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Category: Universities

  • MIL-OSI Global: Sexism linked to social ills for men and women, finds largest cross-cultural study of its kind

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Magdalena Zawisza, Associate Professor in Gender and Consumer Psychology, Director of Groups and Societies Research Centre and Chair of Faculty Athena Swan Committee, Anglia Ruskin University

    Feminism is facing a backlash, with women’s rights being rolled back in many countries and a significant number of people saying feminism has gone far enough or even too far. Yet women still face basic obstacles to education in some countries and are generally paid less than men. They still suffer from male violence and, in some places, face increasing restrictions to reproductive rights. There are even some places where families force midwives to kill their newborn girls.

    Many women are also fed up with doing both a full-time job and the lion’s share of domestic duties and unpaid caring jobs. It’s easy to wonder whether gender equality is simply impossible, especially as many men inaccurately perceive that gains for women equate losses for men.

    But there is hope. Our 62-nation psychological study, which is largest of its kind, suggests that gender equality benefits us all and sexism is harmful to everybody – women, men and nations in many surprising ways. As such, we all have an interest in promoting egalitarianism.

    As our findings show, sexism is linked with several social ills affecting us all. For example, higher sexism predicted lower GDP – indicating lower economic productivity. It also predicted a lower “global peace index”, meaning nation’s higher domestic and international conflict, militarisation and lower safety and security.

    Further, sexism was linked to a greater level of antidemocratic practices in a given country. Lastly, it even predicted shorter healthy lifespans (ones without chronic disease or disability) in women and men as measured with WHO’s Healthy Life Expectancy in Women and Men. For example, our data reveals that one point increase in sexism (measured from 0-5) is linked with a 9.12 months shorter lifespan in men and 8.88 months in women.

    While the type of analysis we did cannot directly prove that sexism causes these issues, the pattern of our findings aligns with theoretically driven predictions and with experiments that directly test such links on a smaller scale. It makes more sense to expect that sexism leads to poor health than that poor health leads to sexism, for example.

    Specifically, other research reports that sexism reduces human capital by restricting women’s education and job opportunities, thus depleting economic productivity. A country where most women work is likely to have much higher productivity than a country where all the women stay at home.

    Research also shows that sexist masculine norms encourage male violence contributing to greater conflict. And we know that sexism is linked to medical discrimination for women, such as less medical research on women and treating women’s complaints as less credible. This may lead to poorer health.

    Sexism prevents men from getting help with their mental and physical health.
    YURII MASLAK/Shutterstock

    For men, sexism discourages seeking help for psychological or medical problems, seeing it as weakness. It also encourages risk-taking, such as aggression or not using seatbelts. This may well cause a reduction in health and wellbeing.

    Two faces of sexism

    Importantly, our study also reveals that affectionate but patronising attitudes to women are also harmful to all – you might not even recognise them as sexist. And you are not alone.

    After 30 years of its conception, our research supports the ambivalent sexism theory. The theory proposes that sexism has two faces: hostile and benevolent. While both are ugly, the latter hides under the veil of superficial positivity. Hostile sexism is an open and overt hostility to non-traditional women and a desire to punish those who break norms, such as female politicians.

    Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is superficially positive but patronising. It includes attitudes that reward traditional women, such as stay-at-home mums, by idealising them, offering them male protection and provision. This sounds innocent, but such beliefs imply women’s weakness.

    In fact, research has shown that exposure to benevolent sexism increases women’s acceptance of hostile sexism, decreases their work performance, and reduces their support for gender equality action.

    Both ideologies work together to maintain men’s power over women: they form a system of rewards and punishments akin to the iron fist (hostility) in a velvet glove (benevolence). Thus, hostile and benevolent sexism are internalised also by women.

    Our study shows that people who hold benevolent sexist views are also more likely to hold hostile sexist views, as the two correlate positively in 62 countries across five continents. Compared with 2000, when the last such study was done in 19 countries, average national sexism scores dropped a meagre 0.47 points (on a 0-5 scale). See our world map of this and other concepts we measured.

    While men are more sexist than women around the world, women’s beliefs about themselves are also sexist to some extent. Interestingly, as men’s hostile sexism increased, women embraced benevolent sexism more (sometimes outscoring men) – probably attempting to secure the promised protection and provision.

    Unfortunately, this benevolent promise appears false. Across our 62 countries, the higher benevolent sexism, the lower was the gender equality, women’s labour participation and the more time women spend on unpaid domestic chores.

    Taken together, our research suggests that it may well be in the interests of women, men and nations alike to tackle sexism for a better future for us all. In other words, women’s gains mean men’s gains too.

    Dr Magdalena Zawisza received funding for activities related to this study from from National Science Centre, Poland. She volunteers her expertise to Women on Boards CIC Leadership Committee and Think Tank, UK.

    This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Centre in Poland (grant 18 number: 2017/26/M/HS6/00360) awarded to Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka

    – ref. Sexism linked to social ills for men and women, finds largest cross-cultural study of its kind – https://theconversation.com/sexism-linked-to-social-ills-for-men-and-women-finds-largest-cross-cultural-study-of-its-kind-247183

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Emotions change our perception of time – as demonstrated on The Traitors

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time, Liverpool John Moores University

    In the UK version of the TV show The Traitors, contestants were given five minutes to find as much gold as they could, put it into cages and hoist them before the time ran out. There was a catch though – they weren’t given any information about when the five minutes were up.

    Instead, they had to use their internal sense of time to decide when to end the task. Stopping the task too soon meant they collected fewer gold pieces. Stopping the task too late would mean all their gold would be discarded. Accurate timing was therefore the key to success – but interestingly, they chose to end the task after just three minutes.

    Why are we so spectacularly bad at judging time? Can you time a minute or an hour perfectly without using a clock? You may be surprised to realise you are not as good at this as you think.

    We don’t have a clock in our brains that keeps track of time perfectly. As a result, time can often feel like it is passing more quickly or slowly than normal. This is because our experience of time is shaped by our activities and emotions.

    Emotional bias

    An extreme example of this is what happens when we think we are about to die. If you’ve ever been in a car accident, you have probably experienced the sensation that time is slowing down, and everything is happening in slow motion.

    When we experience extreme threats, flight or fight responses kick in, our heart rate increases and the insula, an area of the brain responsible for emotion processing, becomes activated. This change in our brain activity and bodies also appears to be responsible for distorting our sense of time.

    We actually demonstrated this in recent research where we explored how people perceived time when walking across a virtual crumbing ice bridge. Wearing a VR headset, participants were tasked with walking from one end of a mountain ice-bridge to the other.

    As they walked, the ice blocks beneath them would crack or give way entirely – causing them to “fall” to the ground. Throughout the task we monitored our participants heart-rate and how much they sweated.

    Our results show that people rarely felt like time passed as normal during this task. Instead, they often felt like time was passing more slowly than normal. Critically, those who experienced the biggest change in arousal during the task were the ones who were most likely to report that time was slowing down as they traversed the bridge. Controlling our emotions is therefore key to maintaining a stable and accurate sense of time.

    It’s not just near-death situation which distort our sense of time. Events during normal daily life govern how quickly we feel like time is passing. Research shows that time really does pass more quickly when we are happy, and it crawls at the pace of a snail when we are bored. These distortions to time are caused by changes in how much attention we pay to time.

    Our brains have a limited capacity. We only really attend to time when it is highly relevant to what we are currently doing, or when there is a high degree of uncertainty about time.

    When we are having fun and socialising with friends, time is rarely a priority, and as a result we pay less attention to its passing than normal. As a result, these types of positive events tend to feel like they are passing more quickly than normal.

    However, when we are dreading a future event, or desperate for a current one to end, we have a tendency to obsess over time. This causes us to pay more attention to time than normal, resulting in the sensation that it is passing slowly.

    Uncertainty over time

    Being uncertain about time has the same effect. When waiting for a delayed train, for example, our level of temporal uncertainty is high because we don’t know precisely when (if ever) our wait will end. Not knowing when an event will occur causes us to focus on time, and this fixation on time is the reason that it drags.

    Time drags when waiting for a train.
    zhukovvvlad/Shutterstock

    During The Traitors gold searching task, time seemed to fly for the contestants, making them feel like it has been five minutes when it had actually only been three. This is probably because the stress of finding the gold, while running around on uneven terrain, and constantly trying to keep an eye out for someone stabbing you in the back, took most if not all of their thinking capacity.

    As a result, despite the importance of time to the task, the contestants simply paid too little attention to time to accurately process it. This, coupled with the increased arousal caused by all the running around, and fear of getting the task wrong left them them hopelessly unable to accurately keep track of time. Ultimately changes in their attention and arousal resulted in them ending the task prematurely and missing out on much needed prize money.

    Understanding the ways in which attention and emotion affect our sense of time can help us to overcome the sense of time flying and dragging when we don’t want it to. If you find yourself in a state of distress, and sense that the world is slowing down around you, the best thing to do is to try to stay calm as reduce your level of arousal. This will help time to speed up.

    But when you find yourself clock-watching, perhaps waiting for a shift at work to end, distraction is key to making that time fly. By focusing on things other than time, you can trick yourself into feeling like time is passing more quickly, reducing how long you feel like you are in a state of torment.

    Ruth Ogden receives funding from The British Academy, The Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, CHANSE and Horizon 2020. This piece was written as part of the Wellcome Trust Project “After the End” 225238/Z/22/Z and the ESRC project TIMED (ES/X005321/1).

    – ref. Emotions change our perception of time – as demonstrated on The Traitors – https://theconversation.com/emotions-change-our-perception-of-time-as-demonstrated-on-the-traitors-248254

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump labels drug cartels as terrorist groups – what it means for Mexico and beyond

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amalendu Misra, Professor of International Politics, Lancaster University

    Donald Trump returned to the US presidency on January 20 with a flurry of executive orders. This included the designation of criminal gangs and drug cartels operating south of the Mexico border as “foreign terrorist organisations” – a first for a US president. The state department will now decide which groups are added to the list.

    Trump’s disdain for the criminal fraternity in Latin America is not new. When announcing his first run for the presidency in 2015, Trump claimed the Mexican government was deliberately sending drugs, rapists and criminals to the US.

    To keep them out, he floated and later implemented a rigorous border protection programme. This led not only to mass deportations, but also the building of a concrete and metal wall along the US-Mexico border that spans hundreds of miles.

    In his new order, Trump claimed the “cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the western hemisphere that has not only destabilised countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the US with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs”.

    How will this order, if it eventually becomes law, impact the people towards whom it is directed?

    Fears of military action

    A terrorist designation expands the government’s ability to collect military intelligence on the cartels and prosecute people deemed to be offering any “material support” to these groups. However, some fear the designation will also make it politically easier for the US government to order direct military intervention against the cartels without having to go through Congress.

    During Trump’s first term, for instance, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was designated as a foreign terrorist organisation. Its head, General Qasem Soleimani, was killed by a US drone strike less than a year later. The Trump Administration cited its foreign terrorist organisation order as justification for its actions.

    Trump has not yet ruled out similar military action in Mexico. On January 20, while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, Trump was asked whether he would send the special forces to confront Mexico’s cartels. “Could happen. Stranger things have happened”, he replied. In the past, Trump has also apparently suggested a missile attack on Mexican drug labs.

    The idea of unilateral US military action against the cartels has always faced stiff opposition from Mexico. And in December, as plans to designate the cartels as terrorist organisations gathered steam, Trump’s Mexican counterpart Claudia Sheinbaum said: “We collaborate, we coordinate, we work together, but we will never subordinate ourselves … Mexico is a free, sovereign, independent country and we do not accept interference.”

    However, US military operations in Mexico may not be so far-fetched. The US has previously staged armed interventions in Latin America when it has felt its national interests were under threat. The ousting of Panama’s leader, Manuel Noriega, in 1989 is a good example.

    That year, the then US president George H.W. Bush ordered 20,000 American troops to invade Panama in an operation to “protect the lives of American citizens”. Noriega, who was arrested after spending days hiding in Panama City’s Vatican embassy, was wanted by US authorities for racketeering and drug trafficking.

    The invasion resulted in the deaths of 514 Panamanian soldiers and civilians (though the unofficial count is closer to 1,000), and three American servicemen.

    Power of persuasion

    The terrorist designation could, on the other hand, simply be a tactic to pressure governments across Latin America into taking tougher action against the gangs. We have already seen the likes of El Salvador’s iron-fisted president, Nayib Bukele, do the heavy lifting for the US, so far as countering criminal gangs is concerned.

    With US assistance, El Salvador currently operates the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security jail that holds high-ranking members of the country’s main criminal gangs. Its critics consider it a “black hole of human rights” and one of the harshest prisons in the world.

    Over the past few weeks, Trump has rebuked Sheinbaum for not doing enough to curtail the power of cartels operating in her country. He claimed earlier in January that Mexico was “essentially run by the cartels”.

    Trump’s proposed appointment of Colonel Ronald Johnson, a former Green Beret with extensive experience in US military intelligence, as ambassador to Mexico signals a potential shift in US strategy toward direct confrontation with the region’s governments to step in line.

    Trump can also buy compliance from governments in Latin America to do his bidding against the cartels, as was the case with Plan Colombia. Launched in 2000, the US-funded US$1 billion project (equivalent to roughly £1.5 billion today) provided foreign and military aid to Colombia in an attempt to fight the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics in the country.

    Plan Colombia was subject to considerable controversy. Its critics claim it led to gross human rights violations as well as the destruction of the environment and people’s livelihoods. But successive US administrations have maintained that Plan Colombia, which came to an end in 2015, was a success.

    The terrorist designation will usher in seismic changes in Latin America. Should Sheinbaum embrace Trump’s initiative, in part or in its entirety, then it is likely to lead to a civil war-like situation in Mexico, given the firepower and deep pockets the cartels have.

    In 2007, under the so-called Mérida Initative, the US donated at least US$1.5 billion to help the then Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, launch his “war on drugs”. The outcome of that war was disastrous, with tens of thousands of lives lost and its effects still being felt today.

    Amalendu Misra is a recipient of British Academy and Nuffield Foundation Grants.

    – ref. Trump labels drug cartels as terrorist groups – what it means for Mexico and beyond – https://theconversation.com/trump-labels-drug-cartels-as-terrorist-groups-what-it-means-for-mexico-and-beyond-248035

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Holocaust: how ‘rescue archaeology’ is tackling the impending loss of surviving witnesses

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton

    This year is the 80th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz, the huge and complex concentration and death camp in which one million Jews were murdered.

    The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is For a Better Future, a message of hope that is much needed in this extremely troubling world, where the far right is gaining power inside and outside of Europe.

    An issue which has troubled those, like myself, who are involved with Holocaust education and memorialisation for some time is what to do when the survivor generation passes on.

    This is no longer a theoretical concern. Every year, inevitably and at an accelerating rate, the numbers of Holocaust survivors diminishes. In the past few years in the UK alone, prominent survivors have been lost. Most recently Lily Ebert, aged 100, who late in life became famous through relating her harrowing story through the very modern media of TikTok.

    Speaking about her death, King Charles said: “Alongside other Holocaust survivors she became an integral part of the fabric of our nation; her extraordinary resilience and courage an example to us all, which will never be forgotten.”

    Indeed, many Holocaust survivors have been prominent in recent years, recounting their testimony to schools and the media. Holocaust Memorial Day, inaugurated at the start of the new millennium, has provided a special place for survivors at both a national and local level.

    This year at the University of Southampton, for example, we are privileged to have Janine Webber, a survivor of the Lvov ghetto in German-occupied Poland, speaking. She will relay to a diverse audience of all ages and backgrounds her life before, during and after the Holocaust.

    Through the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, we have organised this city-wide event for over two decades. We know, however, that this may be one of the last times we will be privileged to have the survivors at the heart of our programme. In 2035 it will be the 90th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and by then few survivors, if any, will still be alive.



    Read more:
    Charlotte Delbo and the women of Convoy 31000: how researching their stories led me to a forgotten subcamp and Nazi lies in the Auschwitz archive

    There is a certain irony in the understandable angst about the devastating prospect of a world without Holocaust survivors (as well as their liberators, and those who helped Jewish people during their darkest hour).

    For many years after 1945, Holocaust survivors were not given the space to talk about their experiences – a silence that often extended to their children and wider families. It was only talking in their own small circles that these survivors felt that their experiences would be understood.

    Now the situation is very different. Survivors are honoured for their work in educating new generations born well after the second world war. King Charles’s heartfelt tribute to Ebert reflects a wider tendency. Many have been given honours, including a knighthood to the late survivor leader, Ben Helfgott, who died in 2023. Helfgott was one of over 700 child survivors who were flown to the UK in 1945 to recuperate and ended up making a huge contribution to the country.

    The Pride of Britain Awards honoured Sir Ben Helfgott in 2020.

    In the 1950s and 60s, when the first histories of the Holocaust were produced, the focus was on the perpetrators and the victims were voiceless and seen as “uneducated men” who had no place in accounts of the recent past. All of this changed in the late 20th century when the Holocaust grew in public awareness and interest.

    Belatedly, the survivors were rescued from obscurity and the human element of the tragedy came to the fore. Local and then international testimony projects emerged, the largest being the ongoing Visual History Archive which has interviewed close to 60,000 survivors, including of more recent genocides such as that in Rwanda.

    ‘Rescue archaeology’

    I have estimated that there may be up to 100,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors in video, oral history and written format – perhaps the most related to any event in history. Most recently these interviews have been developed as interactive holograms where students and others can ask questions of the survivors such as the University of Southern California’s Dimensions project.

    These projects are a form of “rescue archaeology”, saving the testimony of survivors before it is too late. They are, especially in the hologram form, a way of directly confronting the dilemma of how to educate and commemorate without the survivors actually being present.

    The University of Southern California’s Dimensions in Testimony project.

    In 2000, the Imperial War Museum in London opened its first Holocaust galleries. Before then the Holocaust had rarely been confronted by this landmark museum. In 2019 a new permanent Holocaust exhibition was also opened. In both exhibitions, survivor testimony was a prominent and engaging feature. Video testimony especially can capture the attention of all age groups and backgrounds.

    But even with this remarkable resource of recorded Holocaust testimony, something huge and irreplaceable will be lost when we no longer have the survivors to tell their stories.

    Even when survivors are unfocused in their presentation, or they find it challenging to communicate what is ultimately indescribable, there has been a bond between them and their audience. In some ways their presence has made it too easy for those involved in education and commemoration to deal with the Holocaust.

    We must therefore find fresh ways of doing justice to their experiences, using their recorded experiences (including those who were killed but managed to write their testimony in the war itself through diaries) and finding creative ways of engaging a new generation to whom this is now distant history.

    It would be naive, however, to think that the post-survivor world will be an easy one to navigate. We have been lucky that the survivors have had the courage and energy to share their experiences and must regret that it took us so long to listen.

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

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

    – ref. The Holocaust: how ‘rescue archaeology’ is tackling the impending loss of surviving witnesses – https://theconversation.com/the-holocaust-how-rescue-archaeology-is-tackling-the-impending-loss-of-surviving-witnesses-248202

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Holocaust poets who can help us to understand genocides past and present

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jean Boase-Beier, Emeritus Professor, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia

    On Holocaust Memorial Day we remember the victims of the Nazi Holocaust in 1940s Europe and all those affected by later genocides.

    I believe that reading poetry is an important way to commemorate these victims because it is such a personal form.

    The events of the Holocaust are familiar to many people as dates and numbers. The first concentration camp opened in Dachau in 1933. In 1942 the infamous meeting at the Wannsee took place in Berlin to decide upon the “final solution” to the perceived problem of Jewish people in Germany and beyond.

    Some 6 million Jewish people were murdered, some 200,000 disabled and ill people were killed in Germany alone and 400,000 people were forcibly sterilised because they possessed traits the Nazis deemed undesirable.

    Such statistics are well documented by Holocaust historians. But behind these numbers, overwhelming in their sheer vastness, are individuals, those whose voices we hear especially clearly in poems.

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

    People wrote poetry as realisation grew of their likely fate even before the murderous events that later came to be called the Holocaust. Many wrote poetry about the Holocaust later, because they survived and wanted the world to hear their stories, or because they lost family members and wanted to remember them.

    Among those who wrote after the Holocaust was German poet Volker von Törne, who was wracked with vicarious guilt for his father’s Nazi past.

    But it is the poems written as the events of the Holocaust were unfolding that strike a particular chord. These are poems by prisoners facing execution, by Jewish members of society forced to live in overcrowded ghettos, by those in camps and those about to be transported to camps. Often such poems were written on odd scraps of paper, carefully hidden or buried in the ground, or smuggled out of prison, ghetto or camp.

    These writers, desperate to tell their stories, chose poetry because of its immediacy, its conciseness, its emotional impact and its ability to say what cannot easily be said in prose.

    Almost none of them wrote in English, so English speakers read them via translators who can speak their words for them, fashioning new versions that aim to capture the style of the originals with all its resonances and as much of their immediacy and impact as possible.

    Poets of the Holocaust

    Some Holocaust poets became famous, and their work has been translated many times. One of the best known, Paul Celan, was a Romanian-German poet. His parents died in the Holocaust. He died by suicide in 1970, having written some of the most memorable poems about the Holocaust, including Death-Fugue (1948), which described the repetitive and deadly rhythm of camp life and death.

    German poet Nelly Sachs, who escaped at the last minute to Sweden, won the Nobel prize in 1966. Her work is readily available in a number of excellent recent translations.

    Other famous poets of the Holocaust include Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, Italian essayist Primo Levi and Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.

    But the stories told by these famous poets, important though they are, can only give a partial picture. Often the fine details of everyday experience, the fears and hopes of individual women, men and children, have a particular resonance in the work of lesser-known poets.

    Romanian-German poet Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was only 17 when she wrote her poetry of fearful anticipation. She was transported to a concentration camp where she died a year later.

    Lithuanian poet Matilda Olkinaitė was murdered at 19. How would their poetry have developed had they lived? We will never know. But what they have left us, recreated through their translators, is a highly sensitive view of life in the chaos of approaching catastrophe.

    Voices in anthologies

    For readers who want a fuller picture of Holocaust poetry, anthologies are invaluable. They usually have an introduction, or notes, providing the context that is so crucial to understanding the poems.

    Two older anthologies, Holocaust Poetry by Hilda Schiff (1995) and Beyond Lament by Marguerite Striar (1998) are still very useful.

    More recently, I co-edited the anthology Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), which arose from a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our aim was to collect less well-known Holocaust poetry, and, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each.

    We tried to include a broader range of poems than earlier anthologies have tended to do. The anonymous Song of the Roma, for example, laments the fate of the more than 200,000 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller victims of the Nazis.

    Many poems in the anthology document very specific events, such as French writer Andrė Sarcq’s To the Twice-Murdered Men, which depicts the dreadful detail of his lover’s death at the hands of the Nazis, who treated gay men with unfathomable barbarity.

    Polish Resistance member Irena Bobowska suffered the cruel removal of the wheelchair upon which she depended. She imagined the world she has lost in So I Learn Life’s Greatest Art.

    German poet Alfred Schmidt-Sas wrote with extreme difficulty, as his hands were bound. He reflected on his imminent beheading in Strange Lightness of Life. And in My God, French poet Catherine Roux told of the horrifying and mundane details of her arrival in a concentration camp: “I’ve no hair / I’ve no hanky.”

    It is only by listening to these individual voices that we can really begin to understand what the many millions of Holocaust victims went through, and what victims of genocides all over the world have suffered and are suffering at this moment. Poetry helps us to do this.

    Jean Boase-Beier acts as Translations Editor for Arc Publications. She has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research relevant to this article.

    – ref. The Holocaust poets who can help us to understand genocides past and present – https://theconversation.com/the-holocaust-poets-who-can-help-us-to-understand-genocides-past-and-present-248205

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Tuberville Urges Senate to Confirm Hegseth and Rollins, Secure American Farmland with the FARM Act

    US Senate News:

    Source: United States Senator Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
    WASHINGTON – Yesterday, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) spoke on the Senate floor in support of Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense, who will bring much-needed change to the Department of Defense.
    Additionally, Sen. Tuberville addressed legislation he reintroduced on Wednesday, the Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act. The FARM Act will help secure America’s agricultural industry and food supply chains from foreign adversaries by creating a permanent seat for the Secretary of Agriculture on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Additionally, Sen. Tuberville encouraged the Senate to move quickly on confirming President Trump’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, who will fight for America’s farming communities and defend against foreign influence in the U.S. agricultural sector.
    Read Sen. Tuberville’s remarks below or watch on YouTube or Rumble.

    ON CONFIRMING PETE HEGSETH
    “Thank you, Mr. President,
    I want to reiterate what my colleague from Tennessee just talked about, the importance of the vote that we just took. Just a few minutes ago our nominee for new Secretary Defense, Pete Hegseth. 
    Now the procedure is, as we just voted, to close the vote and now, we wait 30 hours from just a few minutes ago and have the final vote on his nomination, which it looks like that he has the votes of a majority to be appointed, or sent to the White House, to be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense.
    I’m on the Armed Services Committee, and I’ve watched four years of the destruction of the best military in our world, United States of America. It is a shame what has happened, the DEI, the woke agenda that’s being pushed on the troops in our country, to me, is embarrassing.
    I’m a military brat. My dad died on active duty in the military. Awarded five bronze stars and a Purple Heart at age 17 driving a tank across Europe after landing the first day at Normandy. We have to change course in our military, and we can talk about inflation and pumping gas and the crime and all the things that we’re having a lot of problems with, but if you don’t have a strong military to protect our borders and protect the citizens in our country from adversaries all over the world, we got problems. And it’s got to start there.
    Pete Hegseth is the choice, the right choice. I like his age, I like his demeanor, I like the things he brings to our military. He’s exciting and he will energize this military into the next decade. And I’m excited about that. 
    So, hopefully in about 30 hours we’ll vote tomorrow night around 9:00 and we’ll vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as our new Secretary of Defense.
    ON THE FARM ACT
    Now, I’d like to turn to national security threats in our Nation’s agriculture sector and food supply chains.
    I’m on the Ag Committee. Over the past few years, the United States has experienced a rapid increase in foreign investment in agricultural sector, particularly from China. We have to open our eyes. Bad things are happening around us. Growing foreign investment in agriculture and other essential industries like health care and energy is a direct threat to our country’s national security.
    You know for years now I’ve been sounding the alarm about foreign ownership of American farmland and other elements of our food chain. According to USDA data from December 2023,  foreign investors own approximately 45 million acres of U.S. agriculture land. Now let me say that again: 45 million acres of our forest and agriculture land in this country has been sold to foreign entities. Does that not scare us? What [did] we just see during COVID about our drug supply? We looked around, we looked for health care and help after COVID hit our hit our borders and what happened? We found out that it was all being made in China.
    So, 45 million acres, this represents over 1.5 million acres in one calendar year. Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land in increased modestly from 2012 to [20]17 an average increase of 0.6 million acres per year, that’s 2012 to 2017. But since 2017, the number has skyrocketed to an average of 2.6 million acres a year that we’re selling, our farmland, to our adversaries. And it’s just not China. It’s Russia it’s other entities that don’t wish us well at the end of the day. So additionally, between 2010 and [20]21, entities or individuals from China increased their ownership of U.S. agriculture land more than twenty-fold from about 14,000 acres to 400,000 Acres. This is an unbelievable and unsustainable pace for the United States of America.
    Now, Alabama is experiencing, my state, this firsthand. We have the fourth largest amount of foreign owned agricultural land in the United States at 2.2 million acres, most of which is forest land. It’s not really agriculture in terms of growing row crops, it’s basically our forest. You know, I represent over 62,000 farmers in the state of Alabama. I hear from them time and time again about foreign activity in our agriculture community. Threats like these are something our states can’t handle all on their own.
    Which is why President Ford established, President Ford, established a Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, also known in short terms, CFIUS. This was in 1975. In other words, this committee is supposed to keep an eye on foreign investments in our country. This is the governmental body that oversees the vetting process of foreign investments and acquisitions of American companies in the interest of national security. CFIUS is composed of nine members of President’s cabinet including the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Energy. The Attorney General, the US Trade Representative, and the Director of Office of Science and Technology Policy also sit on this vetting board of industry and land in our country.
    Nowhere on that list did you hear me say the Secretary of Agriculture. Now why is that? […] Considering the massive increase in foreign investment in our country, we need additional oversight for what’s going on in our country. We got our eyes closed. Which is why yesterday I introduced the Foreign Adversary Risk Management Act, called the FARM Act, here on the floor that will accomplish three major things.
    First, it would add the Secretary of Agriculture as a permanent member of CFIUS. In other words, that somebody that’s going to help our agriculture people vet land that’s being bought by foreign entities. Second, it would protect U.S. agriculture industry from foreign control through transactions, mergers, and acquisitions, and agreements, and it would also designate agriculture supply chains as critical infrastructure and critical technology. Third, it would require a report to Congress on current and potential foreign investments in the U.S. agriculture industry. This legislation, folks, is long overdue.
    These foreign investments now reach into every aspect of agriculture industry and supply chains from farming and processing, to packaging and shipping. We cannot, and I repeat, we cannot allow our adversaries to have a foot in the door to our critical supply chains. Food security is national security. We must prioritize increased oversight of foreign investment, and our food supply chains especially those coming from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. 
    This starts with giving the agriculture community a permanent seat at the table of CFIUS. The FARM Act does just that.
    ON CONFIRMING BROOKE ROLLINS
    And there’s no better person to fill this permanent seat on CFIUS than my good friend, who we had a hearing today, as a new nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins. I’ve known Brooke for 30 years. I met her while I was coaching at Texas A&M. She was the student body president in 1994. The students saw then what President Trump, what they see in her today, her strong leadership and her conviction of agriculture. It will be no different when she becomes the Secretary of Agriculture for the United States of America. 
    Brooke was brought up in a small agricultural community of Glen Rose, Texas. She comes from several generations of American farmers. She participated in levels of 4-H and FFA. She raised livestock throughout her life. Now she is [a] mother, she’s involved in the show steer industry with her four children. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in agricultural development from A&M and later earned a law degree at the University of Texas. 
    Later at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, she was engaged with rural and agriculture communities throughout Texas. She led litigation efforts that focused on the defense of Texas landowners and farmers against federal interference and regulations. Next, Brooke went on to serve in several roles in President Trump’s White House. She served as the Director of Domestic Policy Council, Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives, and Director of The Office of American Innovation. In these roles, she helped roll back terrible EPA rules like Waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, that targeted farmers and ranchers. 
    After the White House, she joined the American First Policy Institute, where she focused on protecting U.S. farmland and foreign entities seeking to gain control, especially from the Chinese. At AFPI, she strove to improve American food security, independence, as well as support measures that defend U.S. agriculture trade. Brooke understands these many challenges.
    In short, Brooke is a conservative warrior and will be an excellent Ag Secretary. I look forward to working with her to secure our farmland from foreign entities and working with her on passing a Farm Bill that puts American producers first again.
    As Alabama’s voiced on the Senate Ag Committee, I will continue fighting to secure our agriculture supply chain so our agriculture community can continue to put food on the table. And that starts with someone like Brooke Rollins as our Secretary of Agriculture. She is a terrific nominee, and I look forward to working with her on the Committee.
    I expect to move, her to move easily through the Committee vote, and here on this floor. So, once she’s out of Committee, the Senate must vote on her for confirmation. She’ll do great. She’s perfect for the job and I ask that the Senate take up both efforts quickly to defend our agriculture communities which feeds not only the American people but the entire world.
    I yield the floor.”
    Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans’ Affairs, HELP, and Aging Committees.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: expert reaction to Defra denying emergency authorisation to Cruiser SB (a neonicotinoid pesticide)

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

    Scientists comment to the Government’s decision to not grant emergency authorisation to a neonicotinoid pesticide. 

    Dr Scott Hayward, Lecturer and Leverhulme Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, said:

    “Definitely an evidence based decision. Ongoing research clearly shows significant effects of neonicotinoids on several pollinators species.  Research interest, and thus data, has been dominated by pollinator projects to date, but important to recognise that this is a biodiversity concern beyond just pollinators. There will be impacts on other insects and invertebrates (especially in the soil).

    “Our own work shows sub-lethal doses, as low as 9 ppb (parts per billion) can negatively affect bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) performance.  Some other bee and fly species species we’ve assessed don’t seem quite as vulnerable as B. terrestris – but we’ve only looked at relatively short (24 h) durations of exposure and very few species.

    “Sugar beet is somewhat of a special case because it doesn’t produce flowers until year 2 of growth, so the concerns that neonics are transferred to the pollen and/or nectar of the plant via seed coating is less of an issue than for other crops – because it is harvested before it produces flowers. However, even seed coating leaves neonic residues in the environment. 

    “Several ongoing projects are trying to model how residues persist in the environment across different habitat types and assess to risk to pollinators and other insects more generally.

    “Less data on what impact alternative pesticides might have, but simple fact is that pesticides targeting fundamental biological functions in pest species will likely have the same (sometimes greater) effects in non-target species.”

     

    Prof Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, said:

    “For the last 4 years, our government ignored the recommendations of the Health and Safety Executive and the Expert Committee on Pesticides, both of which were of the opinion that this derogation request should not be granted. It is pleasing to see that our new government have followed scientific advice and refused the request. There is overwhelming evidence that neonicotinoids harm bees and other wildlife, and contaminate soils, waterways and wildflowers. There is no safe way to use them.

    “Farmers across Europe have been growing sugar beet without use of neonicotinoids, so this should not be an insurmountable problem.”

     

    Prof Toby Bruce, Professor of Insect Chemical Ecology at Keele University, said:

    “What are farmers supposed to do to protect their crops? Without insecticides sugar beet growers face up to 50% crop losses. If the government plans to ban pesticides (neonicotinoids in this case), then it should also plan to fund research into development of alternative approaches. The situation was previously considered an emergency because farmers are left with no control measures and have no way of protecting their crops from insect pests and the serious crop diseases that they transmit”.

    Declared interests

    Toby Bruce: “I don’t have any interests to declare.”

    No others received.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump inherits the Guantánamo prison, complete with 4 ‘forever prisoners’

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lisa Hajjar, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

    A control tower overlooks the Camp VI detention facility, at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. AP Photo/Alex Brandon

    President Joe Biden’s record of handling the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is decidedly mixed. He succeeded in reducing the detainee population he inherited by more than half, but he compounded problems in the military commissions that the Bush administration had invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to try people captured in the “war on terror.” Now all the problems at Guantánamo are again President Donald Trump’s.

    When Biden took office in 2021, there were 40 prisoners. Today there are 15, the lowest number since the first 20 Muslim men and boys captured in Afghanistan were airlifted to the base on Jan. 11, 2002.

    Biden left Trump four people the U.S. will not release but also cannot put on trial – the so-called “forever prisoners.” He also left intact the troubled military commissions system, with three pending criminal cases against a total of six detainees.

    In December 2021, former chief military defense attorney Brig. Gen. John Baker testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “It is too late in the process for the current military commissions to do justice for anyone. The best that can be hoped for at this point … is to bring this sordid chapter of American history to an end.” Baker made clear that the only viable option is to resolve the cases with plea bargains for the defendants.

    Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker tells U.S. senators that there is no opportunity for justice to be done at Guantánamo.

    A chance to make progress

    There are three cases that have not yet gone to trial – the 9/11 case with four defendants facing charges for their connections with the attacks, the USS Cole bombing in October 2000 with one defendant and the Bali bombing in October 2002 with one defendant.

    The 9/11 and USS Cole cases have been stuck in the pretrial phase since Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. In the summer of 2024, a breakthrough in the 9/11 case appeared imminent: Prosecutors and defense lawyers for three of the four defendants reportedly reached plea-bargain agreements. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad – the alleged “mastermind” of the attacks – Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty and accept life sentences in exchange for the government taking the death penalty off the table. There was no deal for the fourth 9/11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi.

    The deals were approved on July 31 by the top military officer overseeing the Guantánamo commissions, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier. But two days later, Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, stepped into the process and overrode Escallier – whom he had appointed. Austin announced that the plea deals were revoked.

    The judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, decided to schedule plea hearings for early January. But after some legal back-and-forth that forced a stay, he had to cancel them. Biden left the case against three 9/11 defendants in limbo.

    The basement of this government building in Bucharest, Romania, held a secret CIA prison, one of many across the world.
    AP Photo

    Witness to the transition

    In mid-January 2025, I made my sixteenth reporting trip to Guantánamo. I came for closing arguments on a motion in the 9/11 case that seeks to suppress statements that Ammar al-Baluchi made to the FBI in January 2007. That was four months after he and 13 others were transferred to Guantánamo from CIA black sites where they were held for years. The litigation to suppress those statements started in 2019.

    In Chapter 10 of my book, “The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture,” I detail how the litigation on this suppression motion made public previously unknown details and under-acknowledged horrors of the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program.

    These closing arguments were the culmination of six years of litigation on the key question in the 9/11 case: Does torture matter in the pursuit of justice in the military commissions?

    A drawing by Guantánamo detainee Abu Zubaydah depicts a person being waterboarded.
    Copyright Abu Zubaydah 2019. Licensed by Professor Mark Denbeaux, Seton Hall Law School

    Can Guantánamo be closed?

    Of the 780 people ever detained at Guantánamo, 540 were released during the presidency of George W. Bush, who established the detention facility. Obama, who signed an executive order on his second day in office pledging to close Guantánamo within a year, released 200.

    In his first term, Trump pledged to keep the facility open. The only man to leave Guantánamo during Trump’s first term was Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2018 to serve out the remainder of his sentence from a 2014 plea bargain agreement.

    When Biden took office, he said that he supported shutting down the military prison at Guantánamo. In the early years of his presidency, there was a slow stream of transfers, mostly people who had been cleared for release long ago and were freed.

    In Biden’s last months, the pace of transfers quickened. In December 2024, a Kenyan detainee, two Malaysian members of al-Qaida who had pled guilty the previous January, and a Tunisian man who had been in Guantánamo since the day the facility was opened were all repatriated to their countries of origin and freed. In January 2024, 11 Yemenis were transported from the prison to Oman to be resettled.

    15 men left behind

    The Biden administration had also planned to repatriate a severely disabled Iraqi detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, to serve out his plea-bargained sentence in a Baghdad prison. But a federal judge blocked that transfer, ruling that al-Iraqi would not get necessary medical treatment in Iraq and might be subject to abuse there.

    Al-Iraqi is one of the 15 that Biden left behind. Three of them – a Libyan, a Somali and a stateless Rohingya – have long been cleared for release. Their continuing detention without charges highlights a key element of the Guantánamo problem: No one can be released unless the U.S. government finds another country willing to accept them.

    One of the remaining detainees, Ali Bahlul, is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit war crimes. Six others, including the four 9/11 defendants, are awaiting their trials.

    There are also four detainees whom the government refuses to transfer but cannot put on trial for lack of evidence.

    The U.S. goverment says it cannot release Abu Zubaydah from Guantánamo because he would disclose classified interrogation techniques critics have labeled torture.
    U.S. Central Command via AP

    These so-called “forever prisoners” include Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born man of Palestinian descent who was taken into CIA custody in 2002 and was used as the guinea pig for the CIA torture program. The government long ago conceded that Abu Zubaydah was not a top leader of al-Qaida – in fact he was not even a member. But he will not be released because he knows how he was treated by the CIA, and that treatment remains highly classified.

    The newest forever prisoner is one of the original 9/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh; in September 2023, he was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. Now he is uncharged, unreleased and untreated for his psychological maladies that were caused by the torture he endured in CIA black sites.

    The ‘War on Terror’ is not over

    When Biden pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in August 2021, he claimed to have ended America’s longest war – and repeated this claim in a January 2025 speech. But the Guantánamo prison remains open, and as long as it is, the “war on terror,” which first put U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001, is not over.

    How Trump will deal with Guantánamo is an open question. If he focuses on the death penalty, he will press ahead with military commission trials like his predecessors, hoping for unanimous guilty verdicts and death sentences. If he prioritizes cutting wasteful government spending, he will release additional detainees and allow the three plea bargain agreements to go into effect.

    No one I spoke to during my last trip was willing to predict what a second Trump term might bode for Guantánamo – except that it won’t be closed.

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

    – ref. Trump inherits the Guantánamo prison, complete with 4 ‘forever prisoners’ – https://theconversation.com/trump-inherits-the-guantanamo-prison-complete-with-4-forever-prisoners-247058

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Harrisburg University, Auditor General DeFoor, Members 1st Federal Credit Union Launch 12th Annual Student Financial Literacy Scholarship Competition

    Source: US State of Pennsylvania

    January 24, 2025 – Harrisburg, PA

    Harrisburg University, Auditor General DeFoor, Members 1st Federal Credit Union Launch 12th Annual Student Financial Literacy Scholarship Competition

    Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (HU) Interim President David Schankweiler, Pennsylvania Auditor General Timothy L. DeFoor, and Members 1st Federal Credit Union Assistant Vice President of Community Relations, Sara Firestone, launched the 12th annual Student Financial Literacy Scholarship Competition. The competition’s theme is: “What Does Financial Literacy Mean to Me?”

    Pennsylvania students in grades 9-12 are encouraged to submit a short essay or poem about financial literacy. Three winners and three honorable mentions will be selected and announced during Financial Literacy Month, which occurs every year in April.

    “The Financial Literacy Scholarship Competition is an event we look forward to each year,” said Harrisburg University Interim President David Schankweiler. “It’s a unique opportunity for us to work with leaders in Pennsylvania and to meet and inspire amazing students from across our Commonwealth. Hearing these students express what they’ve learned about being good stewards of their time and treasure is a great reminder that developing wise money management skills early in life sets us up for success well into the future. Harrisburg University is proud to play a key role in hosting this competition and to shine a spotlight on financial literacy.”

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Governor Lamont Calls for Independent Audit of Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    (HARTFORD, CT) – Governor Ned Lamont today announced that he is calling for an independent audit of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) system in an effort to increase public transparency and accountability of the higher education system’s financial management practices. The governor today submitted a letter to Comptroller Sean Scanlon requesting that his office conduct the review.

    “Recent reports of controversial spending decisions have raised serious concerns about the transparency and accountability of CSCU’s financial management,” Governor Lamont said. “As CSCU has recently implemented measures such as tuition increases and program reductions to address significant budget shortfalls, it is imperative that the public have complete transparency into how public funds are being utilized.”

    In particular, the governor is calling for the audit to include but not be limited to:

    1. An itemized report of purchases made using procurement cards (P-Cards), identifying vendors and purposes.
    2. A review of all expenditures for meals and entertainment including costs for dining with stakeholders/vendors, conferences and related events.
    3. Information on the use of state-owned vehicles by CSCU personnel, including logs of usage, fuel costs and mileage reimbursement.
    4. Any information regarding tax reporting involving CSCU leadership.
    5. Audit the financial practices of the entire CSCU system, including discretionary spending, travel and procurement activities.
    6. Assess whether public funds have been managed in accordance with state financial policies and in alignment with the educational mission of the CSCU system.

    **Download: Letter from Governor Lamont to Comptroller Scanlon requesting audit of CSCU

     

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Science says you’re one of these three types

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Polkinghorne, Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

    Johnson Martin / Unsplash

    If you’ve ever gone to look up a quick fact and just kept browsing from one article (or page, or video), to another, to another – then you know the feeling of “going down a rabbit hole”. This experience of curiosity-led online wandering has become synonymous with the free, user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia.

    Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is today one of the world’s most popular websites. With more users than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or ChatGPT, the site is a go-to source for people to learn about and discover new interests.

    In new research involving more than 480,000 Wikipedia users in 14 languages across 50 countries, US researchers led by Dale Zhou at the University of Pennsylvania studied three distinctly different ways of going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. These “curiosity styles” have been studied before, but not in such a large, diverse group of people using Wikipedia “naturalistically”, in daily life.

    The research may help us better understand the nature and importance of curiosity, its connections to wellbeing, and strategies for preventing the spread of false information.

    Wikipedia: first controversial, now mature, always popular

    When Wikipedia was new in the early 2000s, it sparked controversies. People such as librarians and lecturers voiced concerns about Wikipedia’s potential for platforming untrue or incomplete information.

    Today, the factuality of Wikipedia’s existing contents is less concerning than questions of bias, such as which topics the site’s volunteer editors deem noteworthy enough to include. There are global efforts to fill gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage, such as “edit-a-thons” to add entries on historically overlooked scientists and artists.

    Part of what made Wikipedia groundbreaking was how it satisfies people’s intrinsic learning needs by inviting navigation from page to page, luring readers into rabbit holes. This, combined with the site’s participatory approach to creating and verifying pages, sparked its rapid growth. These qualities have also sustained Wikipedia as a predominant everyday information source, globally.

    Research about Wikipedia has also evolved from early studies comparing it to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    This new study examines data about Wikipedia readers’ activities. It looks at the different “architectural styles of curiosity” people embody when they navigate.

    Busybodys, hunters and dancers

    The new study explores the “knowledge networks” associated with the three main styles of curiosity: busybody, hunter and dancer. A knowledge network is a visual representation of how readers “weave a thread” across Wikipedia articles.

    As the researchers explain:

    The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers in a projectile path, and the dancer leaps in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge.

    Earlier research had shown evidence of busybodies and hunters, and speculated about the existence of dancers. The new study confirms that busybodies and hunters exist in multiple countries and languages. It also details the dancer style, which has been more elusive to document.

    The researchers also identified geographical differences between curiosity styles.

    In all 14 languages studied, busybodies tend to read more about culture, media, food, art, philosophy and religion. Hunters in 12 out of 14 languages tend to read more about science, technology, engineering and maths.

    In German and English, hunters were more drawn to pages about history and society than busybodies. The opposite was true in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Dutch and Chinese.

    Dancers were identified by their forward leaps between disparate topics, as well as the diversity of their interests.

    The research team points out we still have much to learn about how curiosity is shaped by local norms. Relating these results to gender, ethnicity, access to education, and other elements will paint a fuller picture.

    Curiosity is beneficial, generally … and we have more to learn

    Overall, this study supports the benefits of freer, broader browsing and reading. Following our curiosity can help us become better informed and expand our worldviews, creativity and relationships.

    At the same time, people sometimes need closure more than they need exploration. This is not a bad thing or a sign of narrow-mindedness. In many situations there are benefits to moving on from information-seeking, and deciding we’ve learned enough for now.

    Endless curiosity can have downsides. This is especially true when it’s motivated not by the joy of learning, but by the discomfort of uncertainty and exclusion. As other research has found, for some people, curiosity can lead toward false information and conspiracy theories. When information has a sense of novelty, or a hint of being hidden by powerful elites, this can make it more appealing, even when it’s not true.

    The new study emphasises that different curiosity styles do not lead simply or universally to creativity or wellbeing. People’s contexts and circumstances vary.

    Each of us, like Goldilocks, can follow our curiosity to find not too much, not too little, but the information that is “just right”. The researchers also hint at evidence for a spectrum of new curiosity styles beyond the main three, which will surely spark more research in future.

    Stay curious and enjoy the rabbit hole

    This study also suggests ways Wikipedia (and sites like it) could better support curiosity-driven exploration. For example, rather than suggesting pages based on their popularity or similarity to other pages, Wikipedia could try showing readers their own dynamic knowledge network.

    As a Wikipedian would say, this new study is noteworthy. It shows how smaller-scale, exploratory research into people’s reading and browsing can be translated to a much larger scale across languages and cultures.

    As AI becomes more influential and the problems of misinformation grow, understanding technologies that shape our access to information – and how we use them – is more important than ever. We know YouTube recommendations can be a radicalising pipeline to extremist content, for example, and ChatGPT is largely indifferent to the truth.

    Studying Wikipedia readers reveals a rich picture of people’s freely expressed, diverse online curiosities. It shows an alternative to technologies built on narrower assumptions about what people value, how we learn, and how we want to explore online.

    Sarah Polkinghorne has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Association for Information Science & Technology, and RMIT University’s School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. She is also affiliated with the University of Alberta, and is a past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science.

    – ref. Going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Science says you’re one of these three types – https://theconversation.com/going-down-a-wikipedia-rabbit-hole-science-says-youre-one-of-these-three-types-242018

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Red Rocks with Green Spots at ‘Serpentine Rapids’

    Source: NASA

    2 min read

    After discovering and sampling the “leopard spots” of “Bright Angel,” it became apparent that Perseverance’s journey of discovery in this region was not yet finished. Approximately 20 sols (Martian days) after driving south across Neretva Vallis from Bright Angel, the rover discovered the enigmatic and unique red rocks of “Serpentine Rapids.”

    At Serpentine Rapids, Perseverance used its abrading bit to create an abrasion patch in a red rock outcrop named “Wallace Butte.” The 5-cm diameter abrasion patch revealed a striking array of white, black, and green colors within the rock. One of the biggest surprises for the rover team was the presence of the drab-green-colored spots within the abrasion patch, which are composed of dark-toned cores with fuzzy, light green rims.

    On Earth, red rocks — sometimes called “red beds” — generally get their color from oxidized iron (Fe3+), which is the same form of iron that makes our blood red, or the rusty red color of metal left outside. Green spots like those observed in the Wallace Butte abrasion are common in ancient “red beds” on Earth and form when liquid water percolates through the sediment before it hardens to rock, kicking off a chemical reaction that transforms oxidized iron to its reduced (Fe2+) form, resulting in a greenish hue. On Earth, microbes are sometimes involved in this iron reduction reaction. However, green spots can also result from decaying organic matter that creates localized reducing conditions. Interactions between sulfur and iron can also create iron-reducing conditions without the involvement of microbial life.

    Unfortunately, there was not enough room to safely place the rover arm containing the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments directly atop one of the green spots within the abrasion patch, so their composition remains a mystery. However, the team is always on the lookout for similar interesting and unexpected features in the rocks.

    The science and engineering teams are now dealing with incredibly steep terrain as Perseverance ascends the Jezero Crater rim. In the meantime, the Science Team is hanging on to the edge of their seats with excitement and wonder as Perseverance makes the steep climb out of the crater it has called home for the past two years. There is no shortage of wonder and excitement across the team as we contemplate what secrets the ancient rocks of the Jezero Crater rim may hold.

    Written by Adrian Broz, Postdoctoral Scientist, Purdue University/University of Oregon

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY MINISTER FOR HEALTH MR ONG YE KUNG AT THE BERITA HARIAN ACHIEVER OF THE YEAR 2024 AWARDS PRESENTATION, 25 OCTOBER 2024

    Source: Asia Pacific Region 2 – Singapore

    Mr Chan Yeng Kit, Chief Executive Officer, SPH Media 

    Mr Wong Wei Kong, Editor-in-Chief of the English, Malay and Tamil Media Group 

    Mr Nazry Mokhtar, Editor, Berita Harian 

    Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests 

               Good evening. Let me begin with a few words in Malay.

    Speech in Malay

    2       Saya berbesar hati dapat hadir di majlis malam ini untuk menyampaikan Anugerah Jauhari Berita Harian yang kedua puluh enam. Kita berkumpul pada hari ini untuk meraikan kecemerlangan, untuk memberikan penghormatan kepada mereka yang memberikan inspirasi, dan untuk merenung kesan sumbangan setiap suri teladan dalam masyarakat dan negara kita.

    3      Setiap pemenang Anugerah Jauhari Berita Harian telah mencerminkan keberanian untuk merintis perjalanan baru walaupun berhadapan dengan cabaran. Mereka merebut peluang untuk mencapai kejayaan dalam bidang masing-masing.

    4        Mereka merupakan tunjang harapan dan wira yang akan mencipta sejarah bagi golongan muda. Walaupun kita boleh merumuskan ciri-ciri ideal seseorang individu melalui buku atau pengajaran formal di sekolah, tidak ada yang lebih berkesan daripada mengenali suri teladan yang nyata. Mereka mencerminkan nilai-nilai murni yang segera difahami oleh kanak-kanak – ‘Inilah yang saya ingin tiru dan capai’.

    5       Suri teladan ini bukan sahaja menjadi sumber inspirasi, tetapi juga menerangi jalan ke hadapan bagi masyarakat kita. Melalui teladan mereka, kita dapat melihat cara nilai-nilai murni dan cita-cita luhur boleh diamalkan ke dalam realiti kehidupan seharian.

    6      Saya berterima kasih kepada Berita Harian kerana menganjurkan Anugerah ini selama dua pulu enam tahun yang lalu sebagai inspirasi kepada masyarakat Melayu/Islam, dan juga kepada semua warga Singapura.

    7     Tahniah kepada para pemenang pada tahun ini! Izinkan saya untuk teruskan ucapan saya dalam Bahasa Inggeris.

    The Need for Role Models

    8      I said in my Malay speech that every society needs role models.

    9      Throughout history, figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Yue Fei, Mahatma Gandhi, Leif Erikson and Prince Diponegoro have shaped our world through their vision, conviction, courage, patriotism and dedication to their causes. Their stories, documented in museums and woven into school curricula, remind us of what humanity can achieve, especially when inspired by the extraordinary deeds of individuals.

    10       In our modern world, we continue to find inspiration in diverse personalities. They may or may not become historical figures, but when we hear their stories, we feel a sense of awe, admiration and even feel hope for the future.

    11      For example, Malala Yousafzai. She was prepared to risk her life to champion education for young girls. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, two of the greatest footballers of our times, work very hard and rose to the pinnacle of the footballing world. What impresses me most is that they exude so much humility. Taylor Swift inspired many young fans, not just because of her creativity and her clever and poetic lyrics, but her courage and acumen to take on big businesses and give the younger generation a voice through her music.  

    12     Closer to home, we also have many local role models. They are in public service, business, social, education, and healthcare spheres. I started my career as a public servant and learnt about the legendary deeds, actions and decisions of certain Ministers and Permanent Secretaries that inspire me to continue to be in the Public Service.

    13      Most recently, Singaporeans were inspired by our sportsmen and women like Loh Kean Yew, Max Maeder, Yip Pin Xiu and Shanti Pereira, who did our nation proud with composed and excellent performance under extreme pressure.

    14      I have named many famous personalities, but role modelling is more than that. The truth is, how many of us really get to meet and know these famous people? I have not met Taylor Swift before, nor Martin Luther King Jr, and we don’t get to see them face to face, much less know them and learn from them first hand.

    15      What we need more are everyday role models who may or may not be famous – loving parents, nurturing teachers, good friends, selfless caregivers, exemplary social worker, famous chefs. All of them can be our day-to-day role models. Their contributions often go unseen and unrecognised, but their impact on individual lives and communities is profound.

    16      This is why we make the effort to identify and recognise outstanding individuals within our communities, organisations and professions. For example, we have the President’s Award for Nurses and Teachers. We also have the Anugerah Jauhari Berita Harian, which is the reason why we are gathered here tonight.

    Akmal and Zulayqha

    17      Tonight, we celebrate two remarkable individuals. We have heard about them from the citations earlier but let me talk a little bit more about them.

    18      First, Chef Akmal Anuar. From humble beginnings, he worked at his parents’ Nasi Padang stall. I reminded him that while he skipped school, he was out there doing things and learning from the university of life. From the video clip that was played just now, I can tell that Akmal is very passionate about what he is good at, and you can see that he talks with a sparkle in his eyes. He has a certain view and conviction about cooking and what it should be about. What is beyond the taste but also the culture that we need to bring across. All his hard work has led him to placing Singapore on the world culinary map. I know a number of chefs, and I have no doubt Chef Akmal is totally passionate about his craft and his skills have become an art. He has transformed himself from a cook, to a chef, to an artisan.

    19     Akmal makes time to volunteer at community centres to teach cooking classes. That is something I find amazing about successful people. They are often simultaneously performing at the international level, and contributing at the kampung level. When I read about Cristiano Ronaldo, he is either scoring goals and winning championships or somehow appearing in one of our schools in Singapore. So they are like helicopters – rising to the top and coming to the bottom, constantly moving up and down.

    20     Next, Zulayqha Zulkifli, who also overcame significant challenges from a very young age, facing homelessness and taking on the responsibility of caring for her siblings. Zulayqha’s burdens were heavy, but she was not alone. With emotional and social support from those around her, she excelled academically. I was very happy that she did her Degree in Social Work at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), because I was the Minister for Education and we started that course. Social workers only had a Diploma course at Nanyang Polytechnic, but we made sure social workers can upgrade to a degree programme at SUSS.

    21     Zulayqha’s story shows that when we share our burdens, even the heaviest loads can be carried. And people who received help when in difficulty will often pay back to society, as Zulayqha is now doing.

    22      It is important that we have come together tonight to honour Akmal and Zulayqha as role models. In identifying and recognising them, we, as a society, collectively decide what success should look like, what achievements are valued, and most importantly, what values we uphold.

    From Role Models to Values

    23      What values do our awardees uphold and reinforced for us tonight? I would say first and foremost, the most obvious is resilience and hard work. No one is really born with superpowers – we only see that in Marvel movies. Every successful athlete, artist, professional, chef, social worker, became good at what they are doing through constant practice, learning from others, learning through mistakes and gaining experience.

    24      Second, success is never fully achieved alone. Every successful person received help, support and care from others to help them overcome the obstacles or lighten their burdens. As the peribahasa goes: ‘berat sama dipikul, ringan sama dijinjing’. This was taught to me by Mdm Rahayu Mahzam. Whether the burden is heavy or light, we carry them together.

    25      The final important value that our awardees remind us to uphold, is to respect every trade and profession, and ensure that there are many pathways to success in Singapore, and many definitions of achievements. If success in the jungle is only defined by how fast an animal climbs a tree, then all the lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, elephants and eagles are all failures. The only success is the monkey.

    26      That said, to deliver multiple paths to success, our system of education will need to continue to evolve, so that it opens up opportunities for all, and nurtures craftsmen and experts in every field. As another peribahasa goes, which Mdm Rahayu Mahzam also taught me: ‘hanya jauhari mengenal manikam’ – only a jeweller recognises a gem. I suppose this is where this Award got its name.

    27       That is why we have been witnessing a major transformation of our education system into a lifelong learning system. Our schools lay a strong foundation in our young people upon which they develop diverse skills in our institutes of higher learning – ITE, Polytechnics, Arts Colleges and Autonomous Universities – from engineering, cybersecurity, business to healthcare, culinary arts and sports science. There are now so many options.

     Closing

    28     I would like to thank Berita Harian for taking on the role of this ‘jeweller’, spotlighting Malay/Muslim role models through the Anugerah Jauhari Berita Harian Awards every year.

    29     More broadly, Editor Nazry Mokhtar has spoken about how the newsroom has been transformed. When I visited the newsroom, I was very surprised about the changes that had taken place. Berita Harian has played a crucial role in engaging the Malay/Muslim community. For 67 years, Berita Harian has strived to evolve and stay relevant, even in this really fast-moving world as a trusted source that brings comprehensive coverage of news and issues from home, the region and the world to the community.

    30     As we gather here tonight, let us remember that each of us, in our own way, has the potential to be a role model – to embody the values that make our society strong, to support those around us, and to inspire others to reach for their dreams. I think we all know that there are some families in Singapore where the kids grow up without role models, like in broken families. This is unlike the kampung where my father lived and I used to spend a lot of time in. In a kampung, you still see other role models. But today, we all live in our own apartment, sometimes from a broken home, and they really have no role models. We can all be that role model even if it is for one kid. That is a meaningful contribution.

    31      Thank you, and congratulations to our deserving Achievers of the Year. 

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Security Bureau Youth Uniformed Group Leaders Forum strengthens youth exchanges among Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macao

    Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region

         The Secretary for Security, Mr Tang Ping-keung, today (October 26) attended the launch ceremony of the induction course for the new-term Security Bureau Youth Uniformed Group Leaders Forum in Shenzhen, kicking off training activities in the coming year for Hong Kong youth members and students from Shenzhen University, which is the Leaders Forum’s partner, as well as youths from Macao joining this year.

         Addressing the ceremony, Mr Tang thanked Shenzhen University for the well-designed induction course this year. He said that Shenzhen University’s participation in the past year injected impetus and new elements into the Leaders Forum, further broadening members’ horizons and enhancing their sense of national identity. He added that the new term of the Leaders Forum had invited participation from the youth groups of public security forces of Macao, further expanding the collaboration network of the Leaders Forum and promoting development and cultural exchanges among young people in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macao. Mr Tang also encouraged the youths to take the induction course as a start to prepare themselves to do their utmost to serve the community in different positions in the future.

         The two-day, one-night induction course is being held at Shenzhen University. In addition to team building and training activities, members will also experience professional training in relation to national defence and the military, visit a well-known innovation and technology company and attend lectures on different topics including understanding national development. Moreover, outstanding leaders from different sectors, including Beijing 2008 and Rio 2016 Olympic Games Mainland diving gold medalist Mr Lin Yue; the representative of the Leaders Forum’s advisory board in Hong Kong, Ms Sandy Lau; and the Hong Kong youth representative, Mr Alexander Yeung, also attended the exchange- and experience-sharing session.

         The Security Bureau established the Leaders Forum in October 2022 to deepen participation in youth work. There are 45 members from Hong Kong in the new term of the Leaders Forum, while another 28 and 20 youths from Shenzhen University and the youth groups of public security forces of Macao respectively will also participate in activities of the Leaders Forum.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: InnoCarnival 2024 showcases I&T achievements to propel future development (with photos)

    Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region

         Organised by the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC), InnoCarnival 2024 (IC 2024) is being held from today (October 26) to November 3 at the Hong Kong Science Park. Under the theme “Let’s Sail with Innovation and Technology”, this year’s carnival features a number of exhibits of local innovation and technology (I&T) achievements. IC 2024 is also one of the signature events to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

         Officiating at the opening ceremony of IC 2024, the Financial Secretary, Mr Paul Chan, said that the theme of IC 2024 matches the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s policy in fostering economic diversification by creating a favourable environment for emerging industries to develop via technology. He said that I&T are not out of reach; rather, they are closely related to daily life and can produce substantial benefits. The Government has strived to enhance the I&T ecosystem of Hong Kong over the past few years, while the Chief Executive also announced multiple measures to promote the development of the technology industry in last week’s Policy Address.
          
         Mr Chan continued that it is also necessary to elevate the foundation of popularising science to have a vibrant local I&T development, while the InnoCarnival serves as a good opportunity to foster popularising science among the public. In fact, the carnival is not only an I&T event for the public to enjoy but also a platform for programme partners, especially start-ups, to realise their dreams. He believed that different activities in the carnival will inspire people’s interest in I&T and cultivate more talent to join the I&T field and contribute to Hong Kong and the country.
          
         Speaking at the ceremony, the Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry, Professor Sun Dong, acknowledged that popularising science culture is crucial for developing the I&T ecosystem in Hong Kong, while the carnival undoubtedly serves as an event to foster science education for all. He expressed special thanks to universities, research institutes and government departments for their enthusiastic participation in the carnival. He noted that universities and research and development (R&D) centres have been the backbone of the I&T ecosystem of Hong Kong, which have spawned a number of disruptive technologies in the past and nurtured many outstanding scientific talents, while government departments have responded positively to the development of Hong Kong into a smart city in recent years by utilising technology in their daily work. He said he believes that the annual InnoCarnival, where programme partners showcase their I&T achievements with pride, presents a good opportunity for technology education for the public.
          
         The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation are campaign partners of IC 2024. The event is receiving support from over 75 programme partners, including local universities, R&D centres and platforms, government departments and other organisations, which have set up booths at the Hong Kong Science Park, showcasing a series of I&T achievements and interactive games. Also, a diverse line-up of about 150 workshops and webinars across various subjects will be available during the carnival, with the aim of showing the public the importance of I&T in people’s daily lives.
          
         In addition, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, some significant scientific research projects in co-operation with Mainland institutions will be displayed, including the “Hong Kong Youth Scientific Innovation”, the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence model scientific satellite jointly developed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and ADA Space with funding support from the Innovation and Technology Commission; “Surface Sampling and Packing System”, a space instrument developed for the Chang’e-6 by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to assist the country in completing the world’s first lunar far-side sampling mission; and the “Digital Deep-sea Typical Habitats (DEPTH),” an initiative under the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development led by the country and participated by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These projects not only testify to country’s remarkable achievements and developments in science and technology but also recognises Hong Kong’s contributions to the country’s I&T development.
          
         Furthermore, 23 winning I&T solutions and some of the prototypes of the second City I&T Grand Challenge will also be displayed for trial in the carnival. To promote an I&T culture and enhance the application of I&T in the community, the second City I&T Grand Challenge was launched in March this year under the theme “Hong Kong’s Got I&T”. It invited submissions from different sectors of the community to develop I&T solutions focusing on two subjects, namely “I&T for Nature (Yama)” (improving the operation and management of country parks and campsites, and enhancing hikers’ experiences in nature) and “I&T for Community (Community Wellness)” (enhancing support for carers). After rounds of assessment and pitching, over 50 awards across four categories, which were the Primary School Group, the Secondary School Group, the University/Tertiary Institute Group and the Open Group, were presented at the Grand Pitch in August this year.
          
         All IC 2024 activities are free of charge. Some of the activities require preregistration. Details are available on the thematic webpage (innocarnival.hk). Members of the public are most welcome to join.   

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Youth forum course launches in SZ

    Source: Hong Kong Information Services

    Secretary for Security Tang Ping-keung today attended the launch ceremony of an induction course for the new-term Security Bureau Youth Uniformed Group Leaders Forum in Shenzhen.

     

    Addressing the ceremony, Mr Tang said Shenzhen University’s participation over the past year has injected impetus and new elements into the forum, further broadening members’ horizons and enhancing their sense of national identity.

     

    He added that the new-term forum includes members of youth groups in Macau’s public security forces, thereby expanding collaboration and facilitating developmental and cultural exchanges among Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macau youths.

     

    The security chief encouraged participating youths to undergo the induction course as a preparation for doing their utmost to serve the community in different positions in the future.

     

    The two-day course is being held at Shenzhen University. In addition to team-building and training activities, members will also receive instruction on national defence and military matters, visit a well-known innovation and technology company, attend lectures on national development, and more.

     

    Outstanding leaders from different sectors, including Beijing 2008 and Rio 2016 Olympic Games diving gold medallist Lin Yue, attended an experience-sharing session today.

     

    The new-term leaders forum comprises 45 Hong Kong youths. Twenty-eight Shenzhen University students and 20 members off youth groups in Macau’s public security forces will also join the forum’s activities in the coming year.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI Video: UN Ambassador’s Climate Message & Cities Cutting Air Pollution | WEF | Top Stories of the Week

    Source: World Economic Forum (video statements)

    This week’s top stories of the week include:

    0:15 UN ambassador’s climate message – Peter Thomson is the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean. He’s urging young people to take part in climate action but he’s also clear about where responsibility lies. Scientists have devised the concept of ‘positive tipping points’ which are thresholds that can propel rapid decarbonization. However, Thomson says the first tipping point is up to us.

    4:05 How to make better decisions – Before entering business, Ravi Kumar S trained as a nuclear scientist. This gave him a huge helping hand in his career, he says. Kumar says modern companies aren’t hierarchies, but networks which draw on the ‘community knowledge’ of all their staff. As CEO, he has developed a decision-making process that takes his gut feeling and supports it with data in a continual feedback loop.

    7:08 Cities cutting air pollution – Curitiba in Brazil built an integrated transport network to cut congestion. Curitiba began by launching the world’s first bus rapid transit (BRT) in 1974. Today’s network combines express routes with suburban connections and cycle lanes so passengers can move easily from one transport to another.

    9:01 Where is AI headed? – At our Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils in Dubai 500 experts gathered to share insights on pressing issues, including how rapid advances in AI are reshaping our world. As AI becomes more prevalent, it remains clear that the humanities are essential to a functioning society and a fulfilled life, says Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley.

    _____________________________________________

    The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.

    World Economic Forum Website ► http://www.weforum.org/
    Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/
    YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/wef
    Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/worldeconomicforum/ 
    Twitter ► https://twitter.com/wef
    LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/world-economic-forum
    TikTok ► https://www.tiktok.com/@worldeconomicforum
    Flipboard ► https://flipboard.com/@WEF

    #WorldEconomicForum

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDFB39Eb8k

    MIL OSI Video –

  • MIL-Evening Report: LNP wins Queensland election, likely with a clear majority

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

    With 45% of enrolled voters counted in today’s Queensland state election, The Poll Bludger’s results have the Liberal National Party (LNP) winning 38 of the 93 seats, Labor 26, Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) three and independents one.

    Including undecided seats where one party is ahead, it’s 49 LNP, 39 Labor, three KAP, one Green and one independent. A majority is achieved with 47 seats, so the LNP are on track for a majority.

    The statewide two-party estimate is a 53.1–46.9 win to the LNP, a 6.3% swing to the LNP since the 2020 election. Current primary votes are 40.9% LNP (up 5.7%), 33.4% Labor (down 6.6%), 10.3% Greens (up 0.7%), 7.8% One Nation (up 1.0%) and 2.3% KAP (down 0.3%).

    As pre-poll and postal votes have come in, the swing to the LNP has increased as these votes have had stronger swings to the LNP than election day votes. There are many more pre-poll and postals still to be counted, so it’s more likely that the LNP will exceed its current projections than fall below them.

    I believe the Resolve poll that gave the LNP a 53–47 lead will be the most accurate. While Labor recovered from landslide defeat margins in polls taken about the middle of this year, it wasn’t enough. The uComms poll that gave the LNP just a 51–49 lead two days before the election was poor.

    The Greens lost South Brisbane to Labor, after the LNP recommended preferences to Labor on their how-to-vote material after recommending preferences to the Greens in 2020. Analyst Kevin Bonham said this is the first time the Greens have lost a single-member seat that they won at the previous general election.

    The key reasons for Labor’s defeat were an “it’s time” factor, as Labor has governed since winning the January 2015 election, the federal Labor government tending to hurt state Labor parties, and Queensland easily being the most pro-Coalition state at the 2022 federal election.

    At that election, Queensland was the only state where the Coalition won the two-party vote (by 54.1–45.9). The second best state for the Coalition was New South Wales, where Labor won the two-party vote by 51.4–48.6.

    Labor’s defeat in Queensland will give some assistance to federal Labor. An unpopular and old Queensland Labor government would have hindered federal Labor’s prospects in Queensland at the federal election that is due by May 2025.

    Late polls

    The Newspoll and uComms poll were both released after Wednesday’s preview article on the Queensland election.

    A Newspoll, conducted October 18–24 from a sample of 1,151, had given the LNP a 52.5–57.5 lead, a 2.5-point gain for Labor since a mid-September Newspoll. Primary votes were 42% LNP (steady), 33% Labor (up three), 11% Greens (down one), 8% One Nation (steady) and 6% for all Others (down two).

    Labor premier Steven Miles gained seven points for a -3 net approval, with 48% dissatisfied and 45% satisfied. LNP leader David Crisafulli’s net approval plunged 15 points to -3. Miles led Crisafulli by 45–42 as better premier, a reversal from a 46–39 Crisafulli lead in September.

    A uComms poll that was conducted Thursday from a sample of 3,651 using robopolling, gave the LNP a 51–49 lead. Bonham had primary votes from this poll, which was not commissioned by anyone. The primary votes were 39.3% LNP, 33.6% Labor, 12.9% Greens, 7.8% One Nation, 2.9% KAP and 3.5% others.

    Federal Essential poll: Labor slumps and Dutton’s ratings jump

    A national Essential poll, conducted October 16–20 from a sample of 1,140, gave the Coalition a 48–46 lead including undecided (49–47 to Labor in early October). Primary votes were 35% Coalition (up one), 28% Labor (down four), 12% Greens (steady), 7% One Nation (down one), 2% UAP (up one), 9% for all Others (steady) and 6% undecided (up one).

    Anthony Albanese’s net approval improved one point from September to -4, with 48% disapproving and 44% approving. He has improved six points since August. Peter Dutton’s net approval jumped six points to +6, his best in any poll this term.

    King Charles had a 50–26 approval rating. By 45–39, voters supported Australia becoming a republic (42–35 in January). On Australia’s colonial history, 26% thought it something we should be proud of, 12% something we should be ashamed of and 62% said it had both positive and negative elements.

    On the National Anti-Corruption Commission, 46% thought it is largely operating as intended but could be improved, 14% wanted it abolished and 10% said it’s successful.

    Freshwater poll: Coalition holds narrow lead

    A national Freshwater poll for The Financial Review, conducted October 18–20 from a sample of 1,034, gave the Coalition a 51–49 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since the September Freshwater poll. Primary votes were 41% Coalition (down one), 30% Labor (steady), 13% Greens (steady) and 16% for all Others.

    Albanese’s net approval was up one point to -14, with 49% unfavourable and 35% favourable. Dutton’s net approval improved two points to -2. Albanese was just ahead as preferred PM by 44–43 (45–41 in September).

    Asked about Albanese buying a $4.3 million house, 52% said it had no impact on their view of him, 36% said it had worsened their view and 4% improved their view.

    Cost of living remained the top issue with 72% saying it was important. The Coalition retained a 14-point lead over Labor on this issue and a 16-point lead on managing the economy.

    Morgan poll: Labor jumps ahead

    A national Morgan poll, conducted October 14–20 from a sample of 1,687, gave Labor a 52–48 lead, a two-point gain for Labor since the October 7–13 Morgan poll.

    Primary votes were 36.5% Coalition (down one), 32% Labor (up two), 13.5% Greens (down 0.5), 5.5% One Nation (down 0.5), 9% independents (steady) and 3.5% others (steady).

    The headline figure uses respondent preferences. By 2022 election preference flows, Labor led by 53–47, a two-point gain for Labor.

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

    – ref. LNP wins Queensland election, likely with a clear majority – https://theconversation.com/lnp-wins-queensland-election-likely-with-a-clear-majority-241918

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: InnoCarnival 2024 opens

    Source: Hong Kong Information Services

    Financial Secretary Paul Chan today officiated at the opening ceremony of the InnoCarnival 2024, which is being held from now until November 3 at the Hong Kong Science Park.

     

    Organised by the Innovation & Technology Commission (ITC), the event features exhibits showcasing local innovation and technology (I&T) achievements under the theme “Let’s Sail with I&T”.

     

    In a speech, Mr Chan said that I&T is relevant to daily life and can produce substantial benefits. He added that the Government has strived to enhance Hong Kong’s I&T ecosystem over the past few years, and that the Chief Executive announced multiple measures to promote the sector in last week’s Policy Address.

     

    Mr Chan asserted that it is necessary to elevate “popularising science” in the public imagination in order to nurture I&T development locally, and that the InnoCarnival offers an opportunity to achieve this.

     

    He added that besides being an event for the public to enjoy, the carnival is a platform for programme partners, especially start-ups, to realise their dreams. He said that it will inspire people’s interest in I&T, encouraging more talent to join the sector and contribute to Hong Kong and the country.

     

    The carnival is supported by over 75 programme partners, including local universities, research and development centres and platforms, government departments, and other organisations. The partners’ booths showcase various I&T achievements, in addition to interactive games.

     

    A diverse line-up of about 150 workshops and webinars, ranging across various subjects and demonstrating the importance of I&T in people’s daily lives, will be staged during the carnival.

     

    To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a number of significant scientific research projects carried out in co-operation with Mainland institutions will be on display.

     

    These include the “Hong Kong Youth Scientific Innovation”, the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence model scientific satellite, which was jointly developed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Mainland’s ADA Space, with funding support from the ITC.

     

    In addition, 23 winning solutions from the second City I&T Grand Challenge, including some prototypes, will be displayed.

     

    All activities at the carnival are free to join, although some require pre-registration.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI: Rich Steinmeier Named Chief Executive Officer of LPL Financial; Elected to Board of Directors

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    SAN DIEGO, Oct. 21, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: LPLA) today announced that the Board of Directors has confirmed Rich Steinmeier as Chief Executive Officer. Steinmeier, who had been interim CEO since October 1, was also elected a member of the Board.  

    In addition, the Board named Matt Audette as President and Chief Financial Officer, expanding his previous role as Chief Financial Officer and Head of Business Operations. The appointments are effective immediately.  

    “LPL is fortunate to benefit from an exceptionally strong team with leaders who have a clear vision for the continued success of the business,” said Jim Putnam, chair of the LPL Financial Board of Directors.  

    “Rich’s appointment to CEO, which reflects the Board’s succession plan, is a testament to the valuable contributions he has made during his tenure with LPL and the trusted relationships he has established with clients and employees,” added Putnam, noting that LPL’s organic growth rate has more than doubled since Rich joined the company in 2018 to lead its growth initiatives. “With Rich as CEO and Matt in his expanded role as President, the Board is confident that LPL’s trajectory of high performance and its steadfast commitment to serving clients will continue to build stakeholder value.” 

    “The success of LPL is shaped by the clear-eyed view from our talented team that all Americans deserve access to sound financial advice. It is an incredible honor to lead the company that delivers on this purpose,” said Steinmeier. “I’m fortunate to collaborate with Matt and our leadership team to elevate our service to clients, provide rewarding careers for our people, and to build on our momentum as one of the fastest growing companies in wealth management.” 

    “We’re operating from a position of strength with a leadership team that is sharply focused on supporting our clients’ success through innovative solutions,” said Audette. “I look forward to continuing my partnership with Rich as we expand on our leading position in the advisor-centered marketplace and enhance value for all the stakeholders we serve.” 

    About Rich Steinmeier  

    Steinmeier, 50, was appointed LPL Financial’s interim CEO on October 1, 2024. He previously served as Managing Director, Chief Growth Officer and, prior to that, as Divisional President, Business Strategy and Growth. As Chief Growth Officer, he led teams responsible for shaping corporate and business line strategy, recruiting new financial advisors and institutions, leading the field management of LPL employee advisors, creating and deploying capital solutions to LPL clients, and leading the marketing and communications functions. 

    Before joining LPL in 2018, Steinmeier held senior leadership roles at UBS Financial and Merrill Lynch as well as working as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. Steinmeier earned a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. 

    About Matt Audette 

    Audette, 50, joined LPL Financial as Chief Financial Officer in 2015 and assumed responsibility for the firm’s business operations in 2023. Audette is responsible for the firm’s financial, risk, compliance and client operations functions. In addition, he oversees the teams responsible for delivering increased operational speed and transparency, along with continued strong risk management, to advisors and institutions. Over Audette’s tenure, he has contributed to the firm’s continued growth and profitability by leading corporate acquisitions, debt transactions, the client deposit portfolio, expense management, and capital allocation. 

    Prior to joining LPL, Audette served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of E*TRADE Financial Corporation. Audette earned a Bachelor of Science in accounting from Virginia Tech. 

    About LPL Financial  

    LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: LPLA) was founded on the principle that the firm should work for advisors and institutions, and not the other way around. Today, LPL is a leader in the markets we serve, serving more than 23,000 financial advisors, including advisors at approximately 1,000 institutions and at approximately 580 registered investment advisor firms nationwide. We are steadfast in our commitment to the advisor-mediated model and the belief that Americans deserve access to personalized guidance from a financial professional. At LPL, independence means that advisors and institution leaders have the freedom they deserve to choose the business model, services and technology resources that allow them to run a thriving business. They have the flexibility to do business their way. And they have the freedom to manage their client relationships, because they know their clients best. Simply put, we take care of our advisors and institutions, so they can take care of their clients. 

    Securities and Advisory services offered through LPL Financial LLC (“LPL Financial”), a registered investment advisor. Member FINRA/SIPC. LPL Financial and its affiliated companies provide financial services only from the United States. 

    Throughout this communication, the terms “financial advisors” and “advisors” are used to refer to registered representatives and/or investment advisor representatives affiliated with LPL Financial. We routinely disclose information that may be important to shareholders in the “Investor Relations” or “Press Releases” section of our website. 

    Media Contact 
    Jen Roche 
    jen.roche@lplfinancial.com 

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Health – New data shows surgery mortality outcomes improving

    Source: Te Tāhū Hauora Health Quality & Safety Commission

    Surgery mortality outcomes are improving in Aotearoa New Zealand despite an aging population and more complex surgeries being performed.
    Data updated to December 2023 by the National Mortality Review Management Group, Te Tāhū Hauora Health Quality & Safety Commission Health Quality Intelligence team, and the Perioperative Mortality (POM) subject matter experts’ group, shows overall surgical mortality rates in New Zealand are not increasing.
    This is despite an aging population, surgeries now performed on those who might not have previously been operated on, and increasingly complex surgeries undertaken on patients with more illnesses.
    Despite pressures on the health system the data shows outcomes have not deteriorated, with surgery here continuing to be as safe as countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
    “Māori and Pacific peoples’ mortality after planned surgery has also improved when compared to Pākehā and other ethnicity groups,” Elizabeth Dennett, University of Otago Wellington, Associate Professor of Surgery and POM member, said
    However, Associate Professor Dennett noted that for acute or emergency surgeries this improvement had not happened for Pacific peoples.
    The data is summarised in an updated ‘Surgery and risk in Aotearoa New Zealand’ infographic, released today and available on Te Tāhū Hauora website.
    Covering a range of information including risk factors, the infographic can be used by health care professionals when discussing upcoming surgery with patients.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center will pay $900K in back wages, interest to resolve alleged systemic racial hiring discrimination

    Source: US Department of Labor

    DALLAS – The U.S. Department of Labor and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have entered into a conciliation agreement in which the federal contractor will pay $900,000 in back wages and interest to resolve alleged systemic racial hiring affecting 6,123 Black applicants at the center’s Dallas facility.

    A routine compliance evaluation by the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found the research hospital’s hiring practices allegedly discriminated against Black applicants from Aug. 24, 2016, through Aug. 24, 2018, in violation of Executive Order 11246, which prohibits federal contractors from discriminating in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. 

    In addition to the back wages and interest, UT’s Southwest Medical Center will make 132 job offers to the affected job applicants and ensure its hiring policies and procedures do not discriminate. The facility will also provide training to all managers, supervisors and other company officials in the hiring process. 

    “Federal contractors must ensure they are not engaging in discriminatory employment practices. Employers must ensure equal employment opportunities and nondiscrimination in hiring for all applicants,” said Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ Southwest and Rocky Mountain Regional Director Ronald W. Sullivan II in Dallas.

    The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center employs about 23,000 people and provides medical education, scientific training and clinical care. It currently has contracts to provide services to the Department of Veterans Affairs and has held more than $90 million in federal contracts since 2013.

    OFCCP launched the Class Member Locator to identify applicants and/or workers who have been impacted by OFCCP’s compliance evaluations and complaint investigations and who may be entitled to a portion of monetary relief and/or consideration for job placement. In addition to Executive Order 11246, OFCCP enforces Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974. Together, these laws prohibit employment discrimination by federal contractors.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Another Atmospheric River Hits British Columbia

    Source: NASA

    About a month after a powerful atmospheric river brought abundant rain to coastal British Columbia, another storm drenched southern parts of the Canadian province and western Washington in the U.S.
    The atmospheric river made landfall over British Columbia on October 18, 2024, and moved down the coast on October 19-20. Portions of southern Vancouver Island recorded up to 300 millimeters (12 inches) of rain between October 18 and 20, while the Vancouver metropolitan area on the mainland received up to 150 millimeters (6 inches). According to the Vancouver Sun, the rain overwhelmed the city’s storm drain system, leading to widespread flooding.
    Toward the south, the storm also brought rain and wind to portions of western Washington. Up to 150 millimeters of rain was also measured on the Olympic Peninsula. Gusty winds toppled trees and contributed to 14,500 households in the Puget Sound region briefly losing power on October 19. NASA-led research has shown that atmospheric rivers are associated with the most damaging storms in the middle latitudes, especially with regard to the hazardous wind they produce.
    A second pulse of water vapor moved over southwest British Columbia and northern Washington on October 20, when the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite acquired this image. In the image, an elongated stream of water vapor—the hallmark of atmospheric rivers—had reached the western coast of North America after crossing the Pacific Ocean. When atmospheric rivers encounter land, they often release that water vapor in the form of rain or snow.
    According to the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego, forecasters expected the atmospheric river to hit western Canada as a Category 3 or 4 event, the second- and third-highest tiers on the scale. The storm follows an unusually strong Category 5 atmospheric river that hit British Columbia in September 2024. Experts suspect that the September atmospheric river was among the most intense events to transit the northeast Pacific in a satellite-based record going back to 2000.
    NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Story by Emily Cassidy.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Welcoming Universities Summit

    Source: Australian Executive Government Ministers

    I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Conference is taking place today, and I pay my respects to elders, past and present. 

    I would also like to acknowledge:  

    • CEO of Welcoming Australia, Mr Aleem Ali  
    • Associate Professor Kathomi Gatwiri 
    • Professor Kylie Readman 

     Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today and I’m sorry I can’t be there in person.  

     You know, like I do, that education is the most powerful cause for good in this country. 

    It doesn’t just change lives.  

    Its impact ricochets through generations.  

    It changes communities and it changes countries.  

    It’s changed ours.  

    We are a different country today to the one I grew up in. 

    When I was a kid less than 10 percent of young Australians had a uni degree. Now it’s almost half.  

    That’s changed us. We are a different country because of it. Stronger, smarter, wealthier.  

    But that change hasn’t reached into every corner of the country or every home. 

    One in two young Australians might have a degree. But not everywhere.  

    Not where I grew up.   

    Not on our outer suburbs. Not in the regions or the bush.  

    Not if you grew up in a poor family. Not if you have a disability or if you are indigenous.  

    Changing that is, at its core, what the Universities Accord is all about.  

    Cutting student debt.  

    Creating Paid Prac.  

    Massively expanding funding for free university preparation courses.  

    Doubling the number of university hubs – in the regions and for the first time in our outer suburbs. 

    A new funding system for universities – that guarantees a place a university for everyone from a disadvantaged background who gets the marks to get in.  

    And needs based funding to support them when they get there.  

    All of it designed to break down that invisible barrier that stops so many people getting a crack at university.  

    But there are other barriers we also have to break down.  

    Barriers that make university an unwelcome place.  

    That make university an unsafe place.  

    They can take many forms, including sexual violence and harassment, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other types of racism and discrimination. 

    You can see it in the one in 20 students who have reported being sexually assaulted since they started university. 

    Or the one in six who have reported being sexually harassed. 

    The students who are being made to feel unwelcome because of their faith or the colour of their skin.  

    All of it requires action.  

    In the Parliament right now is legislation to establish a National Student Ombudsman.  

    A dedicated, national body to handle student complaints within our higher education system. 

    The National Student Ombudsman will have the powers: 

    • to investigate complaints about a broad range of issues; 
    • to bring parties together to resolve those issues, including offering restorative engagement processes and alternative dispute resolution where appropriate; 
    • to make findings and recommendations on what actions universities should take; and 
    • to monitor the implementation of those recommendations. 

    It will also have strong investigative powers, similar to those of a Royal Commission. 

    It is a direct response to the terrifying evidence of sexual violence in our universities, but its remit is broader than that.  

    It will include complaints about everything from homophobia to antisemitism to Islamophobia to any other form of racism or discrimination.  

    It is also a recommendation of the Universities Accord.  

    So is the work I have asked the Australian Human Rights Commission to do.  

    An examination of racism in our universities and what we need to do to address it.  

     All of it is necessary.  

    All of it is about making our universities more welcoming places.  

    For everyone.  

    Regardless of your gender, where you live, what your parents do, where you worship or the colour of your skin.  

    John Curtin, one of our greatest Prime Ministers, described what he thought a great university should be.  

    He said it should be: 

    “a friend of the reformer, the host ever willing to receive the initiator, the champion always ready to defend the poor and the obscure”. 

    I believe that too.  

    It’s what drives me.  

    And I know it drives you too. 

    It’s why you are here, at this Summit.  

    Because you want our universities to be more welcoming places for everyone.  

    I hope you have a great Summit today and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it. 

     

     

     

     

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI China: Artworks by Taiwan, Fujian artists on display in Taipei

    Source: China State Council Information Office 3

    A total of 81 paintings and works of calligraphy by 47 artists from east China’s Fujian Province and Taiwan are on display in Taipei.

    Held at the Taipei-based China University of Science and Technology from Monday to Nov. 15, the exhibition features a diverse range of Chinese artistic expressions, including traditional ink painting, color painting, calligraphy, seal carving and artistic stone collection, showcasing the rich and varied heritage of Chinese art.

    The event provides a valuable platform for artists from Taiwan and Fujian to showcase their works, exchange ideas and learn from each other, said Tsai Chieh-teng, professor and dean of the Department of Painting and Calligraphy Arts, Taiwan University of Arts, as well as the academic adviser to the exhibition.

    The exhibition invites a number of artists from the younger generation. Tsai noted that, based on his personal observation, although the artistic preferences of artists on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are somewhat different, the younger generation’s creative focus is becoming increasingly similar, thanks to the internet and social media networks.

    “Unlike artists from the older generation who prefer natural landscapes, young ink-painting artists are placing greater emphasis on personal and emotional expression. This tendency can be seen on both sides of the Strait,” he said.

    Kuo Ching-chang, chairman of the Cross-Strait Association of Image Art, one of the event’s organizers, said that in the current cross-Strait climate, artistic and cultural activities like this one offer an opportunity for artists from both sides to learn from each other, inspire one another, and promote cultural development together, leading to a deeper emotional connection.

    In a congratulatory message, Fujian Pictorial, one of the mainland organizers, said that Fujian and Taiwan have profound historical connections and share the same language and culture, adding that the fine works of calligraphy and painting at the show evoke not only the allure of art among audiences on both sides, but also a profound emotional resonance. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Promoted as a win-win, Australia’s Pacific island guest worker scheme is putting those workers at risk

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Withers, Senior Lecturer, School of Sociology, Australian National University

    The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme (PALM) has been lauded by both sides of politics as a “win win” for the islanders who come here and the Australians who use their services.

    Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs has even labelled it a “triple win”, for the workers, their hosts and for their home nations who receive remittances.

    But beneath the surface serious questions are being asked about the safety of workers denied the right to leave their employers.

    A report by the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner entitled Be Our Guests has identified signs of debt bondage, deceptive recruiting, forced labour and, in extreme cases, servitude, sexual servitude and human trafficking.

    The NSW parliament has launched its own inquiry into the risks faced by migrant workers in response and is seeking submissions.

    Employment Minister Murray Watt this month signalled changes, saying there had been “far too many abuses of the PALM scheme”.

    PALM allows rural and regional employers to hire workers from nine Pacific nations and Timor-Leste when there are not enough local workers available.

    Unplanned pregnancies, sleeping rough

    The workers hired do not have the right to change employers while in Australia, even for contracts of up to four years, except via a request from their original employer or a direction from the Department of Employment.

    This means workers who abandon their employers for reasons including underpayment of wages, excessive deductions and overcharging for accommodation become absconders and lose their rights.

    The NSW Modern Slavery Commissioner says there are several thousand absconded PALM workers in Australia, without access to health insurance and formal income. Among them are women with unplanned pregnancies denied antenatal care due to ineligibility for Medicare.

    The Commissioner says crisis accommodation services in the NSW Riverina report having exhausted all available resources, including tents, for PALM workers who have left their employers and are sleeping rough.

    Australia had 30,805 PALM workers at the end of August, one-third of them (11,420) in Queensland. Most work in farming (52%) and 39% in meat processing. The accommodation and care industries between them account for 6%.

    For many of these workers, the income is life-changing. An I-Kiribati worker I interviewed recently told me she makes more money cleaning hotel rooms in Queensland than is paid to the president of her country.

    The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says between July 2018 to October 2022 PALM workers sent home a total of A$184 million, but their employers made profits of $289 million and charged them a further $74 million in rent.

    Unable to switch employers, their bargaining power is weak.

    An estimated 45 workers on the PALM scheme died between June 2022 and June 2023. Nineteen deaths remain under investigation.

    After a Fijian abattoir worker died of a brain tumour in June, Fiji raised with Australia claims of racism, bullying, excessive workloads, unfair termination and unsafe working conditions under the program.

    Minimum pay, but no right to move

    Reforms introduced last year guaranteed workers a minimum of 30 hours per week and a minimum weekly take-home pay (after deductions) of $200.

    But until PALM workers are able to move freely between approved employers they will remain at risk of what the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Michele O’Neil calls modern-day slavery.

    O’Neil wants the government to blacklist bad employers and identify ethical ones in consultation with unions and civil society organisations. But she says until PALM workers can move, they risk being treated as disposable labour.

    Many employers treat their PALM workers well, but the current design of the scheme leaves that outcome to chance, and leaves badly-treated workers trapped.

    It’s time to give them the same sort of right to move between employers as the rest of us.

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

    – ref. Promoted as a win-win, Australia’s Pacific island guest worker scheme is putting those workers at risk – https://theconversation.com/promoted-as-a-win-win-australias-pacific-island-guest-worker-scheme-is-putting-those-workers-at-risk-240333

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: With AI translation tools so powerful, what is the point of learning a language?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elba Ramirez, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader BA International Studies, Auckland University of Technology

    In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), foreign language learning can seem like it’s becoming obsolete. Why invest the time and effort to learn another language when technology can do it for you?

    There are now translation tools to understand song lyrics, translate websites and to enable automated captions when watching foreign videos and movies. Our phones can instantly translate spoken words.

    At the same time, foreign language programmes are closing at New Zealand and Australian universities.

    But while technology can translate messages, it misses an important component of human communication – the cultural nuances behind the words.

    So, while AI translation might bridge language barriers and promote communication because of its accessibility, it’s important to be clear about the benefits and challenges it presents. Merely relying on technology to translate between languages will ultimately lead to misunderstandings and a less rich human experience.

    The rise of translation technology

    Translation technology has rapidly grown since its emergence between the 1950s and 1960s. This progress was bolstered by the commercialisation of computer-assisted translation systems in the 1980s.

    But recent advances in generative AI have led to significant breakthroughs in translation technologies.

    Google Translate has dramatically changed since its launch in 2006. Initially developed as a limited statistical translation machine, it has evolved into a “portable interpreter”.

    AI translation is useful in some circumstances. For example, helping teachers communicate with parents who speak a different language, or when travelling.

    Translation technology may even play a role in the preservation of Indigenous and minority languages on the verge of disappearing by supporting online collections of literature. Incorporating AI-powered technology in these digital libraries can help users access and understand these texts.

    But the new technology also comes with limitations.

    In 2019, staff at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centre in the United States used AI translation to process an asylum application. The voice-translation tool was unable to understand an applicant’s regional accent or dialect, leading to the asylum seeker spending six months in detention without being able to meaningfully communicate with anyone.

    In 2021, a court in the US determined Google Translate wasn’t reliable enough to ensure someone’s consent. A trooper had used the translation app to ask a Spanish-speaking suspect if he could search her car. Google Translate used the word “registrar” (which translates as “register” but can be used to say “examine”) when, in fact, the word “buscar” (to search) would have been more appropriate.

    Brain health and other benefits

    Learning additional languages also stands out as one of the best ways to improve ourselves, with benefits for brain health, social skills, cultural understanding, empathy and career opportunities.

    An analysis of studies from 2012 to 2019 found speaking more than one language can enhance the brain’s flexibility, delay the onset of dementia, and improve cognitive health later in life. The analysis also recommended starting language learning early.

    In 2022, the Council of Europe emphasised the significance of plurilingual and intercultural education for fostering democratic culture, noting its cognitive, linguistic and social benefits.

    And this year, the council launched the “Language education at the heart of democracy” programme. The goal is to highlight the importance of learning language for a fairer society.

    Lost in translation

    In Aotearoa New Zealand, English is widely used. Te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language are also recognised as official languages. Some 29% of citizens are born overseas. There are more than 150 languages spoken, with at least 24 spoken by more than 10,000 people.

    But interest in learning languages has fallen. In 2021, 980 full-time equivalent students studied a language other than Māori or New Zealand Sign Language at one of the country’s eight universities, falling from 1,555 less than a decade earlier.

    As a consequence, a number of universities have closed, or announced plans to close, their language programmes.

    While AI-powered translation technology has its uses, a great deal can be lost if we rely solely on it to communicate. The nuances of languages, and what they say about different cultures, are difficult to communicate via translation tools.

    And the benefits of being bilingual or multilingual – both personally and for the wider community – risk being lost if we don’t support second language learning.

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

    – ref. With AI translation tools so powerful, what is the point of learning a language? – https://theconversation.com/with-ai-translation-tools-so-powerful-what-is-the-point-of-learning-a-language-238068

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: From Ancient Rome to Persia, eunuchs often led armies and were powerbrokers of the ancient world

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael B. Charles, Associate Professor, Management Discipline, Faculty of Business, Arts and Law, Southern Cross University

    The person to the right of the haloed emperor is thought to be the eunuch Narses, a powerful Byzantine general. Bender235/Wikimedia

    When people think of eunuchs, someone like Lord Varys from Game of Thrones often springs to mind. Chubby, obsequious and a flatterer, he is involved in court intrigues and manipulates people and events behind the scenes.

    These traits oppose military prowess and valour endorsed by traditional models of masculinity across various times and cultures. According to those tropes, a eunuch’s weapon is the whisper, not the sword.

    In reality, not every eunuch in the ancient world was a servile, cloistered being. In fact, eunuchs sometimes led armies on campaign, and were entrusted with high-level administrative tasks.

    What was a eunuch?

    A eunuch was someone whose testicles had been deliberately crushed or excised.

    In Greek myth, Cronus (the father of Zeus) castrated his own father Uranus to overthrow his tyranny and become king of the Titans.

    Greek historians reported castration as war punishment, and persistently linked the castration of young boys to sexual slavery.

    The ancient Greek historian Herodotus stressed the demand for castrated boys at the court of the Persian kings. But the market for eunuchs was evidently larger than just the Persian court.

    The Romans replicated the Greeks’ negative view of eunuchs. They are often portrayed in Roman texts as being in the company of “bad” emperors such as the supposedly cruel and narcissistic Domitian – even though he forbade the practice of making eunuchs.

    The notion of the unmanly eunuch in antiquity was reinforced by Orientalist literature, which imagined ancient eunuchs in charge of something akin to a Turkish sultan’s harem. Unable to procreate, the eunuch is paradoxically surrounded by beautiful women, his in-between-ness granting him access to the psychological makeup of both genders.

    Orientalism drew inspiration from historical accounts written after the Greco-Persian wars, which the Greeks won in 449 BCE. These accounts were written in the shadow of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East (including areas such as modern-day Iraq, Iran and Syria), which was followed by the Roman hegemony.

    Instead of critically evaluating the sources, colonial writers and their readers indulged in a world of fantasy where eunuchs offered a sensualised peek into the “secrets of the harem”.

    In fact, a deeper look at the historical record reveals that eunuchs often occupied positions of great military power and civil authority.

    Eunuchs as bodyguards, enforcers and governors

    Cyrus, the first Persian king (590–529 BCE), praised eunuchs for their reliability. He insisted that gelded men, like gelded horses, are easier to control. He believed they made up for their lack of physical strength with their loyalty.

    Cyrus may have owed his life to eunuchs, who played a role in saving him as a baby from a murderous plot by his grandfather.

    The Greek historian Herodotus also reports that eunuch-bodyguards tried to protect, albeit unsuccessfully, the man on the Persian throne just before Darius the Great took power in 522 BCE (Darius contended that this man was not a real king but an imposter).

    The historical record also mentions a Persian eunuch being in charge of a garrison at Gaza around 332 BCE.

    The Egyptian pharaoh Amasis, who reigned in the sixth century BCE, also relied on eunuchs to recover fugitive slaves.

    Eunuchs appeared in the courts of the Hittites and Assyrians (civilisations in modern-day Turkey and Iraq respectively) from the 13th century BCE.

    Assyrian kings often appointed eunuchs as provincial governors. The Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad V (who ruled Assyria 824–811 BCE) praised his chief eunuch Mutarris-Ashur as “clever and experienced in battle”. Mutarris-Ashur led the Assyrian army on a military campaign to the Nairi lands in the Armenian Highlands.

    King Ashurbanipal, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BCE to 631 BCE, sent his chief eunuch on missions against neighbouring Mannea (a kingdom in modern-day Iran) and the rebellious Gambulu tribe in ancient Babylonia.

    This Assyrian relief shows the head of a beardless royal attendant, possibly a eunuch. Eunuchs were key figures in the Assyrian court.
    The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Bagoas the eunuch

    In the fourth century BCE, there was Bagoas, a Persian court eunuch who is sometimes conflated with a eunuch lover of Alexander the Great who had the same name. Bagoas became the second most important person in the Persian court, after the Persian king.

    Bagoas had served in Persian king Artaxerxes III’s campaign against Egypt, and rose to the rank of Chiliarch (the leader of the royal infantry guard).

    Bagoas developed a reputation as a kingmaker – he was instrumental in replacing Artaxerxes III with his son, Artaxerxes IV. He later poisoned Artaxerxes IV and installed as king Darius III, who was eventually defeated by Alexander the Great.

    Bagoas had plotted to replace Darius too, but Darius outsmarted him; he forced Bagoas to drink the poison the latter had prepared for Darius to drink.

    Eunuchs in Rome

    Despite the bias of the Greco-Roman sources, including their suspicion of eastern cults that involved eunuch priests, eunuchs were important in Roman imperial service.

    The emperor Claudius rewarded his eunuch Posides for his service during Rome’s invasion of Britain in 43 CE.

    In 399 CE, the eunuch Eutropius became a powerful consul in Rome’s eastern empire under the emperor Arcadius. Some Romans, however, attacked the appointment of a semivir (half man) as consul as an abomination.

    In early Christianity, the concept of becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of God acquired currency. According to some interpretations of the Bible, being a eunuch was connected to the virtues of chastity and celibacy.

    By the sixth century CE, Byzantine eunuchs found themselves in charge of large armies. (What we now call the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Roman Empire, was known by its people as the Roman Empire until 1453 CE).

    Narses was a eunuch and one of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s great generals. He managed to recapture Italy, including Rome, from the Goths (a Germanic people who had invaded Italy).

    Narses, possibly an Armenian by birth, was no armchair general. At the battle of Mons Lactarius (552 or 553 CE), Narses fought on foot with his fellow soldiers against the Goths. He encouraged his men to hang on against a brave enemy.

    Despite the stereotypes, eunuchs clearly often played important roles in the ostensibly masculine world of strategic planning and combat.

    This plurality of masculinities in the ancient Mediterranean world remains relevant to modern society as it challenges notions of a simple gender binary.

    Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

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

    – ref. From Ancient Rome to Persia, eunuchs often led armies and were powerbrokers of the ancient world – https://theconversation.com/from-ancient-rome-to-persia-eunuchs-often-led-armies-and-were-powerbrokers-of-the-ancient-world-235957

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is it possible to have a fair jury trial anymore?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arlie Loughnan, Professor of Criminal Law, University of Sydney

    Shutterstock

    The decades-long mystery about what happened to 19-year-old Amber Haigh made it to court in New South Wales earlier this year. Those accused of murdering Haigh were found not guilty.

    Usually we don’t know precisely why someone was found guilty or not. But in this case, the reasons were given.

    This is because the trial was “judge alone”: a trial without a jury. This means the judge decides on the factual questions as well as the legal ones. And as judges are required to give reasons for their decisions, we learned what was behind the verdict, something usually hidden by the “black box” of the jury room.

    Judge alone trials are increasing in New South Wales. Moves are being made in some other Australian jurisdictions to increase access to judge alone trials.

    While it’s only possible to hold a judge alone trial in certain circumstances, and there are small numbers of such trials relative to other trials, some lawyers and judges think these trials have advantages over those with a jury.

    This is because jury trials face a lot of challenges. Some have pondered whether, in this media-saturated environment, there is such a thing as a fair jury trial. So what are these challenges, and where do they leave the time-honoured process?

    What happens in a jury trial?

    The criminal trial brings together knowledge of the facts that underpin the criminal charge. The task of the jury is to independently assess that knowledge as presented in the trial, and reach a conclusion about guilt to the criminal standard of proof: beyond reasonable doubt.

    Crucially, lay people provide legitimacy to this process, as individuals drawn from all walks of life are engaged in the decision-making around the guilt of the accused.

    The jury is therefore a fundamental part of our democracy.

    The changing trial

    For its legitimacy, the criminal trial traditionally relies on open justice, independent prosecutors and the lay jury (the “black box”), all overseen by the impartial umpire, the judge, and backed up by the appeal system.

    But these aspects of the criminal trial are being challenged by changes occurring inside and outside the courtroom.

    These challenges include high levels of media attention given to criminal justice matters.

    Another is the questioning about the way public prosecutors are using their discretion in bringing charges against individuals. This is happening in NSW, ACT and Victoria.

    There are also concerns about “junk science” being relied on Australian courtrooms. This is where unreliable or inaccurate expert evidence is introduced in trials.

    Some legal bodies are also demanding a post-appeal criminal cases review commission to prevent wrongful convictions.

    Added complexity

    It is not just juries that must come to grips with complex evidence in criminal matters. Judges and lawyers are also required to grasp intricate scientific evidence, understand new areas of expertise, and get across changing practices of validating expert knowledge.

    The difficulty of these tasks for judges and lawyers was on show in the two special inquiries into Kathleen Folbigg’s convictions for the murder of her children, held in 2019 and 2022–23. Rapid developments in genetic science, alongside other developments, came to cast doubt on the accuracy of Folbigg’s convictions. This was just a few years after the first inquiry concluded there was no reasonable doubt about her guilt.

    The challenges facing criminal trials are one dimension of much wider social and political dynamics. News and information is produced and consumed differently now. People have differing degrees of respect for scientific knowledge and expertise. Trust in authority and institutions is low.

    These factors come together in a perfect storm and pose existential questions about what criminal justice should look like now.

    What does the future look like?

    The future of criminal law and its institutions depends on their legitimacy. It’s legitimacy that gives courts the social license and power to proscribe conduct, prosecute crimes and authorise punishment. Juries are a vital piece of this picture.

    Amid the changing environment, there are things we can do to improve jury trials and in turn, safeguard and enhance their legitimacy.

    One is providing extremely careful instructions to juries to make sure jurors understand their tasks, and do not feel frustrated.

    Another is introducing higher and better standards for expert evidence. Experts testifying in court need firm guidance, especially on their use of industry jargon, to decrease chances of wrongful convictions.

    These sorts of changes might be coupled with changes in criminal laws, like enhancing laws of self-defence so they are more accessible to women in domestic violence situations.

    Together, this would help to future-proof criminal law, ready to meet the challenges of coming years and decades that we are yet to detect.

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

    – ref. Is it possible to have a fair jury trial anymore? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-possible-to-have-a-fair-jury-trial-anymore-239401

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: What’s at stake in elections in Georgia and Moldova this week: a stark choice between Russia and the West

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer, International Studies, University of South Australia

    Two former Soviet republics have important elections this week that will likely be pivotal in their respective journeys toward tighter integration with the West against the backdrop of rising Russian influence and the Ukraine war.

    What happens in Georgia and Moldova is being closely watched across the European Union and Moscow. Russia has invested heavily in trying to influence the outcomes of both elections. If it succeeds, this will be a cause of significant concern in other ex-Soviet states, as well as the West.

    Moldova takes a tentative step towards the EU

    On Sunday, Moldovans voted in the first round of their presidential election. A referendum was also on the ballot to amend the country’s Constitution to include an aspiration to join the EU.

    Pre-election polls had suggested the referendum would easily pass and the popular pro-EU president, Maia Sandu, would be re-elected.

    However, Russia launched a significant “propaganda blitz” ahead of the vote, including credible allegations of widespread vote buying, to undermine the electoral process.

    Sandu won the first round comfortably, with over 42% of the vote, though not by enough to avoid a run-off on November 3. The country’s pro-Russia parties are now likely to coalesce behind the second-place candidate in an attempt to oust her.

    The referendum, however, teetered on the edge of failure before narrowly passing by the tightest of margins.

    Though Moldova’s negotiations with the EU were certain to continue under Sandu regardless of the outcome, the result was nonetheless concerning. It demonstrates the strength of Russia’s influence operations to destabilise a nation seen as key to security on the eastern boundaries of the EU and NATO.

    Moldova has a 1,200-kilometre border with Ukraine in the east and borders Romania, an EU and NATO member, in the west.

    Polling suggests a majority of Moldovans condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but a significant minority retain pro-Russian views.

    Russia also has a history of interference in Moldova’s sovereignty.

    Moldova declared independence in 1991 during the dissolution of the Soviet Union but Transnistria, a small part of the country along the border with Ukraine, was taken over by separatists in a military operation backed by Russian troops.

    Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe formally recognised Transnistria as Moldovan territory still occupied by Russia.

    What’s at stake in Georgia?

    On the day of Moldova’s vote, tens of thousands of pro-EU supporters staged a demonstration in Tblisi, Georgia’s capital, calling for their country to choose a pro-EU path in their own election

    The Georgian Dream party has been in power since 2012 and while it remains nominally pro-EU, it has gradually shifted towards a more pro-Russia stance.

    The Georgian Dream-dominated legislature recently passed an antidemocratic, Putinesque law that requires groups receiving at least 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “agents of foreign influence”. And earlier this month, it passed a sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ bill that bans same-sex marriages, adoption by same-sex couples and changing one’s gender on identity documents.

    The EU suspended Georgia’s accession process after the foreign agents law was passed and has recently cancelled €121 million (A$196 million) in funding due to “democratic backsliding”. This month, the European Parliament also overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a freeze on EU funding to Georgia until its undemocratic laws are repealed.

    The opposition parties are now working together to try to remove Georgian Dream from power, support the re-election of the current pro-EU president and return the country to the road of rapid integration with the EU.

    Polls show support for joining the EU remains very high at nearly 80%. However, as the Moldovan election demonstrates, this may not necessarily be reflected in the vote on election day.



    Read more:
    ‘We do not want to be like Russia’: a first-hand account of Georgia’s fight for democracy

    Russian interference

    Russia has long meddled in its southern neighbour. After an invasion of Georgia in 2008, Russian troops supported two pro-Russian breakaway republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as they had done in Transnistria.

    Russia has now established military bases in both regions, as well as a new naval base in Abkhazia to serve as a permanent base for parts of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

    These incursions set the stage for Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. As the post-Soviet Baltic states have argued, the lack of an adequate response from the West to these invasions set the stage for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

    Georgians are understandably concerned that Russia may invade their country again. Polls suggest two-thirds of people support joining NATO.

    There are concerns that Saturday’s election could also be tainted. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe issued a declaration earlier this month, saying there are “alarming reports” indicating the Russian-backed Georgian Dream party might be “preparing to steal” the election.

    The report accused the ruling party of a “massive intimidation campaign” against opposition candidates and their supporters, including physical attacks. It also said the Central Election Commission has apparently been brought under the control of Georgian Dream.

    The opposition and civil society groups claimed electoral fraud after the 2020 elections, which resulted in mass protests and a political crisis when the opposition boycotted parliament.

    Why these elections matter

    These elections in Georgia and Moldova are crucial for reinforcing democratic rights in vulnerable former Soviet states. Any outcome that shifts their trajectory towards Russia will likely result in increased repression of both minorities, including the LGTBQ+ community, and the political opposition.

    Wins by pro-Russian candidates and parties – legitimate or otherwise – will also drive greater military and economic integration with Russia. Despite popular support in both countries for joining NATO, wins by Russian-backed candidates will likewise undermine support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

    While it looks like pro-EU results might have squeaked through in Moldova, the elections in Georgia are potentially more hazardous for European relations.

    The stakes in both elections could not be higher.

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

    – ref. What’s at stake in elections in Georgia and Moldova this week: a stark choice between Russia and the West – https://theconversation.com/whats-at-stake-in-elections-in-georgia-and-moldova-this-week-a-stark-choice-between-russia-and-the-west-240675

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –