welfare rolls, but not because work requirements led to economic prosperity. Instead, they had trouble navigating the bureaucratic demands.
TANF is administered by the states. They can set many rules of their own, but they must comply with an important federal requirement: Adult recipients have to work or engage in an authorized alternative activity for at least 30 hours per week. The number of weekly hours is only 20 if the recipient is caring for a child under the age of 6.
The dozen activities or so that can count toward this quota range from participating in job training programs to engaging in community service.
Some adults enrolled in TANF are exempt from work requirements, depending on their state’s own policies. The most common exemptions are for people who are ill, have a disability or are over age 60.
To qualify for TANF, families must have dependent children; in some states pregnant women also qualify. Income limits are set by the state and range from US$307 a month for a family of three in Alabama to $2,935 a month for a family of three in Minnesota.
Complying with these work requirements generally means proving that you’re working or making the case that you should be exempt from this mandate. This places what’s known as an “administrative burden” on the people who get cash assistance. It often requires lots of documentation and time. If you have an unpredictable work schedule, inconsistent access to child care or obligations to care for an older relative, this paperwork is hard to deal with.
What counts as work, how many hours must be completed and who is exempt from these requirements often comes down to a caseworker’s discretion. Social science research shows that this discretion is not equally applied and is often informed by stereotypes.
Some of this decline happened because recipients got jobs that paid them too much to qualify. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office that provides economic research to Congress, attributes, at least in part, an increase in employment among less-educated single mothers in the 1990s to work requirements.
Not everyone who stopped getting cash benefits through TANF wound up employed, however. Other recipients who did not meet requirements fell into deep poverty.
Regardless of why people leave the program, when fewer low-income Americans get TANF benefits, the government spends less money on cash assistance. Federal funding has remained flat at $16.5 billion since 1996. Taking inflation into account, the program receives half as much funding as when it was created. In addition, states have used the flexibility granted them to direct most of their TANF funds to priorities other than cash benefits, such as pre-K education.
Lawmakers in Congress and in statehouses have debated whether to add work requirements for Medicaid before. More than a dozen states have applied for waivers that would let them give it a try.
Georgia is currently the only state with Medicaid work requirements in effect, after implementing a waiver in July 2023. The program has experienced technical difficulties and has had trouble verifying work activities.
Other states, including Idaho, Indiana and Kentucky, are already asking the federal government to let them enforce Medicaid work requirements.
Then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson speaks during a news conference in 2017, in Little Rock, Arkansas, calling for Medicaid work requirements. AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo
But most people covered by Medicaid in that age range are already working, and those who are not would likely be eligible for work requirement waivers. An analysis by KFF – a nonprofit that informs the public about health issues – shows that in 2023, 44% of Medicaid recipients were working full time and another 20% were working part time. In 2023, that was more than 16 million Americans.
About 20% of the American adults under 65 who are covered by Medicaid are not working due to illness or disability, or because of caregiving responsibilities, according to KFF. This includes both people caring for young children and those taking care of relatives with an illness or disability. In my own research, I read testimony from families seeking work exemptions because caregiving, including for children with disabilities, was a full-time job.
The rest of the adults under 65 with Medicaid coverage are not working because they are in school, are retired, cannot find work or have some other reason. It’s approximately 3.9 million Americans. Depending on what counts as “work,” they may be meeting any requirements that could be added to the program.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that introducing Medicaid work requirements would save around $300 billion over a decade. Given past experience with work requirements, it is unlikely those savings would come from Americans finding jobs.
My research suggests it’s more likely that the government would trim spending by taking away the health insurance of people eligible for Medicaid coverage who get tangled up in red tape.
This article was updated on May 22, 2025, with details about the House of Representatives’ passage of the budget bill.
When the computer or phone you’re using right now blinks its last blink and you drop it off for recycling, do you know what happens?
At the recycling center, powerful magnets will pull out steel. Spinning drums will toss aluminum into bins. Copper wires will get neatly bundled up for resale. But as the conveyor belt keeps rolling, tiny specks of valuable, lesser-known materials such as gallium, indium and tantalum will be left behind.
Those tiny specks are critical materials. They’re essential for building new technology, and they’re in short supply in the U.S. They could be reused, but there’s a problem: Current recycling methods make recovering critical minerals from e-waste too costly or hazardous, so many recyclers simply skip them.
Sadly, most of these hard-to-recycle materials end up buried in landfills or get mixed into products like cement. But it doesn’t have to be this way. New technology is starting to make a difference.
A treasure trove of critical materials is often overlooked in e-waste, including gallium in LEDs, indium in LCDs, and tantalum in surface mount capacitors. Ansan Pokharel/West Virginia University, CC BY
As demand for these critical materials keeps growing, discarded electronics can become valuable resources. My colleagues and I at West Virginia University are developing a new technology to change how we recycle. Instead of using toxic chemicals, our approach uses electricity, making it safer, cleaner and more affordable to recover critical materials from electronics.
Even worse, nearly half the electronics that people in Northern America sent to recycling centers end up shipped overseas. They often land in scrapyards, where workers may use dangerous methods like burning or leaching using harsh chemicals to pull out valuable metals. These practices can harm both the environment and workers’ health. That’s why the Environmental Protection Agency restricts these methods in the U.S.
The tiny specks matter
Critical minerals are in most of the technology around you. Every phone screen has a super-thin layer of a material called indium tin oxide. LEDs glow because of a metal called gallium. Tantalum stores energy in tiny electronic parts called capacitors.
All of these materials are flagged as “high risk” on the U.S. Department of Energy’s critical materials list. That means the U.S. relies heavily on these materials for important technologies, but their supply could be easily disrupted by conflicts, trade disputes or shortages.
Right now, just a few countries, including China, control most of the mining, processing and recovery of these materials, making the U.S. vulnerable if those countries decide to limit exports or raise prices.
At West Virginia University’s Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering, I and materials scientist Edward Sabolsky asked a simple question: Could we find a way to heat only specific parts of electronic waste to recover these valuable materials?
If we could focus the heat on just the tiny specks of critical minerals, we might be able to recycle them easily and efficiently.
This equipment isn’t very different from the microwave ovens you use to heat food at home, just bigger and more powerful. The basic science is the same – electromagnetic waves cause electrons to oscillate, creating heat.
In our approach, though, we’re not heating water molecules like you do when cooking. Instead, we heat carbon, the black residue that collects around a candle flame or car tailpipe. Carbon heats up much faster in a microwave than water does. But don’t try this at home; your kitchen microwave wasn’t designed for such high temperatures.
West Virginia University researchers are using this experimental microwave reactor to recycle critical materials from end-of-life electronics. Ansan Pokharel/West Virginia University, CC BY
In our recycling method, we first shred the electronic waste, mix it with materials called fluxes that trap impurities, and then heat the mixture with microwaves. The microwaves rapidly heat the carbon that comes from the plastics and adhesives in the e-waste. This causes the carbon to react with the tiny specks of critical materials. The result: a tiny piece of pure, sponge-like metal about the size of a grain of rice.
This metal can then be easily separated from leftover waste using filters.
So far, in our laboratory tests, we have successfully recovered about 80% of the gallium, indium and tantalum from e-waste, at purities between 95% and 97%. We have also demonstrated how it can be integrated with existing recycling processes.
Many important technologies, from radar systems to nuclear reactors, depend on these special materials. While the Department of Defense uses less of them than the commercial market, they are a national security concern.
We’re planning to launch larger pilot projects next to test the method on smartphone circuit boards, LED lighting parts and server cards from data centers. These tests will help us fine-tune the design for a bigger system that can recycle tons of e-waste per hour instead of just a few pounds. That could mean producing up to 50 pounds of these critical minerals per hour from every ton of e-waste processed.
If the technology works as expected, we believe this approach could help meet the nation’s demand for critical materials.
How to make e-waste recycling common
One way e-waste recycling could become more common is if Congress held electronics companies responsible for recycling their products and recovering the critical materials inside. Closing loopholes that allow companies to ship e-waste overseas, instead of processing it safely in the U.S., could also help build a reserve of recovered critical minerals.
But the biggest change may come from simple economics. Once technology becomes available to recover these tiny but valuable specks of critical materials quickly and affordably, the U.S. can transform domestic recycling and take a big step toward solving its shortage of critical materials.
Terence Musho has received funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Patrick Aguilar, Professor of Practice of Organizational Behavior, Washington University in St. Louis
Pharmacies are more than just stores – they’re vital links between people and their health care.
One of us, Patrick, witnessed this firsthand in 2003 while working as a pharmacy technician at Walgreens in a midsize West Texas town. Each day involved handling hundreds of prescriptions as they moved through the system – meticulously counting pills, deciphering doctors’ handwriting and sorting out confusing insurance issues. The experience revealed that how pharmacies are owned and managed is as much a public health issue as it is a financial one.
Fast-forward to today, and Walgreens – one of the world’s largest pharmacy chains, which filled nearly 800 million U.S. prescriptions in 2024 – is at a turning point. In March, the company announced it would be acquired by private equity firm Sycamore Partners for US$10 billion, just 10% of its peak market value. That deal takes the storied pharmacy chain off the public market for the first time in nearly 100 years.
We’re professors who study the intersection of medicineand business, and we think this deal offers a window into the future of pharmacy care. It matters not just to pharmacists but also to the tens of millions of Americans who rely on outlets like Walgreens to meet their everyday health needs.
The rise and struggles of Walgreens
A lot has changed in the pharmacy industry since 1901, when Charles R. Walgreen Sr. purchased the Chicago drugstore where he served as a pharmacist. The company went public in 1927, expanded rapidly throughout the 20th century and grew to 8,000 stores by 2013. By 2014, a merger with the European pharmacy chain Alliance Boots made Walgreens one of the largest pharmacy chains in the world.
More recently, however, the picture for the pharmacy industry hasn’t been so rosy. Labor costs have risen. Front-end retail sales – things like snacks, greeting cards and cosmetics – have fallen. And financial pressures from pharmacy benefit managers – those third-party groups that manage the cost of prescription drug benefits on the behalf of insurers – have grown.
All of these things have significantly constrained revenues across the industry, leading stores to shutter. Some estimates suggest that as many as one-third of U.S. retail pharmacies have closed since 2010.
Against that backdrop, Sycamore Partners’ March acquisition of Walgreens raises big questions. What does Sycamore see in this investment, and what might their strategies imply about the future of American pharmacy care?
Framing the private equity bet
Private equity firms typically buy companies, streamline their operations and seek to sell them for a profit within five to seven years of the acquisition.
This growing movement of private equity into the global economy is by no means limited to health care. In 2020, private equity firms employed 11.7 million U.S. workers, or about 7% of the country’s total workforce. The total assets under management by such investors have grown by over 11% annually over the past two decades, a trend that’s expected to continue.
In looking at Walgreens, Sycamore, like many of these businesses, likely sees an opportunity to buy low, cut costs and improve profitability. One survey of private equity investors found that the most common self-reported sources of value creation in these deals for companies of Sycamore’s size were changing the product and marketing it more robustly to drive demand, changing incentives for those within the business, and facilitating a high-value exit.
While private owners may have more patience than public markets, critics argue that private equity firms tend to have a short-term focus, looking for quick, predictable services of margin improvement – like, for example, cutting jobs.
There’s some evidence in favor of that claim. One study found that employment often drops in the years following a private equity buyout. And if the focus shifts to repaying debt or prepping for resale, long-term projects, such as investing in future innovation, can get deprioritized.
The history of privatized public companies offers a mix of successes and failures. Dell Technologies and hotel chain Hilton are two prominent examples of companies that went private, restructured successfully and came back stronger. In those cases, going private helped management focus without the constant pressure of quarterly earnings reports.
On the other hand, companies such as Toys R Us, which was taken private in 2005 and filed for bankruptcy in 2018, show how high debt and missed innovation can lead to collapse.
What’s next for Walgreens
So, where does this leave Walgreens − and the investors involved in the deal?
As the dust settles on the purchase, Sycamore has indicated an interest in splitting Walgreens into three business units: one focused on U.S. pharmacies, one on U.K. pharmacies and one on U.S. primary health care through its VillageMD subsidiary.
That’s not unusual: Sycamore has used a similar approach before with its investment in the office supply retailer Staples, a strategy that has garnered strong financial returns but been called into question for its long-term sustainability.
Given the significant financial challenges VillageMD has faced since its acquisition by Walgreens, this represents an opportunity to separately evaluate and optimize its performance. Meanwhile, Sycamore’s historic focus on retail and customer-focused businesses might help it modernize the in-store experience or optimize staffing.
For more than a century, Walgreens has survived and adapted to sweeping changes in retail. Now, it’s entering a new chapter – one that could reshape not just its own future but the role of pharmacies in American life.
Will Sycamore help Walgreens thrive, using its resources to strengthen services and deliver more value to customers? Or will pressure to generate quick returns create problems? Either way, the answer matters – not just for investors but for anyone who’s ever relied on their neighborhood pharmacy to stay healthy.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
An additional 11,000 people moved into the city in the years 2023 and 2024, a small gain in a city with a population of 645,705 – but one which marked a symbolic shift.
The census data shows just over 1% growth in the past year alone and 0.7% the year before compared with a nearly 25% loss between 2000 and 2010.
As an urban sociologist studying issues related to race and ethnicity, I am interested in how Detroit’s population is changing, and where different groups live in both the city and its suburbs.
Analyzing population trends in the metro Detroit area using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I wanted to understand how racial, ethnic and socioeconomic trends are unfolding, and what those changes can tell us about the evolution and vitality of Detroit.
Black Detroiters relocate, city diversifies
From 2010 to 2023, Detroit’s racial and ethnic makeup continued to gradually diversify even as the city was declining in population.
While Black residents are still the majority, their proportion of the total number fell from around 84% to 79%.
Other groups, in contrast, increased their share of the city’s population. Between 2010 and 2023, the percentage of Hispanic residents grew from 6.6% to 8.3%, the percentage of white residents grew from 8.2% to 10.7%, and the percentage of Asian residents grew from 1.3% to 1.7%.
These shifts reflect a steady and ongoing diversification of Detroit’s population, indicative of new migration trends and shifting neighborhood dynamics.
Suburbs in flux
In addition to Detroit’s recent population growth, a broader story is unfolding in the city’s suburbs.
The population of the suburban area as a whole increased 0.73% from 2023 to 2024, but growth was not evenly spread. Collectively, the outer-ring suburbs gained almost 20,000 people, increasing by 1%. Communities such as the city of Troy and Macomb Township accounted for a significant share of that growth.
A map of Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, with shading to indicate which areas are considered to be the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ suburbs. Grigoris Argeros, CC BY
Inner-ring suburbs, such as Southfield, Warren and others, grew less vigorously – gaining just 4,000 people, or 0.31%.
These differences highlight the necessity of complicating the conventional city-versus-suburb narrative to acknowledge the many economic and racial divisions across the metropolitan region.
The socioeconomic statuses of residents of the inner- and outer-ring suburbs diverged between 2000 and 2020.
My analysis of census data shows that although both subregions witnessed increases in median household incomes, the rates of change were significantly higher in the outer-ring suburbs, with a 37.7% increase versus a 16.8% increase in the inner rings.
The data shows a similar trend in higher education attainment. Outer ring suburbs gained 7.1% more residents with college degrees or higher during this period, while the inner suburbs lost 7.5%.
Homeownership patterns in the two suburban regions also diverged over those two decades, increasing 18% in the outer rings and decreasing 10% in the inner rings.
The data on poverty and immigration also reveal contrasting results.
According to my calculations of census data, inner-ring suburbs experienced a 77% increase in poverty, while the outer ring experienced a lesser, though considerable, 50.8% bump in poverty during the 2000-2020 period.
Meanwhile, during the same time period, the foreign-born populations in the outer suburbs expanded by 24.9%, with increases of at least 10,000 in places such as Sterling Heights, Novi and Canton. In contrast, the inner suburbs saw more modest gains — around 5,000 in cities such as Dearborn Heights and Warren — while their overall foreign-born share declined by nearly 20%.
Together, the above trends highlight the necessity of not viewing the suburban area as a monolith. These patterns reflect national trends, in which many older, inner-ring suburbs are experiencing socioeconomic stagnation or decline while newer, outer-ring suburbs continue to attract more people who have higher incomes.
Mixed neighborhoods grow
Residential segregation also differentiates inner and outer suburban rings.
Segregation levels remain high in the inner suburbs, especially between white and Black residents. While outer suburbs tend to be more integrated today, the rate of change there has been more modest over the past two decades.
Social scientists measure segregation using a tool called the “dissimilarity index.” The index represents the proportion of one group that would need to move to establish an equal distribution of the population based on their relative numbers. It ranges from 0 to 100. A score of 0 means equal distribution across neighborhoods, while a score of 100 means the two groups live in completely separate areas.
From 2000 to 2020, white-Black segregation across the region decreased from 84.4% to 68.3% on the index, while white-Hispanic segregation decreased from 47.6% to 39.9%. Together, these numbers indicate a broader trend toward more integrated living patterns.
In the inner-ring suburbs, segregation fell across the board. White-Black segregation went down by 15.6%; white-Asian and white-Hispanic segregation dropped even more, by 43.2% and 30.7%, respectively.
These trends suggest that while the outer suburbs currently have lower levels of segregation, the inner suburbs are integrating more rapidly, reflecting shifting patterns of neighborhood change and increasing racial and ethnic diversity.
Detroit has come a long way since exiting bankruptcy in 2014. Its recent population growth and increasing diversity show important signs of renewal.
Grigoris Argeros does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In the early hours of June 22, 2025, local time, the United States attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran with “bunker buster” bombs and Tomahawk missiles.
The Conversation U.S. turned to Javed Ali, an expert on Middle East affairs at the University of Michigan and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, to talk through why Trump chose now to act and what the potential repercussions could be.
What do we know about the nature and timing of US involvement?
President Trump has been forcefully hinting for days days that such a strike could happen, while at the same time opening up a window of negotiation by suggesting as late as June 20 that he would make a decision “within the next two weeks.” We know Trump can be very unpredictable, but he must have assessed that the current conditions presented an opportunity for U.S. action.
Trump met with the National Security Council twice in the days leading up to the strike. Typically at such meetings the president is presented with a menu of military options, which usually boil down to three: a narrow option, a middle ground and a “if you really want to go big” strike.
The one he picked, I would argue, is somewhere between the narrow option and the middle ground one.
The “go big” options would have been an attack on nuclear sites and Iranian leadership – be that senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or possibly the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The more narrow approach would have been just one facility, likely to have been Fordo – a deeply fortified uranium enrichment site buried within a mountain.
What did occur was a strike there, but also at two other sites – Isfahan and Natanz.
U.S. military chiefs confirmed that that 12 GBU-57s – the so-called 30,000-pound bunker busters – were dropped by B-2 bombers on Fordo, and two on Isfahan.
That suggests to me that the military goal of the operation was to destroy Iran’s ability to produce and or store highly enriched uranium in a one-time strike rather than drag the U.S. into a more prolonged conflict.
Has the strike achieved Trump’s objectives?
It will take some time to properly assess the extent to which Iran’s ability to produce or store highly enriched uranium has been damaged.
Certainly we know that the bombs hit their targets, and they have been damaged – but to what extent is not immediately clear. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that all three target sites had suffered “extremely severe damage and destruction” – possibly rolling back from Trump’s “fully obliterated” assessment. Perhaps most tellingly, Iran has not commented yet on the extent of the damage.
But to Trump, the objective was not just military but political, too. Trump has long said “no” to a nuclear Iran while at the same time has expressed that he has no desire to drag the U.S. into another war.
And this strike may allow Trump to achieve those seemingly contradictory goals. If U.S. initial assessments are correct, Iran’s nuclear program will have been severely compromised. But the strikes won’t necessarily pull U.S. into the conflict fully – unless Iran retaliates in such a way that necessitates further U.S. action.
And that is what Iran’s supreme leader and his military generals will need to work out: Should Iran retaliate and, if so, is it prepared to deal with a heavier U.S. military response – especially when there is no end in sight to its current conflict with Israel.
An operational timeline of a strike on Iran is displayed during a news conference with U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on June 22, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
What options does Iran have to retaliate against US?
Iran has in the past tried to respond proportionately to any attack. But here is the problem for Iran’s leaders: There is no feasible proportionate response to the United States. Iran has no capability to hit nuclear plants in the U.S. – either conventionally or through unconventional warfare.
But there are tens of thousands of U.S. troops in the region, stationed in Iraq, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Jordan. All are in range of Iran’s ballistic, drones or cruise missiles.
But that military inventory has been depleted – both by using ballistic missiles in waves of attacks against Israel and by Israel hitting missile launch and storage sites in Iran.
Similarly, Tehran’s capacity to respond through one of its proxy or aligned groups in the region has been degraded. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza’s Hamas – both of whom have ties to Iran – are in survival mode following damaging attacks from Israel over the past 18 months.
The Houthis in Yemen are in many ways the “last man standing” in Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance.” But the Houthis have limited capability and know that if they do attack U.S. assets, they will likely get hit hard. During Operation Rough Rider from March to May this year, the Trump administration launched over 1,000 strikes against the Houthis.
Meanwhile Shia militias in Iraq and Syria that could be encouraged to attack U.S. bases haven’t been active in months.
Of course, Iran could look outside the region. In the past the country has been involved in assassinations, kidnappings and terror attacks abroad that were organized through its Quds Force or via operatives of MOIS, its intelligence service.
But for Iran’s leaders, it is increasingly looking like a lose-lose proposition. If they don’t respond in a meaningful way, they look weak and more vulnerable. But if they do hit U.S. targets in any meaningful way, they will invite a stronger U.S. involvement in the conflict, as Trump has warned.
On that occasion, Iran promised a strong retaliation. Its retaliatory attack against the U.S. Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq involved 27 ballistic missiles and caused the physical destruction of some of the facilities on base as well as traumatic brain injury-type symptoms to dozens of troops and personnel, but no deaths. Nevertheless, after this both the U.S. and Iran then backed off from deepening the conflict.
The circumstances now are very different. Iran is already at war with Israel. Moreover, the U.S. went after Iran’s crown jewels – its nuclear program – and it was on Iranian territory. Nonetheless, Khameini knows that if he retaliates, he risks provoking a larger response.
Trump suggested ‘further attacks’ could occur. What could that entail?
The U.S. has suggested that it has the intelligence and ability to hit senior leadership in Iran. And any “go big option” would have likely involved strikes on key personnel. Similarly there could be plans to hit the Iranian economy by attacking oil and gas targets.
A satellite image of the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran prior to the U.S. strike on June 22, 2025. Maxar/Getty
But such actions risk either damaging the global economy or drawing the U.S. deeper into the conflict – it would evolve from a “one and done” strike to a cycle of attacks and responses. And that could widen political cracks between hawks in the administration and parts of Trump’s MAGA faithful who are against the U.S. being involved in overseas wars.
Is there any opportunity of a return to diplomacy?
Trump has not closed his “two weeks” window for talks – theoretically it is still open.
But will Iran come to table? Leaders there had already said they were not willing to entertain any deal while under attack from Israel. Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said after the U.S. strikes that the time for diplomacy had now passed.
In any event, you have to ask, what can Iran come to the table with? Do they have much of a nuclear program anymore? And if not, what would they try to negotiate? It would seem, using one of Trump’s phrases, they “don’t have the cards” to make much of a deal.
Javed Ali does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Retention and recruitment efforts designed to boost diversity in engineering programs often fall short of their goals.gorodenkoff/Getty Images
For decades, colleges, government agencies and foundations have experimented with recruitment and retention efforts designed to increase diversity in engineering programs.
However, the efforts have not significantly boosted the number of women, students of color, individuals with disabilities and other underrepresented groups studying and earning degrees in STEM and engineering fields.
Latino, Black, Native American and Alaska Native students are underrepresented among science and engineering degree recipients at the bachelor’s degree level and above. The groups are also underrepresented among STEM workers with at least a bachelor’s degree.
I study equity and social justice in STEM learning. In my recent study, I found that more students from diverse backgrounds could excel in engineering programs if course content were tailored to a wider variety of learning preferences.
Why it matters
Focusing on learning preferences could boost diversity in engineering courses and careers. Morsa Images/Getty Images
During my time as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering, I reviewed plenty of research focused on broadening participation and diversifying student enrollment in STEM fields.
Progress can stall on efforts to boost diversity because college instructors do not consider the synergistic relationship between the content and the learner.
Teachers are the mediators, and it is students’ experiences with the curriculum that matter.
It was long a common belief that students have different learning styles. These included kinesthetic, learning through hands-on experiences and physical activity; auditory, learning by listening to information; and visual, learning by seeing information.
More recent research does not support the idea that teaching students according to their learning style leads to improved learning.
That’s why I prefer the term “learning preferences” rather than learning styles. We all have preferences – whether for ice cream flavors, home decor or how we receive information, including how we learn.
Learning preferences are broader and more flexible, allowing multiple ways of engaging with content.
For example, let’s say a teacher always presented equations in a classroom and the student just could not get it. However, it was the only way the information was presented. To the individual learner, they have failed. Some people would say, “These kids can’t learn,” and subsequently counsel the student out of the class.
Then, years are spent repeating the same cycle.
Students should have opportunities to connect with engineering content in multiple ways. 10’000 hours/Getty Images
However, educators can broaden their viewpoints if they look at the students as customers. If a customer is shopping for a shirt, they look for one that catches their eye. Ultimately, they find one they like.
Instructors need to take the same approach when trying to help students understand what is happening in class. For instance, if I have trouble with equations, I should be provided with options to engage with the lesson in ways that align with my learning preferences.
What’s next?
Learning styles have been heavily researched. However, content preferences have not been well explored.
In a truly democratic education system, curriculum design should reflect the voices of all stakeholders and not just those in positions of power, namely instructors.
Using data mining and artificial intelligence, educators have a variety of options for creating content for the various preferences a learner may want or need. For example, if a student prefers other representational content, such as word problems, graphics or simulations, AI can create diverse representations so that the learner is exposed to a variety of representations.
I argue that future studies need to consider the use of technologies such as adaptive learning applications to understand students’ learning preferences.
Prioritizing diverse learning perspectives in STEM could help create a more inclusive and responsive learning environment.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Sharon Tettegah received funding from the National Science Foundation for this work. Award Abstract # 1826632
Coordinating Curricula and User Preferences to Increase the Participation of Women and Students of Color in Engineering
The directive from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and resulting lawsuit from Harvard have escalated the ongoing conflict between the Trump administration and the Ivy League institution.
It’s also the latest step in a White House campaign to ramp up vetting and screening of foreign nationals, including students.
Homeland Security officials accused Harvard of creating a hostile campus climate by accommodating “anti-American” and “pro-terrorist agitators.” The accusation stems from the university’s alleged support for certain political groups and their activities on campus.
In early April, the Trump administration terminated the immigration statuses of thousands of international students listed in a government database, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. The database includes country of citizenship, which U.S. school they attend and what they study.
Barring Harvard from enrolling international students could have significant implications for the campus’s climate and the local economy. International students account for 27% of the university’s enrollment.
Here are four stories from The Conversation’s archive about the Trump administration’s battle with Harvard and the economic impact of international students.
1. A target on Harvard
This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has targeted the university.
The White House has threatened to end the university’s tax-exempt status, and some media outlets have reported that the Internal Revenue Service is taking steps in that direction.
“Before the IRS can do that, tax law requires that it first audit that charity,” they wrote. “And it’s illegal for U.S. presidents or other officials to force the IRS to conduct an audit or stop one that’s already begun.”
Several U.S. senators, all Democrats, have urged the IRS inspector general to see whether the IRS has begun auditing Harvard or any nonprofits in response to the administration’s requests or whether Trump has violated any laws with his pressure campaign.
Hackney and Mittendorf wrote that the Trump administration’s moves are part of a larger push to exert control over Harvard, including its efforts to increase its diversity and its response to claims of discrimination on campus.
University of Michigan students on campus on April 3, 2025, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
2. International students help keep ‘America First’
The U.S. has long been the global leader in attracting international students. But competition for these students is increasing as other countries vie to attract the scholars.
Di Maria wrote that such efforts could hamper the Trump administration’s ability to achieve its “America First” priorities related to the economy, science and technology, and national security.
Trump administration officials have emphasized the importance of recruiting top global talent. And Trump has said that international students who graduate from U.S. colleges should be awarded a green card with their degree.
Research shows that international students launch successful startups at a rate that is eight to nine times higher than their U.S.-born peers. Roughly 25% of billion-dollar companies in the U.S. were founded by former international students, Di Maria noted.
Indeed, international students have a tremendous economic impact on local communities.
If these global scholars stay home or go elsewhere, that’s bad economic news for cities and towns across the United States, wrote Barnet Sherman, a professor of multinational finance and trade at Boston University.
With the money they spend on tuition, food, housing and other other items, international students pump money into the local economy, but there are additional benefits.
On average, a new job is created for every three international students enrolled in a U.S. college or university. In the 2023-24 academic year, about 378,175 jobs were created, Sherman wrote.
In Greater Boston, where Harvard is located, there are about 63,000 international students who contribute to the economy. The gains are huge – about US$3 billion.
A common claim, they wrote, is the flawed assumption that “cash-strapped public universities” aggressively recruit more affluent students from abroad who can afford to pay rising tuition costs. The pair wrote that, historically, shifting demographics on college campuses result from social and economic changes.
In today’s context, Miller-Idriss and Streitwieser maintain that the argument that colleges prioritize international students fails to account for the global role of U.S. universities, which help support national security, foster international development projects and accelerate the pace of globalization.
One reason for the air traffic controller shortage relates to the demands of the job: The training to become a controller is extremely intense, and the Federal Aviation Administration wants only highly qualified personnel to fill those seats, which has made it difficult for what has been the sole training center in the U.S., located in Oklahoma City, to churn out enough qualified graduates each year.
As scholars who study and teach tomorrow’s aviation professionals, we are working to be part of the solution. Our program at Ohio State University is applying to join over two dozen other schools in an effort to train air traffic controllers and help alleviate the shortage.
In fact, about 30% of students fail to make it from their first day of training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City to the status of a certified professional air traffic controller. The academy currently trains the majority of the air traffic controllers in the U.S.
Before someone is accepted into the training program, they must meet several qualifications. That includes being a U.S. citizen under the age of 31 and speaking English clearly enough to be understood over the radio. The low recruitment age is because controllers currently have a mandatory retirement age of 56 – with some exceptions – and the FAA wants them to work for at least 25 years in the job.
Candidates, additionally, must have three years of general work experience, or a combination of postsecondary education and work experience totaling at least three years.
This alone is no easy feat. Fewer than 10% of applicants meet those initial requirements and are accepted into training.
An air traffic controller monitors a runway in the tower at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
This begins with several weeks of classroom instruction and several months of simulator training. There are several types of simulators, and a student is assigned to a simulator based on the type of facility for which they will be hired – which depends on a trainee’s preference and where controllers are needed.
There are two main types of air traffic facilities: control towers and radar. Anyone who has flown on a plane has likely seen a control tower near the runways, with 360 degrees of tall glass windows to monitor the skies nearby. Controllers there mainly look outside to direct aircraft but also use radar to monitor the airspace and assist aircraft in taking off and landing safely.
Radar facilities, on the other hand, monitor aircraft solely through the use of information depicted on a screen. This includes aircraft flying just outside the vicinity of a major airport or when they’re at higher altitudes and crisscrossing the skies above the U.S. The controllers ensure they don’t fly too close to one another as they follow their flight paths between airports.
If the candidates make it through the first stage, which takes about six months and extensive testing to meet standards, they will be sent to their respective facilities.
Once there, they again go to the classroom, learning the details of the airspace they will be working in. There are more assessments and chances to “wash out” and have to leave the program.
Finally, the candidates are paired with an experienced controller who conducts on-the-job training to control real aircraft. This process may take an additional year or more. It depends on the complexity of the airspace and the amount of aircraft traffic at the site.
Two control towers watch over Newark Liberty International Airport, where a shortage of air traffic controllers has led to blackouts and other problems lately. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Increasing the employment pipeline
But no matter how good the training is, if there aren’t enough graduates, that’s a problem for managing the increasingly crowded skies.
Other plans include paying retention bonuses and allowing more controllers to work beyond the age of 56. That retirement age was put in place in the 1970s on the assumption that cognition for most people begins to decline around then, although research shows that age alone is not necessarily a predictor of cognitive abilities.
But we believe that aviation programs and universities can play an important role fixing the shortage by providing FAA Academy-level training.
Currently, 32 universities including the Florida Institute of Technology and Arizona State University partner with the FAA in its collegiate training initiative to provide basic air traffic control training, which gives graduates automatic entry into the FAA Academy and allows them to skip five weeks of coursework.
The institution where we work, Ohio State University, is currently working on becoming the 33rd this summer and plans to offer an undergraduate major in aviation with specialization in air traffic control.
This helps, but an enhanced version of this program, announced in October 2024, allows graduates of a select few of those universities to skip the FAA Academy altogether and go straight to a control tower or radar facility once they’ve passed all the extensive tests. These schools must match or exceed the level of rigor in their training with the FAA Academy itself.
At the end of the program, students are required to pass an evaluation by an FAA-approved evaluator to ensure that the student graduating from the program meets the same standards as all FAA Academy graduates and is prepared to go to their assigned facility for further training. So far, five schools, such as the University of North Dakota, have joined this program and are currently training air traffic controllers. We intend to join this group in the near future.
Allowing colleges and universities to start the training process while students are still in school should accelerate the pace at which new controllers enter the workforce, alleviate the shortage and make the skies over the U.S. as safe as they can be.
Melanie Dickman is a member at large of the Air Traffic Controllers Association
Brian Strzempkowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Texas children’s performance on an annual reading test was basically flat from 2012 to 2021, even as the state spent billions of additional dollars on K-12 education.
I recently did a peer-reviewed deep dive into the test design documentation to figure out why the reported results weren’t showing improvement. I found the flat scores were at least in part by design. According to policies buried in the documentation, the agency administering the tests adjusted their difficulty level every year. As a result, roughly the same share of students failed the test over that decade regardless of how objectively better they performed relative to previous years.
From 2008 to 2014, I was a bilingual teacher in Texas. Most of my students’ families hailed from Mexico and Central America and were learning English as a new language. I loved seeing my students’ progress.
Yet, no matter how much they learned, many failed the end-of-year tests in reading, writing and math. My hunch was that these tests were unfair, but I could not explain why. This, among other things, prompted me to pursue a Ph.D. in education to better understand large-scale educational assessment.
Ten years later, in 2024, I completed a detailed exploration of Texas’s exam, currently known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. I found an unexpected trend: The share of students who correctly answered each test question was extraordinarily steady across years. Where we would expect to see fluctuation from year to year, performance instead appears artificially flat.
The STAAR’s technical documents suggest that the test is designed much like a norm-referenced test – that is, assessing students relative to their peers, rather than if they meet a fixed standard. In other words, a norm-referenced test cannot tell us if students meet key, fixed criteria or grade-level standards set by the state.
In addition, norm-referenced tests are designed so that a certain share of students always fail, because success is gauged by one’s position on the “bell curve” in relation to other students. Following this logic, STAAR developers use practices like omitting easier questions and adjusting scores to cancel out gains due to better teaching.
Ultimately, the STAAR tests over this time frame – taken by students every year from grade 3 to grade 8 in language arts and math, and less frequently in science and social studies – were not designed to show improvement. Since the test seems designed to keep scores flat, it’s impossible to know for sure if a lack of expected learning gains following big increases in per-student spending was because the extra funds failed to improve teaching and learning, or simply because the test hid the improvements.
Why it matters
Ever since the federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002 and tied students’ test performance to rewards and sanctions for schools, achievement testing has been a primary driver of public education in the United States.
Texas’ educational accountability system has been in place since 1980, and it is well known in the state that the stakes and difficulty of Texas’ academic readiness tests increase with each new version, which typically come out every five to 10 years. What the Texas public may not know is that the tests have been adjusted each and every year – at the expense of really knowing who should “pass” or “fail.”
Students who are marginalized by racism, poverty or language have historically tended to underperform on standardized tests. I believe STAAR’s design makes this problem worse.
On May 28, 2025, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the STAAR test and replace it with a different, shorter test or a norm-referenced test. As best as I can tell, this wouldn’t address the problems I uncovered in my research.
What still isn’t known
I plan to investigate if other states or the federal government use similarly designed tests to evaluate students.
My deep dive into Texas’ test focused on STAAR before its 2022 redevelopment. The latest iteration has changed the test format and question types, but there appears to be little change to the way the test is scored. Without substantive revisions to the scoring calculations “under the hood” of the STAAR test, it is likely Texas will continue to see flat performance.
This article was updated on May 31, 2025, to clarify some language and the type of data used in the chart, replace a link and add a comment from the Texas Education Agency.
The Texas Education Agency responded to a pre-publication request for comment after the piece was published. A spokesman refuted several of the scholar’s research conclusions, including that it behaved like a norm-referenced test. However, the scholar stands by them.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Jeanne Sinclair receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Funding cuts to trans health research are part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to medically and legally restrict trans rights.AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson
Given the Trump administration’s systematic attempts to medically and legally disenfranchise trans people, and its abrupt termination of grants focused on LGBTQ+ health, we can’t say that the notice of termination we received regarding our federally funded research on transgender and nonbinary people’s health was unexpected.
However, our project on trans health became one of the hundreds of grants that have been terminated on ideological grounds. The termination notice stated that the grant no longer fit agency priorities and claimed that this work was not based on scientific research.
Termination notice sent to the authors from the National Institutes of Health. Jae A. Puckett and Paz Galupo, CC BY-ND
The effects of ending research on trans health ripple throughout the scientific community, the communities served by this work and the U.S. economy.
Studying resilience
Research focused on the mental health of trans and nonbinary people has grown substantially in recent years. Over time, this work has expanded beyond understanding the hardships these communities face to also study their resilience and positive life experiences.
Resilience is often understood as an ability to bounce back from challenges. For trans and nonbinary people experiencing gender-based stigma and discrimination, resilience can take several forms. This might look like simply continuing to survive in a transphobic climate, or it might take the form of being a role model for other trans and nonbinary people.
Studies show anti-trans legislation is harming the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth.
With the support of the NIH, we began our work in earnest in 2022. The project was built on many years of research from our teams preceding the grant. From the beginning, we collaborated with trans and nonbinary community members to ensure our research would be attuned to the needs of the community.
At the time our grant was terminated, we were nearing completion of Year 3 of our four-year project. We had collected data from over 600 trans and nonbinary participants across the U.S. and started to follow their progress over time. We had developed a new way to measure resilience among trans and nonbinary people and were about to publish a second measure specifically tailored to people of color.
The termination of our grant and others like it harms our immediate research team, the communities we worked with and the field more broadly.
Loss of scientific workforce
For many researchers in trans health, the losses from these cuts go beyond employment.
Our project had served as a training opportunity for the students and early career professionals involved in the study, providing them with the research experience and mentorship necessary to advance their careers. But with the termination of our funding, two full-time researchers and at least three students will lose their positions. The three lead scientists have lost parts of their salaries and dedicated research time.
These NIH cuts will likely result in the loss of much of the next generation of trans researchers and the contributions they would have made to science and society. Our team and other labs in similar situations will be less likely to work with graduate students due to a lack of available funding to pay and support them. This changes the landscape for future scientists, as it means there will be fewer opportunities for individuals interested in these areas of research to enter graduate training programs.
The Trump administration has directly penalized universities across the country for ‘ideological overreach.’ Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Getty Images
As universities struggle to address federal funding cuts, junior academics will be less likely to gain tenure, and faculty in grant-funded positions may lose their jobs. Universities may also become hesitant to hire people who work in these areas because their research has essentially been banned from federal funding options.
Loss of community trust
Trans and nonbinary people have often been studied under opportunistic and demeaning circumstances. This includes when researchers collect data for their own gains but return little to the communities they work with, or when they do research that perpetuates theories that pathologize those communities. As a result, many are often reluctant to participate in research.
To overcome this reluctance, we grounded our study on community input. We involved an advisory board composed of local trans and nonbinary community members who helped to inform how we conducted our study and measured our findings.
Our work on resilience has been inspired by feedback we received from previous research participants who said that “[trans people] matter even when not in pain.”
Abruptly terminating projects like these can break down trust between researchers and the populations they study.
Loss of scientific knowledge
Research that focuses on the strengths of trans and nonbinary communities is in its infancy. The termination of our grant has led to the loss of the insights our study would have provided on ways to improve health among trans and nonbinary people and future work that would have built off our findings. Resilience is a process that takes time to unfold, and we had not finished the longitudinal data collection in our study – nor will we have the protected time to publish and share other findings from this work.
Despite claims that there is insufficient research on gender-affirming care and more data is needed on the health of trans and nonbinary people, the government has chosen to divest from actual scientific research about trans and nonbinary people’s lives.
Loss of taxpayer dollars
The termination of our grant means we are no longer able to achieve the aims of the project, which depended on the collection and analysis of data over time. This wastes the three years of NIH funding already spent on the project.
Scientists and experts who participated in the review of our NIH grant proposal rated our project more highly than 96% of the projects we competed against. Even so, the government made the unscientific choice to override these decisions and terminate our work.
Millions of taxpayer dollars have already been invested in these grants to improve the health of not only trans and nonbinary people, but also American society as a whole. With the termination of these grants, few will get to see the benefits of this investment.
Jae A. Puckett has received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Paz Galupo has received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Katherine G. Hastings, PhD Candidate in Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia
Most households that own firearms have more than one − and owners often don’t secure all of them.StockPlanets/E+ via Getty Images
More than half of U.S. teens living in households with firearms believe they can access and load a firearm at home. Even when their parents report storing all firearms locked and unloaded, more than one-third of teens still believe they could access and load one. These are the main findings of our new study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
We are behavioral scientists investigating youth injury prevention and youth safety. In this study, we analyzed national survey data from nearly 500 parents who owned firearms and their teens. One survey asked the parents to report how many firearms they had in the home and how they stored each one. Another asked their teens to estimate how quickly they could access and load a firearm at home.
While the presence of unlocked and loaded firearms in the home was weakly linked to perceived access among teens, we found that parents’ storage practices alone were a poor predictor of whether teens believed they could access a firearm. What’s more, in households with more than one firearm, locking up more firearms was not at all linked to perceived access among teens if at least one remained unsecured.
In short, just one unlocked firearm can undo the protective benefit of securing all other firearms in the home, our results showed.
Our study focused on teens’ beliefs about firearm access, not their actual access. However, these perceptions may provide important clues around firearm access and use. Prior research shows that teens who believe they can access a firearm are more likely to access and carry one. This is particularly concerning for teens who already have a higher risk for dying by suicide.
Despite evidence that securely storing firearms saves lives, efforts to promote that messaging may be less effective when it is not universally applied to all firearms in the home or when teens still know how to access them.
Our study also points to the need for messaging and safety strategies that consider teen behavior amid household firearm dynamics. For example, teens may observe where firearms are stored or know where keys or combinations are kept and unlock firearms in moments of impulsivity or emotional distress. Beyond securely storing firearms, encouraging parents to treat every firearm in the household as a potential source of risk and talking with teens about how to address conflicts and promote mental and emotional well-being may also be protective.
Additionally, our study adds support for universal laws that require securely storing all firearms in homes in which children live and mandating routine assessments of teen firearm access by pediatricians.
What still isn’t known
It is still unclear how teens’ beliefs about their access to firearms affects whether they actually seek them out – or how the variability of parents’ practices on storing firearms affects teen access.
Another important question is how teens’ perceptions of their access to firearms at home may vary depending on cultural backgrounds, geography and different households’ attitudes and beliefs around firearm use.
Additionally, our study looked only at teens ages 14 to 18. Further research is needed to explore these associations among younger children in firearm-owning households.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Rebeccah Sokol receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Katherine G. Hastings does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ian McDonough, Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Older adults generally have a good sense of their own financial abilities – unless they have dementia. shapecharge/E+ via Getty Images
Older adults diagnosed with dementia lose their ability to assess how well they manage their finances, according to a recent study I co-authored in The Gerontologist. In comparison, people of the same age who don’t have dementia are aware of their financial abilities – and this awareness improves over time.
For our study, we used data from over 2,000 adults in the U.S. age 65 and older, collected during a long-term study on aging.
We focused on how participants’ financial skills changed over time. The study began in 1998 and is still running, but we probed data collected between 1998 and 2009.
Participants were assessed at one year, two years, five years and 10 years for their ability to carry out everyday tasks, including ones that required handling money. For example, they had to calculate the cost of a gym membership and a store discount rate, fill out part of a tax return and assess the cost of medical services. They also rated how well they thought they could do everyday financial tasks. Initially, none of the participants were diagnosed with dementia, but over the course of the decade, 87 participants, or 3.1%, received a dementia diagnosis.
We found that even though participants’ performance on financial tasks declined as they aged, older adults who did not have dementia and older adults who had mild cognitive impairment were appropriately aware of their financial abilities. What’s more, that awareness increased over time. However, participants who were diagnosed with dementia during the study and experienced severe cognitive decline often misjudged how well they performed financial tasks.
Financial scams targeting older adults are on the rise.
The lack of insight into one’s cognitive abilities is called anosognosia. This study reveals a new type called financial anosognosia.
Few tools are available that can support families in helping cognitively impaired adults manage their finances. Our research suggests that there is a critical window of time after people begin to experience cognitive decline during which they are still aware of their financial abilities. We believe that this is when people can take action to secure their finances and develop systems to protect themselves from fraud.
What still isn’t known
Close friends or family members are often tempted to take away the financial autonomy of an older adult who is mismanaging their finances. However, that may not be the best solution, particularly for people who feel that handling their finances is a core part of their identity. More research is needed to identify how best to balance personal autonomy and the need to protect a person’s finances.
What’s next
This study used paper-and-pencil tasks to assess financial performance. But increasingly, many older adults are using online banking.
E-banking simplifies many calculations, which may be helpful for older adults with declining cognition. However, e-banking can also make finances more of a black box, which may decrease a person’s awareness of their financial abilities. Furthermore, e-banking is constantly advancing, putting older adults at a disadvantage because they are more likely to be less cognitively flexible and to learn more slowly.
We hope to explore whether older adults with and without cognitive decline have similar awareness of their ability to appropriately manage their finances online and identify potential financial scams.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Ian McDonough receives funding from The National Institutes of Health.
On June 11, 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a slate of eight new members to serve on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on national vaccine policy.
The announcement, made on the social media platform X, comes two days after Kennedy removed all 17 of the serving committee members. Kennedy called their replacements “a bold step in restoring public trust” rooted in “radical transparency and gold standard science.”
The Conversation U.S. asked Santosh Kumar Gautam, an expert in global health policy at the University of Notre Dame, to explain how the vaccine committee’s guidance has shaped vaccine recommendations for the public, and what the changes might mean for peoples’ ability to access vaccines in the future.
What is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices?
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, is a panel of experts appointed to advise the CDC on how to use vaccines to protect the health of people in the U.S. The committee’s job is to review multiple strands of scientific evidence to recommend which vaccines should be used, who should get them and when they should be given. Its guidance affects vaccine schedules for both children and adults, insurance coverage and public health policy across the country.
The committee was formed in 1964 to establish national vaccine policy as federal immunization programs began to expand. It can have up to 19 voting members, who are appointed by the secretary of Health and Human Services. Members are experts in areas such as medicine, public health and immunology. Member usually serve overlapping four-year terms to ensure continuity. All 17 previous members were appointed at different times during the Biden administration. Removing all members of the committee at once is unprecedented.
The group also includes nonvoting members from government health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. There are also representatives from more than 30 medical and public health organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians.
These nonvoting members share useful information and real-world experience such as practical issues in administering vaccines in hospitals, management of vaccine side effects and insights into adverse events. Their input helps the committee make recommendations that reflect both science and practical needs.
The committee meets three times a year to review new data on vaccine safety and effectiveness. Its next meeting is scheduled for June 25-27 and is expected to include discussions on COVID-19 and HPV vaccines, with recommendation votes planned for COVID-19 boosters, human papilloma virus and influenza vaccines. The meeting is open to the public and will be telecast live online.
What is the committee’s role in vaccine policy?
The committee makes its recommendations to the CDC by reviewing scientific evidence about a vaccine’s safety and efficacy, as well as practical issues, such as how easy a vaccine is to use, how it affects different groups, its side-effects and how it fits into the health system. The recommendations don’t just consider whether a vaccine works, but how it can be most effectively deployed to protect the American public from disease outbreaks.
The committee looks at data from clinical trials and other research to examine the most recent data on a vaccine’s safety, efficacy and use in everyday settings. When new vaccines come out or a change occurs in the way a disease spreads or behaves, the committee often revises its advice. It also responds to public health emergencies such as recent measles outbreaks in the U.S.
What was the committee’s role during the COVID-19 pandemic?
The committee played a vital role in evaluating vaccine safety and effectiveness and authorizing the use of vaccines for different age groups by reviewing clinical trial data, from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and other vaccine manufacturers.
The committee also developed step-by-step guidelines for who should get vaccinated first, based on how likely people were to catch the virus, their risk of serious disease, the type of work they did and whether they came from a population that was historically underserved or at higher risk. It also issued tailored guidance for pregnant and breastfeeding women, immunocompromised people and children and adolescents as more trial data became available.
Public health experts have expressed concern that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to replace all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee will erode its ability to provide evidence-based guidance.
Who are the new members that Kennedy appointed?
Although Kennedy promised more transparency, he handpicked the advisory committee’s new members without revealing how they were selected. Historically, the body’s members are selected after an extensive vetting process that can take two years.
The committee’s new makeup and Kennedy’s decades-long anti-vaccine stance threaten to erode the integrity of scientific decision-making and commitment to ethical standards in vaccine recommendations.
Kennedy’s overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will likely affect how insurers, doctors and the public make decisions about vaccines – and vaccine policy generally. For example, the advisory committee’s decisions directly affect which vaccines are covered by health insurance. If a vaccine is not recommended by the committee, many insurance plans, including those under the Affordable Care Act, are not required to cover it. This means families could face out-of-pocket costs, making it harder for children to access routine immunizations.
The advisory committee also plays a key role in shaping the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule. Given Kennedy’s long-held skepticism about childhood vaccines — including those for measles and polio — some public health experts worry that the newly appointed members could push to revisit or revise vaccine recommendations, especially for newer and more debated vaccines like those for COVID-19 or HPV.
States usually base their school entry vaccine requirements on the committee’s guidelines, and insurers often use them to determine which vaccines are covered. As a result, shifts in policy to childhood vaccinations could influence both school vaccination mandates and access to vaccines for millions of children.
Santosh Kumar Gautam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: United Kingdom – Prime Minister’s Office 10 Downing Street
Press release
Appointment of Lord-Lieutenant for Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale: 30 June 2025
The King has been pleased to appoint Mr John Jeffrey JP, DL as His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant for Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale.
The King has been pleased to appoint Mr John Jeffrey JP, DL as His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant for Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale, to succeed Richard Scott, The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry KT, KBE, CVO, DL, FSA, FRSE following his retirement on 4th July 2025.
Background
Mr Jeffrey was educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh and then at Newcastle University where he graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Agriculture. He is a fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society, a Justice of the Peace, and Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Roxburghshire. Mr Jeffrey runs his own farm estates business and has played Rugby nationally and internationally including on the Scotland Men’s national team and for the British Lions. John was a founding member and Vice-Chair of the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation which works to find a cure for MND. He has held a number of Board and Governance roles including the Moredun Foundation for Animal Health & Welfare, Border Union Agricultural Society and the British Lions Trust. John is also the former Chairman of Scottish Rugby and vice-chair of World Rugby.
The competition, which formed part of a wider initiative to promote deaf awareness, invited primary school pupils to create posters showcasing a superhero who is deaf, highlighting the importance of representation and understanding.
A judging panel selected three winning entries from the submissions received. The panel consisted of Councillor Ian Massie, member of the Learning and Families Committee, Fiona Mackay, Service Manager for Inclusion and Additional Support, David McPhee, Team Leader for Equalities, Ronald Burns, a resident and employee of the council who is a deaf BSL user and Kirsty Lockhart, Inclusion Co-ordinator. Additionally, Kirsten from Crieff High School and George Brodie, a previous pupil who is now studying Art at Dundee University were part of the judging panel.
The judges praised the entries as “very imaginative and eye-catching”, reflecting the pupils’ thoughtful engagement with the theme.
The winning entries from Hanna, Pitlochry Primary School, Taylor, Goodlyburn Primary School and Evie, Oakbank Primary School, were celebrated in a special presentation at the pupil’s schools where they received certificates and prizes for their outstanding work.
In addition to the poster competition, around 500 pupils participated in deaf awareness, using the online resource aimed at raising awareness about deafness and promoting inclusive communication strategies. The resource included a retelling of the well-know Elmer story in sign language by Hazel Burns, Librarian at Perth High School.
This resource will be a valuable addition to the ongoing work of the Hearing Support team who provide vital support to around 110 children and young people, both at home and within their educational setting. By complementing existing services, the resource will help further embed understanding and inclusion across primary schools within the Perth and Kinross area.
Congratulations to all the winners for their inspiring designs and to every pupil who took part in this important initiative.
Councillor Ian Massie, selection panel judge and member of the Council’s Learning and Families Committee said: “This competition has been a fantastic way to engage young people in raising deaf awareness within their own and other schools in Perth and Kinross. The creativity and empathy shown in the pupils’ designs are truly inspiring, and we are incredibly proud of their efforts.”
Councillor Peter Barrett, Equalities Lead for Perth and Kinross Council, added: “Raising awareness about deafness and promoting equality is vital in building a more inclusive community. The work these pupils have done, both through their superhero designs and the online resource, demonstrates a deep understanding and commitment to making a difference to those in our communities who are deaf.
A breath-taking, life-sized artwork depicting its painter’s wife as a beautiful goddess has gone on display after being delicately conserved by experts at Leeds Art Gallery.
The romantic tribute Goddess of Night, by artist Quentin Bell is part of a new exhibition exploring different portrayals of women over the past 400 years, after it was the subject of a careful restoration project by specialist paper conservator James Caverhill.
Separating the fragile piece from its backing, James began the painstaking process of repairing a split which had occurred in the brittle paper over many years.
Drawn in astonishing detail on fragile material, the remarkable piece is one of a pair, with its companion Goddess of Day – also part of the gallery’s collection – having been generously gifted last year by Vanda Walton.
Both pieces are now proudly on display in the gallery as part of its current Portrayals of Women exhibition, which explores how women have been portrayed from the 17th century to the present day.
Bell was the nephew of Virginia Woolf, as well as a renowned ceramicist and former professor of fine art at The University of Leeds. He based both artworks on his beloved wife Anne Olivier Bell, known as Olivier, completing the captivating portraits in the early years of their marriage.
Olivier, a distinguished art expert herself, met her future husband during a study trip to Paris in 1937 where he painted her for the first time.
In 1945, she worked for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Branch of the Control Commission for Germany, one of the so-called ‘Monuments Men’ featured in the 2014 film starring George Clooney.
She was also one of the first members of the Arts Council, a role which included escorting paintings from Munich’s Alte Pinakothek on goods trains across Germany for display at the National Gallery in London.
Both Goddess of Day and Goddess of Night hung in the couple’s Sussex home for many years until 1980, when Bell gifted both paintings to his friend and colleague Peter Walton, Vanda’s late husband.
The works, which were cherished and well cared for, remained in Peter and Vanda’s home until last year when they were generously donated to the gallery.
Kirsty Young, Leeds Art Gallery’s assistant curator of fine art, said: “Both these works by Bell have a unique and timeless beauty, even more so because of the personal story behind them and the powerful emotional connection the artist clearly had with his subject.
“Bell’s works frequently reference classical mythology and these works that have a strong architectural quality to them are a perfect reflection of this.
“In various mythologies, day and night are personified as female deities that control the cycle of light and darkness. These portrayals often highlight female power, beauty, wisdom and influence. The figures here are clearly identifiable through the symbolic items they are holding.
“The nature of works on paper means that over time, they can be subject to this kind of deterioration as the paper can become very brittle, so we’re extremely fortunate to have James’s expertise in conserving Goddess of Night in readiness for display.
“Bell painted Olivier a number of times through his career, and as well as being a companion in life, she was clearly also a huge inspiration to him artistically, so we’re looking forward to sharing their story with visitors through these stunning artworks.”
Bell’s works are part of Leeds Art Gallery’s impressive fine art collection which is designated as being of national and international importance. The collection of works on paper is one of the finest in Britain and consists of over 10,000 items dating from 1450 to the present day.
The Portrayals of Women exhibition brings together a range of artworks from Leeds Art Gallery’s nationally renowned works on paper collection. It features a selection of works including historic pieces by Ottavio Leoni and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, to recent acquisitions by contemporary artists Skye Davies and SHARP
Councillor Salma Arif, Leeds City Council’s executive member for adult social care, active lifestyles and culture, said: “The opportunity to learn about and be inspired by stunning artworks like this is exactly why our gallery and its incredible collection are so important to life and culture in Leeds.
“Preserving and conserving these works means that future generations will also be able to learn about them and their fascinating stories for many years to come.”
Jane Bhoyroo, principal keeper at Leeds Art Gallery added: “We are very grateful for this recent gift which enables us to continue to grow the city’s outstanding collection. We look forward to sharing this remarkable work with our audiences”.
Source: Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University – Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University –
The International Children’s Center “Artek” celebrates its centenary this year. Over its century-long history, the camp has become a real forge of talents. It unites children from different regions of Russia and countries and opens up new horizons for them.
Artek hosted the technology festival “From Dream to Progress”, dedicated to the development of the latest technologies in various sectors of the country – construction, agriculture, space industry, medicine. The event was attended by representatives of the Russian ministries, universities, as well as various companies such as VKontakte, Russian Railways, Sberbank.
Polytech is one of Artek’s key partners. Every year, the university holds specialized shifts at the International Children’s Center aimed at developing engineering thinking, modern skills, and scientific and technical creativity, helping talented children find their way.
The University organized several interactive platforms for the participants of the anniversary shift. One of them was called “Programming Microorganisms”. There, schoolchildren learned how genetic engineering changes medicine, agro-industry and food technologies. Under the guidance of IBSiB students Alena Babich and Matvey Mokan, the children immersed themselves in the world of genetic code, tried to create and edit DNA on models.
At the site “Electronics for Space and Telecommunication Systems of the “Smart Environment”” the participants got acquainted with the latest systems of space and ground communications, got the opportunity to work with a real nanosatellite. As part of teams, they processed data received from spacecraft and ground sources of radio signals. Engineer of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications Alexandra Kuznetsova and assistant of the institute Sergey Melnikov spoke about promising professions in the field of space technologies.
At the “Smart City Unmanned Systems” site, schoolchildren equipped models of unmanned vehicles with the necessary equipment. They studied the operating principles of sensors and probes, understood the logic of placing devices on unmanned vehicles, and gained an understanding of the technologies of the “smart city” of the future. The master class was conducted by Georgy Vasilyanov, senior lecturer at the Institute of Scientific and Technical Sciences, and Vladimir Voronov, engineer at the Institute of Scientific and Technical Sciences. The site continued a long-standing tradition. Every year, Polytechnic University holds a specialized shift in Artek dedicated to the technologies of the “smart city” and autonomous transport.
For us, cooperation with Artek is an opportunity to spark children’s interest in science and innovation today. We see how the children who have attended our shifts return home with new knowledge and a desire to change the world for the better. During specialized shifts, we strive to inspire participants by showing them the connection between school knowledge, university education and the professions of the future. Through the interaction of science and industry, we demonstrate how innovations make life better, and high-quality education opens the way to the profession of your dreams, – noted Artem Egupov, Director of the Center for Work with Applicants at SPbPU.
On Artek’s birthday, Polytech prepared interactive platforms demonstrating key areas of technological development. Not only the participants of the Artek shift, but also children from all over Crimea invited to this event were able to get acquainted with the advanced developments of the university.
The festival’s guests of honor were Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Chernyshenko and Minister of Education of the Russian Federation Sergey Kravtsov, who viewed the exhibits. Dmitry Chernyshenko especially noted the interactive platforms of SPbPU, emphasizing that they attract the largest number of participants and serve as a striking example of an effective combination of educational methods with modern technologies.
The Artek anniversary ended with a celebration in which more than 4,000 children took part. The main event was the musical “100 Years of the Childhood Road” – a colorful show that told about the centuries-old history of the camp, from the first days to the present day.
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