Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University

It’s official: the only Australian shrew is no more.

The latest edition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the world’s most comprehensive global inventory on extinction risk, has declared the Christmas Island shrew is extinct.

The news may not seem momentous. After all, most Australians know nothing of shrews and would be unaware this one species counted among our native fauna.

But the shrew’s extinction increases the tally of Australian mammals extinct since 1788 to 39 species. This is far more than for any other country. These losses represent about 10% of all Australia’s land mammal species before colonisation. It is a deplorable record of trashing an extraordinary legacy.

So, what are shrews?

Shrews are small, long-nosed, insect-eating mammals, with many species widely distributed across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. On mainland Australia, similar roles are filled by unrelated small marsupials such as dunnarts, antechinuses, planigales and ningauis, which are themselves not writ large on our national consciousness.

Many people will know of shrews only courtesy of Shakespeare. Combining misogyny and zoophobia (an intense fear of animals) he used the name of this inoffensive animal to describe a shrill, ever-complaining, grating caricature of women. The offensive term has stuck through the ages, draining sympathy for and interest in the animal.

The history of Australia’s shrew

It must have been a harrowing voyage. Tens of thousands of years ago, a small family of shrews (or a pregnant female) rafted on floating vegetation, from islands of what is now Indonesia. Haphazardly, they landed on uninhabited Christmas Island, now an Australian territory about 1,500 kilometres west of the mainland. These lucky or reckless pioneers gave rise to Australia’s only shrew species.

For many years the Christmas Island shrew prospered. When European naturalists first visited Christmas Island in the 1890s, at the time of its settlement, they remarked:

[…] this little animal is extremely common all over the island, and at night its shrill shriek, like the cry of a bat, can be heard on all sides.

Change came quickly thereafter. In 1900, black rats were accidentally introduced, stowaways on hay bales. Worse, these rats were infested with trypanosomes, a cellular parasite. These trypanosomes spread rapidly to the island’s two species of native rats (and presumably the shrew).

The long isolation of Christmas Island had cocooned its native mammals, leaving them with no resistance to new diseases. Within a year, island residents began seeing many dying rats stumbling across the forest floor.

By the time naturalists next visited the island in 1908, the two species of native rats and the Christmas Island shrew were thought to have become extinct. Subsequently, many other endemic animals were also lost or suffered serious declines due to the introduction of cats and invasive species of ants, snails, plants, giant centipedes, birds and snakes.

It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly across the world’s islands. Introductions of plants and animals have subverted island ecosystems and, as a consequence, endemic island species represent a disproportionately high number of the world’s extinctions.

Defying extinction?

But the shrew lived on. After not being seen for more than 50 years, two survivors were caught in the 1950s as bulldozers cleared a patch of rainforest for mining. The shrews were released and the find was not reported until many years later.

Then, nothing for another 30 years. In December 1984, biologists Hugh Yorkston and Jeff Tranter were clearing a rainforest track and came across a live female shrew in a clump of fallen birds’ nest fern. They kept the shrew in a terrarium for 12-18 months, industriously catching grasshoppers to feed it.

At the time, they didn’t consider this a final opportunity to conserve the species through a captive breeding program. When, with extraordinary serendipity, a male shrew was found alive only a few months later in March 1985, it was kept in a separate terrarium. The female was docile but the male was aggressive. It also appeared unwell.

Whatever the reason, there was no introduction, no consummation and no baby shrews. The male died about three weeks after capture while the female lingered on, alone.

No shrews left

Since 1984, there have been no recorded sightings. This means only four Christmas Island shrews have been reported in over 120 years.

Almost no information on the biology of this species has been published, other than the single sentence written by naturalist Charles Andrews in 1900:

[…] it lives in holes in rocks and roots of trees, and seems to feed mainly on beetles.

There are few pictures. However, inklings of the nature of the last known shrew can be seen in a beautiful sketch by the park ranger, naturalist and artist Max Orchard.

In the nearly 40 years since the death of the last known individual, two recovery plans have been compiled, outlining the actions needed to conserve the species. There have been targeted searches. But no shrews have turned up to benefit from those plans.

The most telling evidence of their extinction is the absence of any shrews in the stomach contents of hundreds of feral cats culled over the past few decades.

While the shrew clearly survived until the 1980s, this decade saw the arrival of yet another threat, the Asian wolf snake. This snake quickly spread across the island, most likely causing the extinction of the island’s endemic microbat, the Christmas Island pipistrelle, in 2009 and most of the endemic lizards. The snake’s arrival also probably marked the death knell for any remaining shrews.

We must try harder to prevent extinctions

Extinction can be difficult to prove, especially for a species as cryptic as the shrew. There is peril in categorising a species as extinct when it still survives. This misclassification has been termed the “Romeo error”, where formal recognition of a species as extinct can result in the withdrawal of funding or protection, and hence increase likelihood of actual extinction.

In 2022, the Australian government through then-Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek pledged, admirably, to preventing any more extinctions. Although today’s formal recognition of the shrew’s extinction comes after that pledge, the last shrew probably died one to two decades beforehand.

The shrew’s loss is a reminder of the enormity of the challenge of preventing further extinctions, of the diverse ways these losses can happen, of the need to seize opportunities to protect rare species, and of the importance of a national and political commitment to prevent extinction.

I hope the Christmas Island shrew is not extinct; after all it has defied previous calls of its demise. Perhaps somewhere, a small furtive family of shrews are hanging on, elusive survivors, secure in the knowledge of their own existence and waiting to prove the pessimists wrong.

Hugh Yorkston, Jeff Tranter and Paul Meek helped with this article.

John Woinarski is a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a member of the Biodiversity Council, and co-chair of the IUCN Australasian Marsupials and Monotremes Specialist Species Group.

– ref. And then there were none: Australia’s only shrew declared extinct – https://theconversation.com/and-then-there-were-none-australias-only-shrew-declared-extinct-265988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Independent senator David Pocock, a former captain of the Wallabies, has been declared persona non grata by the Parliament Sports Club, after he complained about its sponsors including a gambling lobbyist.

Pocock, who represents the ACT, said on Friday he had recently brought to light that lobbyists were “buying access to parliamentarians” through $2500 club sponsorships. The club was on the official lobbyists register, he said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is the club’s president, Special Minister of State Don Farrell is its chairman, and it has an executive officer, Andy Turnbull. It organises social sporting events for parliamentarians, including touch football and soccer when parliament is sitting.

Pocock said the club’s sponsors included peak industry body Responsible Wagering Australia, “whose CEO is a regular participant in matches with parliamentarians”.

He said he first raised his concerns privately with Turnbull. He subsequently went public, including at this week’s Senate estimates hearings. Late Thursday, he was told he was out.

In a message to Pocock, Turnbull criticised his handling of the matter and said in the circumstances it was “inappropriate for you to remain a member of the Club”.

“You haven’t actually paid your subs this Parliament so no further action is required,” Turnbull wrote.

“I will remove you from the lists and you are not welcome to attend fixtures operated by the Club.”

He accused Pocock of a “cheap shot that will have no effect on the outcome of your anti gambling campaign”.

At Senate estimates, Pocock questioned whether it was appropriate for Albanese to be “the president of a lobbying firm”.

In reply, Foreign Minister Penny Wong accused him of wanting “to get a grab up” but admitted she did not even know there was such a club.

Asked on Friday whether he should be president, Albanese said that “as prime minister it comes with the gig”, and accused Pocock of seeking publicity.

“I think that’s David Pocock being David Pocock, getting himself in a story. You know, this is a voluntary organisation that raises money for charity.

“The amount of time I have spent on the Australian Parliament Sports Club this year is zero. I have participated in zero events in terms of sports, just because I’m a bit busy.”

Pocock said he was dismayed by the club’s decision to remove a parliamentarian “rather than tighten the criteria of companies who can sponsor the club, or reconsider whether the parliamentary sports club should have corporate sponsors at all”.

“Being kicked out of the club for raising concerns around gambling lobbyists buying access to the club shows the influence vested interests have here in parliament and just how normalised this has become.

“It’s no wonder we haven’t seen the action to end gambling advertising the majority of Australians are desperate to see when gambling lobbyists are calling the shots in Canberra,” Pocock said.

Crossbencher Allegra Spender, who left the club this week over the gambling link, said on Friday it was “an absolute disgrace” Pocock had been excluded.

“To see the parliamentary sports club operating as a front for a gambling industry that spreads so much misery, breaks my heart. I can’t be part of a club that promotes the gambling lobby.”

Michelle Grattan 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. Senator David Pocock thrown out of Parliament Sports Club after criticising gambling link – https://theconversation.com/senator-david-pocock-thrown-out-of-parliament-sports-club-after-criticising-gambling-link-267219

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

Baby boy Cassian is an internet sensation. He was born in the United States weighing 5.8 kilograms in recent weeks. After his mum and the hospital shared the news, it wasn’t long before headlines about the “giant” baby spread around the world. These included:

‘Are you OK’?: Woman breaks record with giant newborn baby

Record-breaking baby tips the scales at almost double the average size of a newborn

While baby Cassian was born heavier than average, he’s not unique. There have been other examples in the news of babies born heavier. That includes a baby boy born in Brazil in 2023 who weighed 7.3kg.

These stories might make women all over the world cross their legs. But how common are big babies, and does their birth always lead to complications?

What are big babies?

Macrosomia describes babies born over 4kg or 4.5kg, depending on the definition.

A big baby can also be defined as having a birth weight over the 90th percentile at a particular gestational age. In other words, more than 90% of babies have a lower birth weight at this particular stage of the pregnancy. The term “large for gestational age” is probably a more accurate term as the weeks of gestation is used alongside the weight.

There has been little change overall in the percentage of large babies in the past decade in Australia. While stories of such births hit the media, their proportion hovers around 9–10% of births.

What are the problems for big babies and their mums?

We don’t know the specific circumstances of Cassian’s birth, his health or that of his mother. And we don’t know whether common reasons for larger babies are relevant in this situation.

But, generally speaking, birth complications can be higher for mothers and babies when the baby is big, especially if more than 4.5kg. This is certainly not always the case, however.

There is an increased need for interventions during the birth, such as forceps or vacuum delivery, or a caesarean section the bigger the baby is. Having these interventions can impact a women’s recovery after the birth, and options for the next birth.

For the baby there are higher risks of the shoulders getting stuck in the birth canal during the birth (known as shoulder dystocia).

Midwives and obstetricians also may need to make extra manoeuvres for the baby to be safely delivered. For instance, they may need to try and bring down one shoulder if it’s stuck behind the mother’s pubic bone.

These manoeuvres can damage the baby or lead to oxygen restrictions, with the baby needing to be resuscitated. However, these complications are rare and can occur when a big baby was not expected.

What leads to a big baby?

Big babies are most often healthy babies, and there are a number of reasons for them.

Genetic factors mean babies are always big in some families.

Babies that go over their due dates tend to be a bit bigger as they have more time to grow inside their mothers.

Having diabetes, especially if this is poorly controlled, can lead to larger babies. This is because the mother’s higher blood sugar leads to the baby receiving more energy than it needs, so it stores this extra energy as fat.

Babies of mothers with diabetes diagnosed for the first time in pregnancy (gestational diabetes) are at increased risk of being obese and developing diabetes in the future.

Mothers who are larger before pregnancy, or when pregnant, may also be more likely to have big babies. This is mostly due to the increased likelihood of developing diabetes in pregnancy, and perhaps poorer nutrition choices.

Can you predict a big baby?

Estimations of babies’ weights before they are born are imprecise. That’s why so many women are told they are going to have a big baby and don’t, and others are surprised by a big baby when it arrives.

Midwives and obstetricians routinely feel a woman’s growing uterus when they provide antenatal check-ups. They are looking at the position the baby is lying in the uterus as well as where the top of the uterus is compared to the woman’s belly button. This gives an idea of whether the baby is growing as you would expect at that time.

They also measure from the top of a woman’s belly to the top of her pubic bone with a tape measure. The weeks of pregnancy usually correspond to the measurement within a couple of centimetres.

For example, at 36 weeks of pregnancy the tape measurement would be somewhere between 34cm and 38cm. If there is more or less than a 3cm difference between the measurement and the numbers of weeks of pregnancy then an ultrasound would be offered to look at how the baby’s growing and to estimate the size.

But ultrasounds are poor predictors of actual birth weight. The Big Baby Trial was published earlier this year. It randomised nearly 3,000 women in the United Kingdom to being induced at 39 weeks if suspected to be having a big baby (according to an ultrasound) or waiting for labour to start.

There was little difference in birth weight or poor outcomes, such as shoulder dystocia for the baby, leading to the trial being stopped early. Around 60% of babies screened as being big babies were not actually big at birth, showing the inaccuracy of ultrasounds in predicting birth weight.

What can women do?

The best health advice for women is to try to be a healthy weight (under a BMI of 30) before getting pregnant.

Eat a balanced diet and limit your intake of foods and drinks high in saturated fats and sugar. Try not to put too much weight on during pregnancy and exercise regularly. Talk to your midwife or obstetrician for advice and support about this.

If you have diabetes, or if this has been diagnosed during the pregnancy, close monitoring of your blood sugar and baby’s growth is important.

Read more:
How pregnant women are tested for gestational diabetes is changing. Here’s what this means for you

Hannah Dahlen 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. News of a ‘giant’ baby boy is all over TikTok. Here’s what women really need to know – https://theconversation.com/news-of-a-giant-baby-boy-is-all-over-tiktok-heres-what-women-really-need-to-know-267207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

Baby boy Cassian is an internet sensation. He was born in the United States weighing 5.8 kilograms in recent weeks. After his mum and the hospital shared the news, it wasn’t long before headlines about the “giant” baby spread around the world. These included:

‘Are you OK’?: Woman breaks record with giant newborn baby

Record-breaking baby tips the scales at almost double the average size of a newborn

While baby Cassian was born heavier than average, he’s not unique. There have been other examples in the news of babies born heavier. That includes a baby boy born in Brazil in 2023 who weighed 7.3kg.

These stories might make women all over the world cross their legs. But how common are big babies, and does their birth always lead to complications?

What are big babies?

Macrosomia describes babies born over 4kg or 4.5kg, depending on the definition.

A big baby can also be defined as having a birth weight over the 90th percentile at a particular gestational age. In other words, more than 90% of babies have a lower birth weight at this particular stage of the pregnancy. The term “large for gestational age” is probably a more accurate term as the weeks of gestation is used alongside the weight.

There has been little change overall in the percentage of large babies in the past decade in Australia. While stories of such births hit the media, their proportion hovers around 9–10% of births.

What are the problems for big babies and their mums?

We don’t know the specific circumstances of Cassian’s birth, his health or that of his mother. And we don’t know whether common reasons for larger babies are relevant in this situation.

But, generally speaking, birth complications can be higher for mothers and babies when the baby is big, especially if more than 4.5kg. This is certainly not always the case, however.

There is an increased need for interventions during the birth, such as forceps or vacuum delivery, or a caesarean section the bigger the baby is. Having these interventions can impact a women’s recovery after the birth, and options for the next birth.

For the baby there are higher risks of the shoulders getting stuck in the birth canal during the birth (known as shoulder dystocia).

Midwives and obstetricians also may need to make extra manoeuvres for the baby to be safely delivered. For instance, they may need to try and bring down one shoulder if it’s stuck behind the mother’s pubic bone.

These manoeuvres can damage the baby or lead to oxygen restrictions, with the baby needing to be resuscitated. However, these complications are rare and can occur when a big baby was not expected.

What leads to a big baby?

Big babies are most often healthy babies, and there are a number of reasons for them.

Genetic factors mean babies are always big in some families.

Babies that go over their due dates tend to be a bit bigger as they have more time to grow inside their mothers.

Having diabetes, especially if this is poorly controlled, can lead to larger babies. This is because the mother’s higher blood sugar leads to the baby receiving more energy than it needs, so it stores this extra energy as fat.

Babies of mothers with diabetes diagnosed for the first time in pregnancy (gestational diabetes) are at increased risk of being obese and developing diabetes in the future.

Mothers who are larger before pregnancy, or when pregnant, may also be more likely to have big babies. This is mostly due to the increased likelihood of developing diabetes in pregnancy, and perhaps poorer nutrition choices.

Can you predict a big baby?

Estimations of babies’ weights before they are born are imprecise. That’s why so many women are told they are going to have a big baby and don’t, and others are surprised by a big baby when it arrives.

Midwives and obstetricians routinely feel a woman’s growing uterus when they provide antenatal check-ups. They are looking at the position the baby is lying in the uterus as well as where the top of the uterus is compared to the woman’s belly button. This gives an idea of whether the baby is growing as you would expect at that time.

They also measure from the top of a woman’s belly to the top of her pubic bone with a tape measure. The weeks of pregnancy usually correspond to the measurement within a couple of centimetres.

For example, at 36 weeks of pregnancy the tape measurement would be somewhere between 34cm and 38cm. If there is more or less than a 3cm difference between the measurement and the numbers of weeks of pregnancy then an ultrasound would be offered to look at how the baby’s growing and to estimate the size.

But ultrasounds are poor predictors of actual birth weight. The Big Baby Trial was published earlier this year. It randomised nearly 3,000 women in the United Kingdom to being induced at 39 weeks if suspected to be having a big baby (according to an ultrasound) or waiting for labour to start.

There was little difference in birth weight or poor outcomes, such as shoulder dystocia for the baby, leading to the trial being stopped early. Around 60% of babies screened as being big babies were not actually big at birth, showing the inaccuracy of ultrasounds in predicting birth weight.

What can women do?

The best health advice for women is to try to be a healthy weight (under a BMI of 30) before getting pregnant.

Eat a balanced diet and limit your intake of foods and drinks high in saturated fats and sugar. Try not to put too much weight on during pregnancy and exercise regularly. Talk to your midwife or obstetrician for advice and support about this.

If you have diabetes, or if this has been diagnosed during the pregnancy, close monitoring of your blood sugar and baby’s growth is important.

Read more:
How pregnant women are tested for gestational diabetes is changing. Here’s what this means for you

Hannah Dahlen 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. News of a ‘giant’ baby boy is all over TikTok. But here’s what women really need to know – https://theconversation.com/news-of-a-giant-baby-boy-is-all-over-tiktok-but-heres-what-women-really-need-to-know-267207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marika Sosnowski, Senior research fellow, The University of Melbourne

There are jubilant scenes in both Gaza and Israel after both sides in the war have agreed to another ceasefire. If all goes well, this will be only the third ceasefire to be implemented by Israel and Hamas, despite there being numerous other agreements to try to stop the violence.

There is a lot to be happy about here. Most notably, this ceasefire will bring a halt to what has now been established as a genocidal campaign of violence against Palestinians in Gaza, the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and the resumption of aid into Gaza to alleviate the famine conditions there.

However, a lot of unknowns remain. While the terms of the “first phase” of this ceasefire have been rehearsed in previous ceasefires in November 2023 and January 2025, many other terms remain vague. This makes their implementation difficult and likely contested.

After this phase is complete, a lot will depend on domestic Israeli politics and the Trump administration’s willingness to follow through on its guarantor responsibilities.

Immediate positives for both sides

The ceasefire agreement appears to be based on the 20-point plan US President Donald Trump unveiled in the White House alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on September 29.

What will be implemented in what is being called the “first phase” are the practical, more detailed and immediate terms of the ceasefire.

In the text of the peace plan released to the public, these terms are stipulated in:

• Point 3 – an “immediate” end to the war and Israeli troop withdrawal to an “agreed upon line”.

• Points 4 and 5 – the release of all living and deceased hostages by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

• Point 7 – full aid to flow into the strip, consistent with the January ceasefire agreement terms.

While these steps are positive, they are the bare minimum you would expect both sides to acquiesce to as part of a ceasefire deal.

Over the past two years, Gaza has been virtually demolished by Israel’s military and the population of the strip is starving. There is also great domestic pressure on the Israeli government to bring the hostages home, while Hamas has no cards left to play besides their release.

The text of these particular terms has been drafted in a way that means both Israel and Hamas know what to do and when. This makes it more likely they will abide by the terms.

Both sides also have a vested interest in these terms happening. Further, both parties have taken these exact steps before during the November 2023 and January 2025 Gaza ceasefires.

Given this, I expect these terms will be implemented in the coming days. It is less clear what will happen after that.

What comes next: the great unknown

After the first phase of the ceasefire has been implemented, Hamas will find itself in a situation very similar to ceasefire agreements that occurred during the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and only recently ended with the downfall of the Assad regime in late 2024. I call these strangle contracts.

These type of ceasefire agreements are not like bargains or contracts negotiated between two equal parties. Instead, they are highly coercive agreements that enable the more powerful party to force the weaker party into agreeing to anything in order for them to survive.

Once the hostages are released, Hamas will go back to having negligible bargaining power of its own. And the group, along with the people of Gaza themselves, will once again be at the mercy of Israeli military might and domestic and international politics.

Other terms of the Trump peace plan relating to Hamas’ demilitarisation (Points 1 and 13), the future governance of Gaza (Points 9 and 13) and Gaza’s redevelopment (Points 2, 10 and 11) are also extremely vague and offer little guidance on what exactly should occur, when or how.

Under such a strangle contract, Hamas will have no leverage after it releases the hostages. This, together with the vague terms of the ceasefire agreement, will offer Israel a great deal of manoeuvrability and political cover.

For example, the Israeli government could claim Hamas is not abiding by the terms of the agreement and then recommence bombardment, curtail aid or further displace the Palestinians in Gaza.

While Point 12 rightly stipulates that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza”, Israel could make conditions there so inhospitable and offer enough incentives to Gazans, they might have little choice other than to leave if they want to survive.

Points 15 and 16 stipulate that the United States (along with Arab and other international partners) will develop a temporary International Stabilisation Force to deploy to Gaza to act as guarantors for the agreement. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) will also withdraw “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization”.

But these “standards, milestones and timeframes” have been left unspecified and will be hard for the parties to agree on.

It is also possible Israel could use the vagueness of these terms to its advantage by arguing Hamas has failed to meet certain conditions in order to justify restarting the war.

Knowing it has no leverage after the first phase, Hamas has explicitly said it is expecting the US to fulfil its guarantor role. It is certainly a good sign the US has pledged 200 troops to help support and monitor the ceasefire, but at this stage, Hamas has little choice other than to pray the US’ deeds reflect its words.

While the ceasefire has now been passed by a majority of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), five far-right ministers voted against the deal. These include Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said the ceasefire is akin to “a deal with Adolf Hitler”.

This opposition bloc will no doubt be making more threats – and could potentially act – to bring down Netanyahu’s government after the first phase is implemented.

The problem with ceasefires

The first phase of this ceasefire will offer Hamas and Israel key items – a hostage-prisoner swap, a halt to violence and humanitarian aid.

After that, rather than a bargaining process with trade-offs between negotiating partners operating on a relatively even playing field, without US opprobrium, the ceasefire could easily devolve into an excuse for further Israeli domination of Gaza.

A ceasefire was always going to be a very small step forward in a long road towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Without meaningful engagement with Palestinians in their self-determination, we can only hope the future for Gazans will not get any worse.

As a Palestinian leader from Yarmouk camp in Syria told me back in 2018: “If there is a ceasefire, people know the devil is coming.”

Marika Sosnowski 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 Gaza ceasefire deal could be a ‘strangle contract’, with Israel holding all the cards – https://theconversation.com/the-gaza-ceasefire-deal-could-be-a-strangle-contract-with-israel-holding-all-the-cards-267208

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Annesley, Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cell and Molecular Biology, La Trobe University

Scientists in the United Kingdom say they have developed a blood test that can diagnose myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) with 96% accuracy – the first of its kind.

For many who live with the debilitating condition, this will be exciting news.

Despite affecting millions of people worldwide, this condition remains poorly understood. It is characterised by unrelenting fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest, and post-exertional malaise – a worsening of symptoms after even minor physical or mental activity.

Yet with no reliable test, many people wait years for a diagnosis. This usually depends on symptoms meeting certain clinical criteria. But diagnostic criteria can be controversial as they vary worldwide and many are outdated.

An accurate blood test could be a game changer for diagnosis.

So, how excited should we get? Here’s what we know.

How diagnosis works without a test

Currently, you can only receive a diagnosis if you experience disabling fatigue – one of the key symptoms according to most clinical criteria – for at least six months, accompanied by post-exertional malaise.

But people with the condition often experience a wide range of other symptoms, including headaches, muscle or joint pain, sleep disturbances, dizziness, a racing heart, and problems with memory, thinking and decision making.

So, clinicians must also rule out other conditions with overlapping symptoms.

This means diagnosis relies heavily on clinicians’ knowledge of ME/CFS and their willingness to listen to the patient’s complex symptom history. This process can take years – and the delay in diagnosis has real consequences.

Evidence suggests early intervention is key to recovery. Rest during the early stages of the illness likely results in better long-term outcomes, as has been suggested for the clinically similar disease long COVID.

One study showed a delayed ME/CFS diagnosis was linked to poorer outcomes, meaning recovery was less likely and the chance of developing more severe symptoms increased.

Without a definitive diagnosis, patients regularly face disbelief about their illness and have limited access to information, health-care services and medical benefits.

Frequent delays in diagnosis may contribute to the condition’s low recovery rate, which is estimated at just 1–10%.

What the new study looked at

To develop a diagnostic test, the new study identified biomarkers that may be specific to people with this condition.

In this case, the biomarkers relate to epigenetics – changes in the structure of a person’s chromosomes, influencing which genes can be turned on or off.

These changes occur due to environmental influences such as stress, infection and exercise. So, when someone develops ME/CFS, the illness may change the structure of their chromosomes – but until now researchers hadn’t identified what this would look like.

The researchers examined blood samples from people they knew had ME/CFS and identified around 200 such biomarkers. These changes formed a distinct biological “signature” that was not present in the blood of healthy participants in the comparison group.

This signature was very accurate in correctly identifying which samples were from people with the condition and which were from the comparison group.

According to the researchers, the test’s sensitivity was 92% – this is the probability a positive result will show when someone has the condition. It had a specificity of 98%, meaning the probability it can rule out negative cases.

This combined to an overall diagnostic accuracy of 96%.

So, is this a breakthrough?

This research is promising, but it’s still very early days. It was a proof-of-concept study, meaning small-scale research to initially test whether an idea might work.

In this case, researchers explored the idea that structural changes in chromosomes could be used as biomarkers of ME/CFS. Their results suggest they can.

However, there were several limitations. The study involved a relatively small number of people: 47 participants with severe ME/CFS and 61 in the healthy “control” group.

The ME/CFS group had more females, and its participants were so severely affected they were housebound. So they presumably had lower activity levels than the control group.

We know a person’s sex and activity levels can influence these chromosomal changes, so this may have affected the results.

To develop a diagnostic test that can be used widely, several crucial steps remain.

How much a person’s sex and exercise levels influence these biomarkers needs to be determined. The biomarkers will also need to be validated in larger, more diverse groups, which include people with less and more severe symptoms than in this study and those from different backgrounds.

To confirm these biomarkers are truly specific to ME/CFS, they need to be compared with other conditions that share similar symptoms, such as multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia.

Finally, it’s also important that a test, if developed, should be affordable and accessible.

ME/CFS remains a severely underdiagnosed condition, and the lack of a reliable test continues to delay care and worsen outcomes. Identifying biomarkers, as this study aimed to do, is a promising first step.

Sarah Annesley receives funding from ME Research UK, The Judith Jane Mason & Harold Stannett Williams Memorial Foundation and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF035120).

– ref. Can a new blood test really detect ME/CFS? An expert unpacks new research – https://theconversation.com/can-a-new-blood-test-really-detect-me-cfs-an-expert-unpacks-new-research-267099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Myra Williamson, Senior Lecturer in Law, Auckland University of Technology

Despite the International Criminal Court (ICC) being under immense pressure right now, its first conviction for crimes in Darfur, and the first for gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity, is a major win.

On October 6, a senior leader of the Sudanese pro-government militia known as the Janjaweed, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, was found guilty on 27 charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court rejected his defence of mistaken identity.

From around August 2003, Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed carried out large-scale attacks on civilians in the Darfur region. This included targeted killings, summary executions, assaults, rapes, theft of livestock and the forced displacement of more than two million people.

The targets of this violence were mostly communities who shared the ethnicity of various rebel groups, and later other Arab and non-Arab tribes.

It has taken over 20 years, but the delivery of justice is a major development for international law, for Sudan and for the ICC itself. The case demonstrates that while the wheels of international criminal justice turn slowly, they do turn.

A milestone conviction

The case marks the first conviction arising out of Darfur, and the first from a referral to the ICC by the United Nations Security Council.

It was also the first investigation of a non-state party, meaning the accused was from a country that hasn’t signed the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC.

Abd-Al-Rahman (sometimes known as Ali Kushayb or Ali Kosheib) was convicted for crimes committed between August 2003 and March 2004. Human Rights Watch published a report in December 2005 calling for accountability.

The ICC started investigating in 2005. An arrest warrant for Abd-Al-Rahman was issued that year, and a second one in 2020. He eventually surrendered himself to the ICC’s custody in 2020 and the trial began in 2022.

There are four other individuals yet to be arrested and tried. Notably, the former president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir (the first sitting president to be indicted by the ICC), is still at large despite warrants for his arrest issued in 2009 and 2010.

Al-Bashir is wanted on five charges of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape. He is also accused of genocide, as well as two counts of war crimes, including intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.

Arrest warrants have also been issued for three former government ministers, with reports that one of them, along with al-Bashir, is in military custody in northern Sudan.

Justice for women and girls

With Sudan not a party to the Rome Statute, the conviction of Abd-Al-Rahman was only possible because the Security Council established an international commission of inquiry on Darfur. This reported that war crimes and crimes against humanity had likely been committed.

The Security Council then referred the Darfur situation to the prosecutor of the ICC as a threat to international peace and security, with the investigation starting on June 6 2005. A “confirmation of charges” hearing was held in May 2021.

This is an important precedent. It demonstrates why the Security Council should use its referral power under Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute to send cases to the ICC, even when accused individuals are from states that don’t want anything to do with the court.

The judges also ruled the attacks caused profound physical, cultural and social harm to women and girl victims. The transcript of the judgment contains harrowing testimony about the Janjaweed’s heinous actions.

This conviction signals the ICC’s commitment to pursuing justice for girls and women who are brutalised during conflicts. It also fulfils one of the goals of the late Cherif Bassiouni, the international law scholar who helped set up the ICC and pushed for a greater focus on punishing rape and gender-based crimes.

The ICC under pressure

Finally, this conviction comes at a time when the ICC itself is under significant pressure, internally and externally.

The court’s chief prosecutor is subject to an internal investigation for sexual misconduct, and the ICC itself was sanctioned by US President Donald Trump in February.

The US has also issued sanctions against the chief prosecutor and individual judges for investigating US forces in Afghanistan, and for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

In August, the US went even further, sanctioning two more judges and two deputy prosecutors. This included Nazhat Shameem Khan, who issued statements on behalf of the court in the Darfur case.

In August, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC a “national security threat”. The ICC has strongly condemned the sanctions, as have many other organisations and countries.

Nonetheless, with Abd-Al-Rahman’s sentencing still to come, the Darfur case represents a much-needed win for international law and for the ICC. For the victims, however, real justice will have to include a comprehensive and funded plan for compensation and rehabilitation.

Myra Williamson 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. A landmark conviction for war crimes in Sudan shows the wheels of global justice do turn – albeit slowly – https://theconversation.com/a-landmark-conviction-for-war-crimes-in-sudan-shows-the-wheels-of-global-justice-do-turn-albeit-slowly-267090

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hart, Emeritus Faculty, US government and politics specialist, Australian National University

US President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the military for law enforcement duties in selected American cities is likely to end up before the US Supreme Court.

If it does, the nine justices will be faced with sorting out a dog’s breakfast of constitutional and statutory laws full of contradictions and ambiguities.

Given the propensity of the current Supreme Court to support and even extend the scope of presidential authority, it could very well rule in Trump’s favour. And this would have far-reaching implications for civil liberties and democracy in the United States.

How did we get to this point, and what does the law actually say about using the National Guard in US cities?

What is Trump attempting to do?

The National Guard is made up of part-time reservists assigned to units in each state. These soldiers are typically called into service by the governors of the states where they serve to respond to disasters or large protests.

In certain circumstances, presidents can also “federalise” National Guard troops, though it rarely happens against a governor’s wishes. Before this year, the last time this happened was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, to protect civil rights protesters.

In recent months, Trump has attempted to “federalise” the National Guard units belonging to several states and dispatch them to cities (Los Angeles, Memphis, Washington DC, Portland and Chicago) that he claims are out of control.

The troop deployments have been opposed by the Democratic governors in some of these states, then blocked or restricted by temporary restraining orders issued by federal district court judges. (The order in California was subsequently stayed by the US Court of Appeals, pending a further appeal).

There are several issues being contested:

• the conditions under which the National Guard can be mobilised by the federal government
• the degree of collaboration between federal and state governments in issuing orders to the National Guard, and
• the prohibition on the military being used for domestic law enforcement purposes.

Trump’s moves are testing the uncertain boundaries of all these constraints on executive power. But, more significantly, he is also challenging the long-standing American tradition of keeping the military out of domestic politics.

What are the legal issues at play?

The constitutional authority to deploy the National Guard is actually assigned to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to “provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions”. Militias have been interpreted to include the National Guard.

However, the Constitution also charges the president with two very significant duties. The first is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”; the second is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. These two duties can amount to a significant grant of power in times of crisis.

The Trump administration will almost certainly argue he is deploying the National Guard in these US cities to carry out these duties.

There’s a bigger issue for Trump, though. Another law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, makes it illegal for federal troops to engage in civilian law enforcement unless expressly authorised by the Constitution or the law.

Trump is currently acting without this explicit legal authorisation. However,
as the Brennan Center for Justice has recently pointed out, there are 26 different laws that allow for the military to execute the law in specific situations. These exceptions undermine the purpose of the Posse Comitatus Act, making the case for urgent reform of the law.

What about the Insurrection Act?

One of these exceptions is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the president the power to use the military or federalise National Guard troops to put down domestic uprisings. Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the act has seldom been used.

Trump said this week he would consider invoking the act to “get around” any court decisions blocking his move to deploy National Guard troops in US cities.

He also claimed the demonstrations against the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Portland amounted to a “criminal insurrection”.

Trump then ramped up the rhetoric and the hyperbole even further by calling for the jailing of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for failing to protect ICE agents in that city.

The demonstrations against Trump’s immigration policies in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago are nowhere near meeting the definition of insurrection.

But, as the president told the meeting of military generals in Virginia last week, he is keen to push the bounds on using the military in domestic affairs. Or, as he put it, to use these cities as “training grounds” for the armed forces.

If the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favour on this issue, it would be tantamount to saying the president is the only arbiter on whether a political protest amounts to an insurrection and when it’s necessary to use the military to quell it.

It would also expand the scope for Trump to use the military in other areas of domestic politics.

The president has already deployed the military for border protection, so patrolling universities or even the lines outside polling stations on election day could be next.

John Hart 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. Explainer: what powers does Trump actually have to deploy the military to US cities? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-powers-does-trump-actually-have-to-deploy-the-military-to-us-cities-267109

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael J. I. Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by US startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design.

The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset.

It plans to start with an 18-metre test satellite named Earendil-1 which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports.

So how bad would the light pollution be? And perhaps more importantly, can Reflect Orbital’s satellites even work as advertised?

Bouncing sunlight

In the same way you can bounce sunlight off a watch face to produce a spot of light, Reflect Orbital’s satellites would use mirrors to beam light onto a patch of Earth.

But the scale involved is vastly different. Reflect Orbital’s satellites would orbit about 625km above the ground, and would eventually have mirrors 54 metres across.

When you bounce light off your watch onto a nearby wall, the spot of light can be very bright. But if you bounce it onto a distant wall, the spot becomes larger – and dimmer.

This is because the Sun is not a point of light, but spans half a degree in angle in the sky. This means that at large distances, a beam of sunlight reflected off a flat mirror spreads out with an angle of half a degree.

What does that mean in practice? Let’s take a satellite reflecting sunlight over a distance of roughly 800km – because a 625km-high satellite won’t always be directly overhead, but beaming the sunlight at an angle. The illuminated patch of ground would be at least 7km across.

Even a curved mirror or a lens can’t focus the sunlight into a tighter spot due to the distance and the half-degree angle of the Sun in the sky.

Would this reflected sunlight be bright or dim? Well, for a single 54 metre satellite it will be 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, but this is still far brighter than the full Moon.

The balloon test

Last year, Reflect Orbital’s founder Ben Nowack posted a short video which summarised a test with the “last thing to build before moving into space”. It was a reflector carried on a hot air balloon.

In the test, a flat, square mirror roughly 2.5 metres across directs a beam of light down to solar panels and sensors. In one instance the team measures 516 watts of light per square metre while the balloon is at a distance of 242 metres.

For comparison, the midday Sun produces roughly 1,000 watts per square metre. So 516 watts per square metre is about half of that, which is enough to be useful.

However, let’s scale the balloon test to space. As we noted earlier, if the satellites were 800km from the area of interest, the reflector would need to be 6.5km by 6.5km – 42 square kilometres. It’s not practical to build such a giant reflector, so the balloon test has some limitations.

So what is Reflect Orbital planning to do?

Reflect Orbital’s plan is “simple satellites in the right constellation shining on existing solar farms”. And their goal is only 200 watts per square metre – 20% of the midday Sun.

Can smaller satellites deliver? If a single 54 metre satellite is 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, you would need 3,000 of them to achieve 20% of the midday Sun. That’s a lot of satellites to illuminate one region.

Another issue: satellites at a 625km altitude move at 7.5 kilometres per second. So a satellite will be within 1,000km of a given location for no more than 3.5 minutes.

This means 3,000 satellites would give you a few minutes of illumination. To provide even an hour, you’d need thousands more.

Reflect Orbital isn’t lacking ambition. In one interview, Nowack suggested 250,000 satellites in 600km high orbits. That’s more than all the currently catalogued satellites and large pieces of space junk put together.

And yet, that vast constellation would deliver only 20% of the midday Sun to no more than 80 locations at once, based on our calculations above. In practice, even fewer locations would be illuminated due to cloudy weather.

Additionally, given their altitude, the satellites could only deliver illumination to most locations near dusk and dawn, when the mirrors in low Earth orbit would be bathed in sunlight. Aware of this, Reflect Orbital plan for their constellation to encircle Earth above the day-night line in sun-synchronous orbits to keep them continuously in sunlight.

Bright lights

So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely.

In the early evening it doesn’t take long to spot satellites and space junk – and they’re not deliberately designed to be bright. With Reflect Orbital’s plan, even if just the test satellite works as planned, it will sometimes appear far brighter than the full Moon.

A constellation of such mirrors would be devastating to astronomy and dangerous to astronomers. To anyone looking through a telescope the surface of each mirror could be almost as bright as the surface of the Sun, risking permanent eye damage.

The light pollution will hinder everyone’s ability to see the cosmos and light pollution is known to impact the daily rhythms of animals as well.

Although Reflect Orbital aims to illuminate specific locations, the satellites’ beams would also sweep across Earth when moving from one location to the next. The night sky could be lit up with flashes of light brighter than the Moon.

The company did not reply to The Conversation about these concerns within deadline. However, it told Bloomberg this week it plans to redirect sunlight in ways that are “brief, predictable and targeted”, avoiding observatories and sharing the locations of the satellites so scientists can plan their work.

The consequences would be dire

It remains to be seen whether Reflect Orbital’s project will get off the ground. The company may launch a test satellite, but it’s a long way from that to getting 250,000 enormous mirrors constantly circling Earth to keep some solar farms ticking over for a few extra hours a day.

Still, it’s a project to watch. The consequences of success for astronomers – and anyone else who likes the night sky dark – would be dire.

Michael J. I. Brown receives research funding from the Australian Research Council.

Matthew Kenworthy receives research funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

– ref. A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to? – https://theconversation.com/a-us-startup-plans-to-deliver-sunlight-on-demand-after-dark-can-it-work-and-would-we-want-it-to-264323

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

Back in the 1980s, when Shimon Sakaguchi was a young researcher in immunology, he found it difficult to get his research funded. Now, his pioneering work which explains how our immune system knows when and what to attack, has won him a Nobel prize.

Sakaguchi, along with American researchers Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, were jointly awarded the 2025 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their work on regulatory T-cells, known as T-regs for short, a special class of immune cells which prevent our immune system from attacking our own body.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, Sakaguchi tells us about his journey of discovery and the potential treatments it could unlock.

Sakaguchi was inspired by an experiment involving newborn mice conducted by his colleagues at the Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute in Nagoya.  They’d removed the thymus from mice three days after they were born. It was already known that the thymus is important in the development of immune self-tolerance: it’s where T-cells, a type of lymphocyte or white blood cell, that could attack the body are isolated and destroyed. Sakaguchi was intrigued by what happened. He said that if you remove the thymus in a normal mouse in the neonatal period, you would expect immune deficiency because the lymphocytes are gone.

But what happened is just the opposite: they developed autoimmune diseases.  This disease is very similar to what we see in humans … but of course, human patients are not removed of the thymus, so there must a common mechanism, which can explain spontaneous autoimmune diseases in humans.

Sakaguchi  decided to try a new experiment to stop the mice’s immune system going into overdrive. When he took some T-cells from genetically identical mice and injected them back into the mice who’d had their thymus removed, he found that autoimmune disease can be prevented. “ This suggests that there must be a T-cell population which can prevent disease development,” he said.

In the 1980s, Sakaguchi said it was not easy to get research funding “because the immunology community were very sceptical about the existence of such cells”. He spent time in the US and he says he was “very fortunate” to be supported by a grant from a private foundation.

After ten years of looking, he published a paper in 1995 setting out his discovery of regulatory T-cells, which act as the body’s security guard, controlling any adverse reactions and keeping the immune system in balance in a process called peripheral tolerance. When these T-regs don’t work properly, this can cause autoimmune diseases. Later work by Sakaguchi, and his fellow laureates Brankow and Ramsdell, discovered the specific gene, called Foxp3 that controlled T-regs.

Cancer, auto-immune treatments and more

When Sakaguchi started out, his interest was in autoimmune diseases and how they occur. “But in the course of my research we have gradually understood that T-regs are more important,” he says. These cells are now implicated in the way cancer attacks the body, as well as the acceptance of organ donations. Sakaguchi is also working on new ways to harness T-regs for treatment, and also on converting other, attacking types of T-cells, into T-regs to target specific autoimmune diseases.

His immediate hope is that some of the clinical trials for cancer immunotherapy can become a reality for treating patients. But he’s also fascinated by recent research which shows the importance of T-regs in diseases which cause inflammation – and what this could mean for potential to repair damaged tissue.

Neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, all involve inflammation. By just targeting that kind of inflammation, we maybe [could] stop the disease progressions, or delay the disease progression. We hope that it is very true and then it really works for such diseases.

Listen to the interview with Shimon Sakaguchi on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood and is hosted by Gemma Ware. Mixing and sound design by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Shimon Sakaguchi is the scientific founder and a director of RegCell, a Japanese start-up working on treatments based on regulatory T-cells. He is also a scientific advisor for biotechnology company Coya Therapeutics.

– ref. Nobel laureate Shimon Sakaguchi on his immune system breakthrough – and the treatments he hopes it will unlock – https://theconversation.com/nobel-laureate-shimon-sakaguchi-on-his-immune-system-breakthrough-and-the-treatments-he-hopes-it-will-unlock-267054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

After two years of violence and the deaths of 68,000 Palestinians and more than 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, it has been reported that Hamas and the Netanyahu government will sign a phase 1 ceasefire agreement. This is the first part of a 20-point plan promoted by the US president, Donald Trump, and supported by the major Arab power brokers in the region.

What we know so far is that Israel will cease it’s military assault in Gaza. Hamas, meanwhile, has agreed to free the remaining 20 Israeli hostages still alive in Gaza.

The Conversation’s international affairs editor Jonathan Este spoke with Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at University College Dublin, who addressed several key issues.

How is this different to previous ceasefire agreements?

Until we have details, this agreement is similar to the phase 1 60-day ceasefire at the start of 2025. There is a pause in the killing, particularly from the Israeli side, but lasting arrangements remain to be confirmed.

The key difference is that Hamas released only some hostages and bodies in the previous ceasefire. This time they are freeing all hostages and the bodies which can be collected, in return for a still unannounced number of Palestinian detainees released from Israeli prisons.

That gives up Hamas’s main leverage against not only Israeli attacks but also the Netanyahu government’s occupation and veto on aid to Gaza.

So key elements of a lasting deal – the extent of the Israeli military’s withdrawal, the restoration of aid, the establishment of governance and security in the Strip – will rest on guarantees and who provides them.

What are the possible sticking points for the rest of the deal?

The immediate “sticking points” are whether central provisions will be agreed in further discussions.

The Israelis will demand complete disarmament by Hamas and possibly the expulsion of some of its officials. Hamas is likely to respond with rejection of any forced removals and its retention of “defensive” weapons.

The make-up of the international “board” overseeing the strip is vague beyond Donald Trump declaring himself the chair and no provision for any Palestinian representation. Hamas will probably seek some Palestinian membership.

At this point, the International Stabilization Force for the Strip is a wish rather than a plan. Israeli agreement to a force replacing its military in Gaza is far from assured, especially as it is not clear who will contribute personnel. The Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has offered to send troops to contribute to the force.

The plan for a day-to-day government to administer the Strip is equally sketchy. While the presence of Palestinian technocrats is mentioned in Trump’s “plan”, we do not know who these will be. We know that Hamas is excluded. Israel is also likely to veto the Palestinian Authority in the short-term. And the release from imprisonment of potential Palestinian leaders – such as Marwan Barghouti, who has been held by Israel for more than 20 years – is not confirmed.

And before consideration of all of these, there is the question of the far-right in the Netanyahu cabinet. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, have yet to comment on the latest news, but have previously opposed any deal short of the “total” defeat of Hamas and a long-term Israeli occupation. Neither have threatened to block the agreement – so far – but they have expressed opposition.

How much of this is due to pressure from Arab states?

While many headlines are likely to give the credit to Trump and his envoys, son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff, the role of Arab states has been vital.

A month after Israel shattered Qatar’s sovereignty with the airstrike trying to assassinate Hamas’s negotiators, the Gulf state and Egypt were the brokers of this Phase 1 agreement. Behind the scenes, other Arab states and Turkey were urging Hamas to accept the Trump “plan” in principle and to reach a deal to release the hostages.

Those states will be needed for the next phase, particularly if Trump threatens to return to his previous position of a blank cheque for Israeli military operations and cut-off of aid.

Read more:
Middle East leaders condemn Israel’s attack on Qatar as Netanyahu ends all talk of Gaza ceasefire – expert Q&A

Is there a future for Palestinian civilians in Gaza?

I hope so. The immediate issue is survival. The Israeli attacks have been paused. The urgent issue is getting essential aid into the Strip. Then it is a matter of being able to return to what is left of homes. The Trump administration has dropped its talk of displacement, stemming the demand of Netanyahu’s far-right ministers for the removal of many Gazans.

However, after two years of scorched-earth tactics by Israel, little is left of many of those homes. The majority of the health sector has been destroyed, as have many schools and other public buildings. Rafah has been razed, and Gaza City’s high rises have been blown apart.

Recovery cannot just focus on the profits to be made – including for Trump, Kushner, and Gulf state business interests – from the “development” of Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East”. It has to begin with day-to-day subsistence for the civilians who have paid the heaviest price in this mass killing.

Does Trump get his Nobel peace prize now?

I don’t care. Sometimes good things happen from a convergence of cynical and self-serving motives. Trump is desperate for the Nobel peace prize because Barack Obama received it in 2009. Kushner, whose investment fund is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Gulf state entrepreneurs see the possibility of large profits. US-Gulf relations need to be repaired after the shock of Israel’s airstrike inside Qatar.

If that means lives are saved, fine. But those lives need to be saved not just for today or tomorrow. They need to be respected and supported with a lasting agreement for security and welfare.

And that would mean a two-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis – something which the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration will not countenance. For Netanyahu and his ministers are devoted to expanding Israel’s illegal settlements, with the accompanying threat of violence, in the West Bank.

Celebrate phase 1 on the behalf of the Israeli hostages, their families, and Gaza’s civilians. And be clear about what is needed for phase 2, phase 3 and beyond.

Scott Lucas 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. Israel and Hamas agree ceasefire deal – what we know so far: expert Q&A – https://theconversation.com/israel-and-hamas-agree-ceasefire-deal-what-we-know-so-far-expert-qanda-267113

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

A little under a year ago, Michelle Rowland, who was then communications minister, had to make a humiliating retreat.

Rowland conceded the government’s sweeping legislation to combat “misinformation and disinformation” would not proceed, because the numbers were not there to get it through.

The government claimed the plan would have held big tech platforms to account in having to deal with false information. It would have “ushered in an unprecedented level of transparency”, it said. Opponents saw it as the government wanting to censor the internet.

Now Rowland, appointed to the plum post of attorney-general following the election (after former occupant Mark Dreyfus was dumped from the ministry in a factional execution), is staring at potential defeat on another high profile measure: her bill to overhaul the freedom of information regime.

On Thursday a group of lower and upper house crossbenchers joined forces at a news conference with the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI), an independent think tank, to condemn the bill. They are calling for its withdrawal and an independent inquiry into FOI to be set up.

The government argues the FOI system has become expensive and unworkable, gobbling up public service resources and open to exploitation by “bots” and foreign players. It insists its changes would “strengthen” the system, ensuring “genuine requests are prioritised while saving the taxpayers money on frivolous and automated requests”.

But in Senate estimates hearings this week, the government was unconvincing when pressed to substantiate some of its claims, for example about the problem of “bots” clogging the system.

The CPI goes to the core issue in relation to access to information about government operations, saying the bill represents “a radical shift in Australia’s FOI culture”. That shift, reflected in the bill’s “objects”, is “from a focus on the Australian community’s access to information, promoting democracy through public participation and increased scrutiny, to a newly introduced ‘balance’ between this and ‘effective government’”.

Independent Allegra Spender says: “the public service is first and foremost there to serve the public.

“But this amendment bill is designed to exclude the public by putting up new barriers to transparency and public scrutiny at a time when we need to hold the government and public service to account.

“In fact, this bill runs absolutely counter to the objective of transparency – it makes no changes that would make it easier or simpler for the public to navigate the FOI process.”

Another crossbencher, Helen Haines, says the legislation is “an extraordinary attempt from the government to broaden cabinet exemptions, when the Robodebt Royal Commission said that the cabinet exemptions in the FOI Act should be repealed.”

A Senate inquiry, already running, is due to report in early December, after parliament rises for the year. So the battle will rage into 2026. When the legislation, which has been introduced into the House of Representatives, reaches the floor of the Senate, Labor will need the support of either the opposition or the Greens to pass the bill.

Greens spokesman on attorney-general matters David Shoebridge has declared the Greens will definitely oppose it. At present, he says, the legislation doesn’t have a friend in the Senate. But his fear is the opposition, seeing itself as “a party of government”, may do some deal with Labor on a bill that increases the power of the executive.

The Coalition has flagged it is disposed to oppose the legislation. But it is yet to receive a relevant security briefing. Shadow Attorney-General Julian Leeser said on Thursday, “We are going to wait at least until the security briefing before we make final decisions in discussions with the government”.

This bill is a serious test for the Liberals.

An aspiring government sees the potential future advantages to it of limiting the access by pesky journalists, stakeholders and others to information. But what about a Coalition that is facing two terms in opposition, and needs every avenue to probe for useful ammunition? A cynic might say the Coalition can have its cake and eat it too – it could make a stand on principle for transparency by opposing the bill, while reaping the advantages of the present level of access to information (flawed as that might be).

How we have arrived at this legislation remains opaque.

Crossbencher Zali Steggall told Thursday’s joint news conference: “in opposition the Labor Party made much of the call for integrity and more accountability of government. Yet here we are, in the second term of the Albanese government that has a record now of actually leaning into secrecy and doing everything it can to reduce accountability.”

In Senate estimates on Tuesday, Shoebridge asked the Secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department Katherine Jones whether the proposal for the FOI reforms was generated from her department or from somewhere else in government.

Jones replied, “I don’t know whether I would attribute them to […] coming out of anywhere. There have been ongoing discussions across government.” Another officer added that “the current bill was developed by the department, but there’s been a track record of reviews and recommendations”.

In the government’s previous term, a range of proposals was under consideration for reforming freedom of information. But there was no sign of legislation that matches the current plan, and no promise was made in the election campaign. The new attorney-general is left carrying the troubled legislation but she is not seen by insiders as the prime driver of it.

FOI is something that all ministers and departmental secretaries (the latter colloquially dubbed the “black cabinet”) have an interest in and views about. For many bureaucrats and ministers, FOI is at best a nuisance and at worst a potential threat.

Albanese, who told parliament on Thursday the FOI system currently was “not working for anyone”, will be pushing to get the legislation through via a deal with the Liberals. As a well-placed source observes, “the prime minister has never liked FOI”.

Michelle Grattan 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. Grattan on Friday: Will the Liberals hold firm in the fight over freedom to find information? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-will-the-liberals-hold-firm-in-the-fight-over-freedom-to-find-information-265859

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iana Wong, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, University of Sydney

We’re beginning to build a better picture of just how many people are affected by intimate partner violence – a crisis that disproportionately impacts women and girls.

Around one in six Australian women and one in 18 men report they have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner at some point since age 15. About one in four women and one in seven men have experienced emotional abuse by a partner since age 15.

But what do we know about the perpetrators?

Two major studies recently found people with an insecure attachment – meaning they’re less likely to trust others and often have difficulties with intimacy – are at higher risk of perpetrating intimate partner violence than others.

But not everyone with insecure attachment will perpetrate this kind of violence. So, we suspected there must be additional risk factors.

In our recently published research, we analysed the findings of 46 other studies on the topic, to see who had a greater risk of perpetrating violence against a partner. Our study identified seven risk factors – and two were more important than the others.

Let’s take a look.

First, what is insecure attachment?

Several social factors contribute to intimate partner violence, including high rates of unemployment and poverty, living in regional and remote areas, and weak social policies and law.

But the perpetrator’s individual psychology also plays a role.

According to attachment theory, the emotional bonds we form early in life affect our behaviour within romantic relationships as adults.

As young children, if we experience our parents as consistently there for us when we are upset, we learn that other people we’re close to will be there for us too. In this case, we become securely attached.

However, if we experience our parents as unavailable, unresponsive, dismissive or neglectful, we learn we cannot count on people we’re close to for support. In that case, we become insecurely attached.

Insecurely attached individuals tend to show two main patterns in relationships – anxiety and/or avoidance.

Anxiously attached individuals may constantly worry their partner will leave them. Avoidantly attached individuals often remain cold and aloof with partners, because they’re uncomfortable with intimacy.

Importantly, your attachment style isn’t your destiny. But it can be a starting point to understand how you relate to others.

While an estimated one in two of us is insecurely attached, not everyone with this attachment style will go on to perpetrate intimate partner violence.

Still, there is a link between insecure attachment and intimate partner violence – and we wanted to know why.

We found 7 risk factors

Our study analysed the findings of 46 international and Australian studies about insecure attachment and intimate partner violence. In these, we identified seven factors that increase insecurely attached people’s risk for perpetrating intimate partner violence.

These included:

• experiencing negative emotions towards a partner (jealousy, anger and distrust)
• emotion dysregulation (having low ability to manage emotions)
• destructive communication styles (for example, refusing to talk to a partner)
• maladaptive personality traits, such as narcissism
• maladaptive beliefs about relationships (such as expecting your partner can read your mind).

But two other factors had the largest effect. Intimate partner violence was most likely when insecurely attached people experienced relationship dissatisfaction and/or a desire for dominance over their partner.

The desire to dominate a partner is more common among those who were anxiously attached (who are usually concerned with keeping their partner close).

Relationship dissatisfaction is more common among people who are avoidantly attached (who are uncomfortable with intimacy).

So, does this change how we tackle violence?

Our findings suggest understanding two risk factors for insecurely attached people in particular – relationship dissatisfaction and the desire for dominance – should be a part of therapies for intimate partner violence perpetrators.

Many of the current interventions for intimate partner violence have been shown to be ineffective or only slightly effective in reducing perpetration.

Most address the risk factors – for example, a desire for dominance – without considering a person’s attachment style.

One treatment that does address attachment is emotionally-focused therapy. This therapy helps partners understand each other’s unexpressed attachment needs and fosters more security in the relationship. But the focus is emotion dysregulation and destructive communication patterns, which our study found were less important risk factors.

Our results suggest interventions that address insecure attachment along with associated risk factors could be more effective at reducing violence. For example, interventions could help insecurely attached people understand why they experience a desire for dominance or relationship dissatisfaction, and how it is linked to their early experiences of caregivers.

We also need more research and long-term studies to confirm the strength of the links we found. The more we understand perpetrators’ risk factors, the better we can tackle the epidemic of intimate partner violence in Australia.

For information and advice about family and intimate partner violence contact1800 RESPECT(1800 737 732). If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, contact 000.Men’s Referral Service(call 1300 766 491) offers advice and counselling to men looking to change their behaviour.

Tom Denson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Iana Wong 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. These 7 factors increase the risk someone will become violent towards their partner – https://theconversation.com/these-7-factors-increase-the-risk-someone-will-become-violent-towards-their-partner-265764

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Toole, Associate Principal Research Fellow, Burnet Institute

More than 54,000 children aged under five in Gaza are suffering acute malnutrition, including more than 12,800 who are severely malnourished, according to a study published in The Lancet on Wednesday.

When more than 15% of the population experiences acute malnutrition, the World Health Organization classifies this as “very high” – its most severe category. In August, the overall rate of acute malnutrition among study participants in Gaza was 15.8%.

Rafah consistently had the highest acute malnutrition rate, across the 20-month study period to August 2025, reaching 32% of children in December 2024.

Acutely malnourished children are at higher risk of severe infections and premature death. If malnutrition becomes long term, the child may develop stunting (shortness for their age) and subsequent cognitive impairment.

A child with severe acute malnutrition is also up to 11 times more likely than a healthy child to die of common childhood illnesses such as pneumonia, the single largest infectious cause of death in children worldwide.

How was the study conducted?

The researchers assessed 219,783 children aged 6–59 months for acute malnutrition – also known as wasting – which reflects recent weight loss. This study size accounts for around 64% of children in Gaza in that age group.

It was conducted in 16 UN health centres and 78 medical points established in school shelters and tent encampments across the five local areas of Gaza.

According to the WHO, the gold standard of assessing the nutritional status of a child is to measure their weight (using standard hanging scales) and their height or length. It also recommends measuring arm circumference to detect acute malnutrition in community screening settings, as numerous studies have demonstrated this is an accurate way of detecting acute malnutrition.

The Lancet study measured the children’s height and weight, as well as their mid-upper arm circumference using a standard measuring tape developed by UNICEF.

However, a number of researchers have recommended increasing the diagnostic threshold, which is currently 125 mm, which would mean more children meet the threshold for malnutrition.

The researchers in Gaza calculated what is called the Z-score for each assessed child, as is standard practice. This is the number of standard deviations above or below the median of the WHO reference population. A Z-score between -2 and -3 represents moderate acute malnutrition and a Z-score of less than -3 is severe acute malnutrition.

What did the researchers find?

The monthly prevalence of acute malnutrition ranged from 5% to 7% between January and June 2024.

After around four months of severe aid restrictions, between September 2024 and mid-January 2025, the prevalence increased from 8.8% to 14.3%. The highest prevalence was seen in Rafah (32.2%).

After a six-week ceasefire and a substantial increase in the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, by March 2025, the prevalence of wasting had declined to 5.5%.

However, an 11-week blockade occurred from March to May 2025 and severely restricted entry of food, water, medicines, fuel and other essentials. By early August 2025, 15.8% of screened children were acutely malnourished, including 3.7% who were severely wasted. This equates to more than 54,600 children in need of treatment using ready-to-use therapeutic food – a paste containing high quantities of calories and other nutrients.

Boys were more likely to be malnourished than girls, which was consistent with the pre-war period. Studies across the globe have found malnutrition rates are usually higher in boys than girls.

Was the study well conducted?

This was a longitudinal (conducted over time, in this case 20 months) cross-sectional study, which means the researchers took their measurements at certain intervals (in this case, monthly).

The authors provide extensive details of the numbers of children included, in which local area, what kind of facility (a fixed medical centre or medical point), as well as age and sex.

Two-thirds of the participants were in Khan Younis and Middle governorates, with relatively low numbers in North Gaza and Rafah, which were highly affected by military activities.

The analysis was thorough, preceded by a data cleansing process which excluded values that were implausible. Standard statistical tests were applied to the data.

The paper was peer reviewed before publication.

What do the findings mean?

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, known as the IPC scale, defines famine as a situation in which at least one in five households has an extreme lack of food and faces starvation and destitution, resulting in extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death. The IPC uses the same classification of acute malnutrition as the WHO.

The IPC scale defines five phases of food insecurity. Famine (phase 5) is the highest phase of the scale, and is classified when an area has 20% of households facing extreme food shortage and 30% of children are acutely malnourished.

In late August 2025, the IPC released its fifth report on Gaza. It found for the period July 1 to August 15 2025, there was famine (phase 5) for the Gaza governorate and emergency (phase 4) for Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis. It was unable to adequately assess North Gaza because of insecurity.

The food insecurity situation in Gaza is among the worst in the world, comparable with the current situation in Sudan, Yemen and Haiti. It is a man-made disaster and can be reversed by urgent human action.

The Lancet study found spikes in acute malnutrition coincided with aid blockades. A ceasefire and a complete opening to international aid are fundamental to a resolution of the food crisis.

Michael Toole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council..

– ref. Child famine has reached the highest level in Gaza, with tens of thousands of kids affected – new study – https://theconversation.com/child-famine-has-reached-the-highest-level-in-gaza-with-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-affected-new-study-266988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristin R. Laurens, Professor, School of Psychology and Counselling, Queensland University of Technology

Suspending or expelling a student is the most serious disciplinary measure available to schools.

Research tells us it can have a negative impact on a students’ learning, their connection to school and mental health.

Students who have been suspended are also more likely to go on to have contact with the criminal justice system due to lack of adult supervision, association with older antisocial peers, and negative impacts on essential skills like reading.

This is why student discipline policies and procedures say they should only be used as a last resort.

But how are schools using these measures?

In a new study, we tracked New South Wales public school students over a decade. We found many students were repeatedly suspended. We also found disadvantaged students were more likely to be suspended or expelled.

Our research

Our research used data from the NSW Child Development Study to track suspensions and expulsions among a group of almost 72,000 students who attended public schools in New South Wales. This represented almost one fifth of all Australian school students at the time.

It provides the first, large-scale analysis of suspension and expulsion data over a ten year period, following the same students from Year 3 to Year 12, from 2012 to 2021.

Almost 1 in 5 students were suspended during their school career

According to the NSW Department of Education, about 4% of students in the state’s public schools are suspended or expelled in any calendar year.

But these figures understate the true scale of the practice, because they do not capture the accumulation of suspensions and expulsions by the same students over more than one year.

Instead of looking at exclusions in a single year, we studied students over ten years. This showed 19% of the 72,000 students in our group were suspended or expelled at least once between Year 3 and Year 12.

In most cases, students were suspended. Less than 1% were expelled.

As noted in other Australian research, the use of suspensions/expulsions escalates in junior high school (Years 7-10). Our data also shows this pattern, with more than two-thirds (71%) of suspensions/expulsions happening during these pivotal years of school.

Why are students suspended or expelled?

Most suspensions were given for “aggressive behaviour” (52%) and “continued disobedience” (31%).

More serious categories, like “physical violence” and “persistent and serious misbehaviour” accounted for 10% and 12% of suspensions/expulsions respectively.

Illegal behaviours (involving things like weapons and drugs) contributed less than 5% of suspensions/expulsions.

Things build over time

About 40% of students who were suspended received just one suspension. But about 60% of students were suspended or expelled multiple times.

As shown in the chart below, almost half (45%) of all suspensions/expulsions went to just 13% of students who were suspended/expelled nine times or more. The highest number of suspensions/expulsions among these individuals was 54.

The earlier students were suspended/expelled, the more likely they were to be suspended/expelled again.

One in two students (54%) who were first suspended/expelled during primary school had repeat suspensions/expulsions. Only two in five students (40%) first suspended/expelled during high school had repeat suspensions/expulsions.

Children disappear from the system

A sharp drop in suspensions of students in Years 11 and 12 has been noted in previous research.

However, our research suggests there is a relationship between being suspended/expelled and leaving school early.

As shown in the chart below, by Year 12, almost half (48%) of the students who had received at least one suspension in the previous ten years were no longer enrolled in a NSW public school.

Which students are being suspended the most?

Our research shows students who are already disadvantaged are more likely to be suspended from school.

Students living in the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, students with unemployed parents, those living in regional, remote, and very remote areas, were all significantly over-represented in the data.

These effects became more pronounced as the number of repeat suspensions rose. For example, children of unemployed parents were almost three times as likely as their peers to experience a single suspension/expulsion, but around ten times as likely to experience 16 or more suspensions or expulsions.

Boys were also much more likely to be suspended/expelled than girls. They were about twice as likely as girls to be suspended/expelled once, but around ten times as likely to be suspended/expelled 16 times or more.

In our previous study in this sample, we found other vulnerable students, such as those with emotional and behavioural disability or maltreated children, are also overrepresented in the data.

Read more:
Expelling students for bad behaviour seems like the obvious solution, but is it really a good idea?

What does this mean?

Our findings suggest there are two different issues at play.

First, schools are turning to the “last resort” of suspending or expelling students for behaviours that can and should be managed within the school using tried and tested approaches that aim to educate a student, rather than punish or push them out.

The problem with turning to the last resort too early is students become desensitised to being suspended and schools have nothing left in the toolkit when behaviours escalate. This pattern becomes clear when children are followed over time.

Some students need more support

The second issue is some students need far more intensive academic, emotional, and behavioural support. These students are concentrated in schools serving disadvantaged communities.

System-wide improvements in behaviour management will help address low-level behaviours. But this will not help some students with disability or those who have experienced trauma who may require intensive support and educational adjustments. This is particularly so if these students are concentrated in certain schools or areas.

Here, we can learn from public school systems in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where a comprehensive approach to supporting students’ academic, social-emotional and behavioural development has been introduced. School suspensions have been reduced and school safety, student engagement and achievement have increased.

The NSW student behaviour policy on suspensions and expulsions was revised in 2024 to place some limitations on the use of suspension and expulsion in public schools. Further research will be needed to examine the effect of that change.

However, school suspension and expulsion rates like those identified by this study are an indication some schools need more help to support the students in their local communities.

Kristin R. Laurens received funding for this research from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, and the Medical Research Future Fund.

Lauren M. Piltz receives funding from the Australian government Research Training Programme Stipend scholarship, administered by the Queensland University of Technology.

Linda J. Graham receives funding from the Queensland government’s Education Horizon scheme.

– ref. We tracked 72,000 NSW public school students over a decade and found 19% had been suspended or expelled – https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-72-000-nsw-public-school-students-over-a-decade-and-found-19-had-been-suspended-or-expelled-267001

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Edwell, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Macquarie University

A proposed one dollar coin featuring US President Donald Trump is causing ructions across the political divide. It’s also provoking discussion in the world of ancient Roman numismatics (coin studies).

The proposed coin depicts Trump in profile on one side (the obverse). On the other side (the reverse) the president raises his fist in defiance accompanied by the words “fight, fight, fight”.

While only a draft proposal, the coin could be minted in 2026 to mark 250 years since the US declaration of independence. But an old law prohibits the “likeness of any living person” from being “placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes, fractional or postal currency of the United States.”

More than 2,000 years ago, the depiction of living figures on Roman coins caused similar ructions.

It came at a time when the Roman republic was in trouble. The republic would crumble altogether soon after, ushering in the long period of Rome being led by emperor-kings who saw themselves as almost akin to gods.

Perhaps the American republic is at a similar stage.

Sulla’s image on a coin

Rome was said to be founded by the mythical king Romulus, who killed his own twin (Remus). The fledgling state was led by seven kings before it became a republic in about 509 BCE.

By the late second century BCE it was led by Roman general and politician Gaius Marius. Marius and his later rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, broke many of the republic’s long-held conventions. They also fought Rome’s first major civil war.

In 88 BCE, while consul, Sulla marched an army on Rome to defend the city from “tyrants” (by which he meant the faction of Marius, who had ousted him). After Sulla won the civil war that followed, he held the dictatorship from 82-79 BCE. Dictatorships were only to be held for six months in times of emergency. Sulla claimed the emergency was ongoing.

As part of this he ordered a list (known as proscriptions) of enemies drawn up. Hundreds or even thousands were killed and had property confiscated.

In the same year a silver coin (called a denarius) was minted in Sulla’s name. One side featured Sulla himself riding in a four-horse chariot.

This was the first time a living person was depicted on a Roman coin. Up to this point only gods and mythological figures had that honour.

It was highly unusual.

Caesar’s challenge to the old republic

Sulla was the first but he wouldn’t be the last leader of the Roman republic to have his image on a coin.

In 44 BCE Julius Caesar went a step further. Only months before his assassination, coins appeared with Caesar’s bust dominating their obverses. Some included the words dict perpetuo meaning “dictator for life”.

By this time, Caesar and many before him, including Marius and Sulla, had broken the mould of the old republic.

Early in 44 BCE, Caesar took the dictatorship for life.

From 46-44 BCE he held the consulship, which was only meant to be held for a one-year term at a time. (Sulla held the dictatorship three years running, which partly set the scene for Caesar’s later emergence and the final breakdown of the republic.)

For many at the time, it seemed Caesar was moving the republic in the direction of monarchy. In January 44 BCE, when a throng hailed him as “rex” (king) Caesar responded, “I am Caesar and no king”. His very name was by now more powerful.

The coins of 44 BCE containing a profile bust of Caesar were an important part of his public program, and part of his challenge to republican convention.

Sulla paved the way 40 years before.

The parallels with Trump are hard to miss

Some emphasise that Caesar did not directly order his image to be placed on coins. Those wanting to curry favour read the room and Caesar did not object.

A similar scenario appears to be playing out with the coin design bearing Trump’s image.

The parallels with Trump are hard to miss. Trump has signed more than 200 executive orders in less than nine months. His predecessor Joe Biden issued 162 in his entire presidency.

Trump’s deployment of federal troops to US cities under emergency decrees provokes cries of tyranny. Sulla’s march on Rome and the proscriptions that followed drew a similar response.

The possibility of a one dollar coin depicting Donald Trump on both sides echoes the coins of Sulla and Caesar.

They might not technically break the law but they would break convention. In the process they also symbolise a notable shift in the US from democracy to autocracy.

When the “no kings!” demonstrations took place in the US earlier this year, they reminded us of a key motivation for the declaration of independence.

A coin celebrating its 250-year anniversary may well symbolise its journey to demise.

Peter Edwell receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Trump on a coin? When Julius Caesar tried that, the Roman republic crumbled soon after – https://theconversation.com/trump-on-a-coin-when-julius-caesar-tried-that-the-roman-republic-crumbled-soon-after-266887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor Emerita, Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University

Imagine you’re away from home but forgot to pack your towel, razor or toothbrush.

Should you use other people’s?

Here’s why it’s probably best not to make a habit of it.

Microbes can stay active for a while

Many disease-causing bacteria, viruses or fungi live on cloth, plastic and metal objects in your bathroom. These so-called pathogenic microbes can remain viable on these surfaces for extended periods. That is, they’re able to cause infection for days, months or years.

For example, the fungus Aspergillus can remain viable for more than a month on cloth and plastic. Some bacteria can survive on these surfaces for years. And many viruses can remain viable for hours to months on some materials such as ceramics, metals, cloth and plastics.

But what is the risk from particular items such as used towels, razors and toothbrushes?

Scientists haven’t run randomised controlled trials (the gold standard study design) to determine the risk. This would be when one group in a study is chosen at random to, say, shave their legs with someone’s used razor, and the infection rates of known pathogens compared with those randomised to a control group who didn’t.

But there are other studies that give us some clues.

Can I share towels? If you play footy, maybe not

Less robust studies suggest an increased risk of picking up a skin infection from used towels.

One report from the United States was of an outbreak of antibiotic resistant Staphylococcus aureas (or Staph, for short) in a group of high-school football players. Players who shared a towel were eight times more likely to pick up an infection.

Staph can cause the skin condition impetigo. But in rare cases it can lead to life-threatening septic shock and organs failing.

In this case, the risk of transmitting Staph was probably elevated due to potential cuts and grazes from playing a contact sport.

Another study, also from the US, followed 150 households for 12 months. Each household had a single child infected with Staph.

When household members shared towels, the risk of Staph transmission increased significantly.

You might think that microbes are washed off in the shower. While washing with soap and water reduces the number of microbes on the skin it does not completely eliminate them. And the warm, moist conditions of the average bathroom encourage microbial growth.

Even if you don’t develop an infection, becoming colonised by pathogens (when there is no damage) can be problematic.

That’s because you may be exposed to antibiotic resistant species, increasing the risk of developing antibiotic resistant infections later. These are more time consuming and expensive to treat.

How about a toothbrush? Think of the viruses

Microbes can remain viable on hard objects, such as toothbrushes. And toothbrushes can cause gums to bleed. So sharing them is discouraged as this can transmit blood-borne viruses such as hepatitis C.

Not everyone who is in a risk category for hepatitis C infection has been tested. And people can be infectious without having symptoms.

Anything that has come into contact with saliva (such as your toothbrush) may also transmit pathogens. These include herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), which causes cold sores, and Epstein-Barr virus, which causes glandular fever.

A person with no signs of HSV-1 infection can still shed viruses and cause infection.

One review found toothbrushes were contaminated with potentially pathogenic species of bacteria such as Staph, E. coli and Pseudomonas. HSV-1 was also found in sufficient numbers to cause infection. This virus can remain viable for two to six days on plastic objects.

Surely a razor’s OK? Not if you hate warts

Microbes can remain viable on hard objects such as razors too. And it’s
hard to avoid nicks when using a razor. So there’s a risk of transmitting blood-borne viruses if you share.

Razors, towels and other personal hygiene items can also spread human papillomaviruses that cause warts. So it’s no wonder dermatologists recommend each person has their own items.

Who’s at risk?

If you have cuts or grazes, this provides a portal of entry for microbes, putting you at increased risk of infection. Remember those footy players who shared towels.

Reduced immune function also increases the risk of infection. We see this in:

• babies, whose immune system is still developing

• elderly people, whose immune function declines in later life

• people taking immune suppressing medications, such as cancer drugs, oral corticosteroids and drugs taken after an organ transplant

• people with type 2 diabetes, because increased blood glucose levels damage the function of immune cells and associated molecules.

However, the overall risk of contracting an infection is low on any one occasion. And if you’re sharing a towel, razor or toothbrush with a partner, you’ll be in regular close contact and sharing microbes anyway.

But it’s still a good idea to avoid making a habit of sharing other people’s used bathroom items.

Thea van de Mortel 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. 3 bathroom items you shouldn’t really share, according to an expert – https://theconversation.com/3-bathroom-items-you-shouldnt-really-share-according-to-an-expert-264109

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

It’s been eight days since a partial US government shutdown began on October 1, owing to a failure by Congress to agree to a new budget by the September 30 deadline.

Democrats are refusing to help to pass a budget unless health insurance subsidies are extended, while Republicans and President Donald Trump want a budget passed without these subsidies. There does not appear to be any progress towards ending the shutdown.

Analyst G. Elliott Morris has reported polls that have Republicans and Trump blamed for the shutdown by six to 17 points more than Democrats. In a YouGov poll for CBS News, by 40–28 respondents said the Democratic positions were not worth the shutdown, and by 45–23 they said the same of the Republican positions.

In analyst Nate Silver’s US national poll aggregate, Trump has a net approval of -9.4, with 52.7% disapproving and 43.3% approving. His net approval dropped two points in late September, but the shutdown hasn’t changed it yet.

Trump’s net approval on the four issues tracked by Silver are -4.7 on immigration, -15.3 on the economy, -15.6 on trade and -27.4 on inflation. His net approval on trade and inflation has risen in the last two weeks.

In November 2026 all of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will be up for election at midterm elections. Morris’ generic ballot average has Democrats leading Republicans by 44.9–42.1. Democrats have led narrowly since April.

In polling conducted before the shutdown started, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer averaged a net favourability of -20.5 according to Silver, making him the least popular of the six party leaders (Trump, Vice President JD Vance and the Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders).

Schumer’s poor ratings are due to weak ratings from Democratic-aligned voters. A Pew poll gave him an overall 50–21 unfavourable rating, including 39–35 unfavourable with Democrats. There’s pressure on Schumer from his own party to fight Trump harder. If Democrats are perceived to have caved to Republicans, Schumer is likely to be blamed by other Democrats.

How do shutdowns affect the US economy?

There have been 11 US government shutdowns since 1980, with seven of them lasting five days or less. The longest shutdown (35 days) occurred during Trump’s first term after Democrats gained control of the House in November 2018 elections.

Shutdowns are economically damaging, but past shutdowns haven’t lasted long enough to do great damage, and the economy rebounds once the shutdown is over.

Shutdowns result in far less government economic data. The September jobs report was to be released last Friday, but this won’t happen until after the shutdown finishes.

Despite the shutdown, the benchmark US S&P 500 stock index surged to a new record high in Wednesday’s session, and is up 4% in the last month. The stock market has been supporting Trump since it rebounded from April lows.

Why is there a shutdown when Republicans control both chambers?

Republicans won the House of Representatives by 220–215 over Democrats at the November 2024 elections and currently hold it by 219–213, with two special elections to occur later this year. A Democrat who won a September 23 special election has not yet been formally certified the winner.

Republicans also hold a 53–47 majority in the Senate.

In the Senate, legislation usually needs to clear a 60-vote “filibuster” threshold. The filibuster allows at least 41 senators to indefinitely delay legislation they disagree with. To reach 60 votes, Republicans need at least seven Democratic senators to vote with them.

The filibuster is not part of the US Constitution, and the majority party could eliminate it. But some Republican senators are probably worried about what Democrats would do if they won the presidency and majorities in both chambers of Congress.

The filibuster cannot be applied to all legislation. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” passed the Senate using “reconciliation” by 51–50 on Vance’s tie-breaking vote. But reconciliation is a cumbersome process that isn’t appropriate for a normal budget bill.

Ipsos poll on Trump’s troop deployments

Trump has deployed national guard troops on home soil in Chicago, Illinois, and attempted to also do this in Portland, Oregon. The national guard has assisted before, during environmental disasters and protests, but Trump’s deployments are against the wishes of the affected states’ governors.

In an Ipsos US national poll for Reuters, respondents thought by 58–25 that the president should only deploy troops to areas with external threats. By 48–37, they did not think the president should be able to send troops into a state if its governor objects.

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. Trump’s ratings steady as the US government shutdown drags into a second week – https://theconversation.com/trumps-ratings-steady-as-the-us-government-shutdown-drags-into-a-second-week-266884

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jill Sheppard, Senior Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University

Sussan Ley’s challenge as opposition leader is to keep her party united and ready to govern in the event that the government loses public favour. That is, they need to be a ready alternative government.

Voters evaluate governments on the basis of what they’ve done, but also what they promise to do next. Opposition parties start on the back foot, as governments have greater public visibility and can use public money to ingratiate themselves with voters. Ley is particularly up against it, with only 51 members in her party room and little public confidence the party has any chance of winning the next federal election.

Inevitably though, the money runs dry or the government’s mistakes start to pile up. That’s when an opposition needs to be in a credible position to persuade swinging voters that they are a better option than the government. This broadly involves three stages: establishing competence, offering an alternative vision of government, and surviving the campaign.

Competence in opposition

The first stage – establishing competence – is where Ley and the Liberals now find themselves. Ley comes to the job with some question marks, having resigned as health minister in 2017 amid accusations of misusing publicly-funded travel.

On the plus side, her early moves to reinstitute formal policy development processes inside the party (including on “net zero” and nuclear energy) signal competence.

Former opposition leader Peter Dutton was competent in his own way, leading a defeated and fractious party room through a full parliamentary term with little public dissent and no serious challenges to his authority. However, this came at the expense of any real policy agenda, and that contributed to their defeat at the 2025 election.

The more difficult task is to combine competence and vision, and this is where we introduce Andrew Hastie.

Hastie, as a recent member of the shadow cabinet and now backbencher, is less concerned with establishing competence than with offering his own vision of a Liberal government. He attributed his decision to resign as shadow minister for home affairs to a lack of autonomy over the party’s immigration policy. He appears to have no patience for deliberative policy development processes. It has also been reported that Dutton accused Hastie of being “on strike” in the lead-up to the election.

Hastie’s position has been compared to that of Tony Abbott, but as opposition leader, Abbott was actually quite conciliatory.

Before the 2013 election, he committed to support the NDIS, Labor-led education reforms and the National Broadband Network. He offered stability and competence, particularly in contrast to six years of Labor in-fighting under Rudd and Gillard. His more conservative excesses (and awkward idiosyncrasies) came post-election.

Balancing competence and vision

Kevin Rudd – whom Abbott defeated in 2013 – offers the best recent example of an opposition leader successfully balancing competence with vision. It might be argued that Rudd’s “John Howard-lite” vision at the 2007 election was less ambitious than electorally strategic. Still, his political style differentiated him from Howard, whose government was 11 years old, fractious, and had little energy for new policy.

Before Rudd came Howard himself, who won government from Paul Keating and Labor in 1996 with a mix of competence and conservative vision. The Liberal Party had been in opposition for 13 years, lost an “unloseable” election in 1993, and rotated through a series of unpopular and gaffe-prone leaders.

Howard was awkward in front of a camera but respected by his colleagues. He successfully sold the electorate on his vision of nationalism, economic prudence, and blue-collar ambition.

Hastie seems in lockstep on the second part of Howard’s approach. His Instagram posts, public statements, and pre-parliamentary career in the military all point to a traditionally conservative vision.

Winning the campaign

Hastie’s criticism of Ley seems to boil down to her insistence on competence at the expense of vision. However, Ley’s deliberative processes might yet produce a platform that concords with Hastie’s personal vision. If so, she will have ticked “competence” and “vision” on the opposition leader checklist, and Hastie may have limited his career unnecessarily.

An alternative outcome is that Ley’s Liberal Party deliberates over the next year or so and agrees on a platform that is more moderate than Hastie (and fellow conservatives Jane Hume, Angus Taylor and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price) wants.

Hastie is wrong if he thinks winning from a centrist position is impossible, although it tends to require an incompetent government. Rudd defeated a moribund government whose two most senior figures openly despised each other. Abbott toppled Rudd in his second stint as prime minister after Rudd was deposed by and then deposed Julia Gillard. In the absence of a similar breakdown in Anthony Albanese’s Labor government, Hastie might be onto something.

In political science we call this valence politics. There are many issues on which all voters generally agree: everyone wants fewer wars, good quality education, affordable healthcare, for instance. Parties can differentiate themselves on their ability to tackle these valence issues, or they can propose an alternative vision.

By tacking to the centre, the Liberals will need to demonstrate that they are more competent than Albanese’s government. Choosing vision over competence – Hastie’s apparent preference – is not for the faint-hearted.

Jill Sheppard receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Competence and vision: how to be a successful opposition – https://theconversation.com/competence-and-vision-how-to-be-a-successful-opposition-266888

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Rose, Adjuct Lecturer, University of Adelaide

Two decades after Timor-Leste gained its independence, the country is a complicated and qualified success story. Poverty and deep economic problems persist, but the country boasts a thriving democracy. Its ascension to the ASEAN regional bloc will come later this month.

As this milestone approaches, however, a senior official with oversight over the national intelligence agency has gone public with explosive claims that Timorese institutions are allegedly being bought by organised crime.

His concerns come after a recent UN report that describes in vivid detail a sophisticated attempt by figures linked to triad gangs in China and Southeast Asia to allegedly establish a base of operations in the Timorese region of Oecusse-Ambeno.

If the allegations are true, they could pose the one of the greatest tests for Timor-Leste in its short history. Is its democracy robust enough to confront the challenge?

Allegations of corruption

Agio Pereira is the Timorese minister of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. He is one of the most powerful elected officials in his country.

On September 21, Pereira published on Facebook what he called A Manifesto for the Defence of Timor-Leste. In it, he claims to have
“undeniable and damning evidence” that US$45 million (A$68 million) has been brought (in some cases flown) into the country by “transnational criminal syndicates from Cambodia, Malaysia, Macau and Hong Kong”.

He says the money was allegedly used to influence regulatory bodies to grant “fraudulent licences” and set up “protected enclaves” where “illegal gambling, cyber-scam centres and human trafficking would be able to operate under state protection”.

He said the country faces a simple choice:

Will we be a sovereign nation governed by democratic laws and institutions, or will we become a criminal state owned by foreign mafia syndicates?

Pereira also listed numerous demands, including:

• the revocation of any licences that may have been granted to criminal networks
• government cooperation with international law enforcement to dismantle the networks
• an investigation of all officials who have allegedly taken any money.

Pereira did not provide any evidence in the post to back up his claims, but especially given his status and oversight of the national intelligence service, many are taking his claims seriously.

In response to the allegations, President José Ramos-Horta told me via WhatsApp:

I always said Timor-Leste does not have homegrown organised crime. […] But Timor-Leste, being still a fragile country, is very attractive to organised crime from Asia.

I have full confidence in our authorities with support from Australian Federal Police and from Indonesian police in tackling the challenges by organised crime.

Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao also took a measured response to the allegations. He told local media Pereira would be given a chance to raise the issue with the government directly.

On October 1, he was given his chance, addressing a meeting of Timor-Leste’s Counsel of Ministers. This resulted in the swift approval of a draft resolution cancelling all existing licences granted for online gambling and betting operations and prohibiting any new licences from being issued.

But Pereira’s other key demand – an investigation into officials accused of taking money from organised crime syndicates – appears not to have been addressed.

Scammers taking root

Cyber-scammming is a booming industry in Southeast Asia, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Illegal gambling and scam centres have proliferated in recent years in “special economic zones” in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. The organised crime groups behind them are constantly looking for new bases of operations where local officials can be persuaded to look the other way, or lack the capacity to stop them.

Although Timor-Leste is small, it’s important due to its strategic location (just a 1.5-hour flight from Darwin) and the fact Australia and its allies are increasingly competing for influence there with China. Australia cannot afford to ignore any threat to the security of a fledgling democracy on its doorstep.

Pereira’s manifesto came in the wake of an August 25 raid on a suspected scam centre in Oecusse-Ambeno, where 30 foreign nationals from Indonesia, Malaysia and China were detained. The head of the regional government, Rogerio Lobato, was given notice two days later.

Oecusse, as it’s commonly known, is a rugged coastal exclave on the western half of Timor island, surrounded by Indonesia. Once extremely isolated, Oecusse was granted autonomy in 2014 and a special economic zone was established to spur foreign investment.

The report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in September described how organised crime groups took advantage of the region’s loose regulatory structures late last year to allegedly establish an “Oecusse Digital Centre”. It reads:

The Special Administrative Region of Oecusse-Ambeno (RAEOA), Timor-Leste appears to have already been targeted by criminal networks through FDI [foreign direct investment].

As Timor-Leste prepares to join ASEAN in October 2025, the reported infiltration of RAEOA and its national ID system by convicted cybercriminals poses a serious security risk.

The report notes that Timor-Leste shares “stark similarities” with the development of the scam industry in Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, which have now become notorious hubs for cyber fraud, drug trafficking and human trafficking.

In his message to me, Ramos-Horta declined to address the allegations surfaced by the UN report, saying:

I know well the work of UN agencies. They should focus more on solid research and less on allegations against individuals because this is not their mandate.

In his manifesto, Pereira appears to suggest operations like the one recently raided in Oecusse are made possible through the bribery of Timorese officials. He says directly this influence is occurring on a scale that risks state capture.

Reactions to Pereira’s allegations

It’s unclear why Pereira chose to appeal directly to the people rather than take his concerns to others in the government.

Nelson Belo, director of the civil society and security monitoring organisation Fundasaun Mahein, criticised Pereira’s choice to go public. He said as a minister, he should “lead and act within the law”.

Belo’s group had also recently warned of the risks transnational organised crime groups could pose to the country.

Abel Pires, a former government minister and former member of Timor-Leste’s Council of Defence and Security, had a different view.

He reasoned that because “the problem may involve too many people within the system”, Pereira might have had no choice but to go public.

He also called the cancellation of gambling licences a positive step, but said there must be an independent investigation into Pereira’s allegations.

On the street, the allegations have fed into frustration with official greed and incompetence, which fuelled recent student demonstrations against government waste.

That a leading minister felt he needed to go public with the accusations to have them taken seriously by his own government is telling.

The potential subversion of Timor-Leste’s institutions by organised crime is a serious threat to the country’s security. Its government – as well as Australia’s – would do well to pay heed.

Michael Rose 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. Organised crime may be infiltrating Timor-Leste’s government. One minister is sounding the alarm – https://theconversation.com/organised-crime-may-be-infiltrating-timor-lestes-government-one-minister-is-sounding-the-alarm-265879

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne-Marie Laslett, Professor, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University

Globally, up to one in three women who live with a male partner report he is a heavy drinker. Evidence shows men’s drinking increases the severity and frequency of violence towards women and harms to children.

Yet in Australia and worldwide, most policies to address gender violence still fail to consider the significant role alcohol plays.

Our new research, published last week, reviewed and analysed the evidence in three major international reviews about men’s drinking.

We wanted to understand the range of impacts that men’s heavy drinking has on women and children worldwide. We also examined whether alcohol policies and interventions specifically address these harms.

Our study shows the impact on women and children is profound – but the harms are often understudied and overlooked. Here’s what we found.

Women carry the burden

We already knew that men’s heavy drinking exacerbates physical violence, leads to more intimate partner violence experienced by women, and to more severe injuries.

However, our new research reveals a much wider range of harms that occur to women when men drink heavily. Heavy drinking can include binge drinking and alcohol dependence.

The psychological impact on women can be profound. We found men’s heavy drinking can contribute to controlling behaviour and irrational sexual jealousy towards partners, sexual aggression and coercion, and emotional abuse that includes humiliating or insulting the partner.

Women also reported alcohol-related harms that are not widely studied or understood. These included women experiencing social isolation and economic abuse, where household resources are diverted to the man’s drinking.

Financial problems for the family can have serious flow-on effects. For example, buying alcohol may not leave enough money for essentials such as food and clothing. Money issues can trigger conflicts which then escalate into violence towards women.

Men’s alcohol use can also lead to missed work or unemployment. This can reduce the family income and put more pressure on women to work extra hours, often alongside existing caregiving duties. They may then be at risk of other harmful situations or exploitation, such as being forced into sex work – reported by some women in lower income countries.

Children become more unsafe

The impact of men’s heavy drinking on children has been even less well studied than its effect on women.

Yet our research shows when men drink heavily, their children are more likely to experience neglect, poor mental health, disrupted schooling and family instability – all of which negatively affects their development.

Men who drink heavily often prioritise alcohol over their children’s needs and this can create dysfunctional family environments. Their children are also more likely to become the targets of violence and witness violence against others.

As a consequence of these sometimes unstable and unsafe family environments, children may often feel less emotionally close to fathers who drink heavily. Evidence shows fathers who drink heavily are less involved in parenting.

A gap in policy

Alcohol research and policy, and general policies, seldom target the diverse impacts of men’s drinking on women and children.

Our study highlights an uncomfortable reality: to prevent violence against women and children, we also need to focus on men’s drinking – and the wider social and economic inequalities that contribute to harms to women and children.

We need interventions that explicitly target the social norms around masculinity, including those that encourage and normalise heavy drinking and reward aggression.

But we also need to address other societal factors that can amplify problematic aspects of men’s heavy drinking – including men’s histories of trauma, mental health and social disadvantage – without diminishing their individual accountability.

Addressing the link between alcohol and gender violence

In Australia, the current National Plan to End Gender Based Violence pays minimal attention to alcohol.

However, in 2024, the federal government led a rapid review into preventing gender violence. It drew specific attention to the role of alcohol and called on states and territories to change their liquor regulations. For instance, by restricting alcohol sales, delivery timeframes and advertising.

Our research supports these recommendations. And suggests we need more nuanced alcohol strategies that are tailored to specifically address harms from men’s drinking and consider when, why and how men drink.

Strategies to reduce harmful alcohol use should be integrated with broader gender-based violence prevention. For instance, by combining interventions for men who are in treatment for alcohol problems and use violence, and reducing alcohol consumption at home, for example, by limiting home delivery.

Men’s heavy drinking can be seriously harmful for women and children. This means we can’t address the epidemic of men’s violence in our community without tackling alcohol use head on.

For information and advice about family and intimate partner violence contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732). If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, contact 000. Men’s Referral Service (call 1300 766 491) offers advice and counselling to men looking to change their behaviour.

For free and confidential advice about alcohol and other drugs call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.

Anne-Marie Laslett receives funding from the Australian Research Council, and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is affiliated with Alcohol Change Victoria, a cross-sector coalition of leading organisations united in their call for action on alcohol harms.

Cassandra Hopkins receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Ingrid Wilson is a member of the The Foundation for Alcohol and Research and Education (FARE)’s Advisory Committee, which has been funded by the federal government to review their national framework for action to prevent alcohol-related family violence, developed by FARE in 2015. She receives a nominal fee for this work.

– ref. Women and kids often pay a heavy price when men drink. Our gender violence plan should reflect this – https://theconversation.com/women-and-kids-often-pay-a-heavy-price-when-men-drink-our-gender-violence-plan-should-reflect-this-266372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eli Levenson-Falk, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical and Computer Engineering, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Quantum mechanics describes the weird behavior of microscopic particles. Using quantum systems to perform computation promises to allow researchers to solve problems in areas from chemistry to cryptography that have so many possible solutions that they are beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful nonquantum computers possible.

Quantum computing depends on researchers developing practical quantum technologies. Superconducting electrical circuits are a promising technology, but not so long ago it was unclear whether they even showed quantum behavior. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists for their work demonstrating that quantum effects persist even in large electrical circuits, which has enabled the development of practical quantum technologies.

I’m a physicist who studies superconducting circuits for quantum computing and other uses. The work in my field stems from the groundbreaking research the Nobel laureates conducted.

Big, cold, quantum

In their 1984 and 1985 work, then-Ph.D. student John Martinis, then-postdoctoral researcher Michel Devoret and UC Berkeley professor John Clarke showed that even large electrical circuits could exhibit quantum behavior. They used a circuit made from niobium and lead. When cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, these metals become superconductors. A superconductor is a material that carries a current without generating any heat.

Martinis, Devoret and Clarke showed that in a superconductor, the voltages and currents are governed by quantum mechanics. The circuit has quantized – meaning discrete and indivisible – levels of energy, and it can be in superpositions of multiple states.

Any physical system can be described by a state, which tells you everything there is to know about that system. Quantum mechanics shows that a state can have certain quantized values of things that can be measured. An example is energy: A particular system could have energy 1 or energy 2, but nothing in between. At the same time, a quantum system can be in a superposition of more than one state, much like you can add different amounts of red/green/blue to get any color in a pixel of an image.

Importantly, the laureates showed that researchers can describe one of these superconducting circuits as if it’s a single quantum particle. This simple behavior is what makes superconducting circuits so useful as a technology.

Today, superconducting circuits are used to study fundamental quantum physics, to simulate other physical systems and to test protocols for ultraprecise sensing. For instance, the Devoret group recently demonstrated a near-ideal microwave amplifier based on a superconducting circuit. Microwave amplifiers are widely used in communications, radar and scientific instruments.

The Martinis group has used superconducting circuits to emulate a group of electron-like particles. This type of simulation is a key technique in studying fundamental physics.

In my own group, we recently used a superconducting circuit to demonstrate a protocol for measuring a magnetic field more sensitively than standard techniques. Quantum sensors measure physical quantities with extreme precision, from biological activity to gravity anomalies.

But by far the biggest application of superconducting circuits is as a platform for quantum computing.

Superconducting quantum computers

Multiple quantum systems can interact with each other and become entangled, so that they act like a single system. This combination of quantization, superposition and entanglement is what gives quantum computers their power.

In quantum computing technology, researchers use a quantum system – a quantum bit or qubit – that can be in only two states. Qubits need to be coherent. This means that if we put it in a particular state, we want it to stay there and not get randomly scrambled to another state. Qubits need to be controllable. This means that researchers should be able to get a qubit to change state as needed and get it to interact with other qubits. And qubits need to be scalable, meaning that we need to make a lot of them.

Many technologies show promise, such as arrays of atoms in a vacuum, trapped ions, trapped electrons in seminconductors, and photons controlled by optical circuits. But all technologies make trade-offs, sacrificing coherence, controllability or scalability to improve something else.

The simplicity and flexibility of superconducting circuits mean that by changing the design of the circuit, researchers can get almost any qubit behavior we want, and that behavior is easy to predict. This hits the technological sweet spot for quantum computing. More obviously quantum technologies, such as trapped atoms, are so small that they can be hard to control and interact with. Superconducting qubits are big enough to be easy to control, simple enough to be reliable and quantum enough to make the whole thing work.

Today, academic research groups like mine develop new types of superconducting qubits, look for ways to make them more coherent, try to improve our control of them, and develop techniques to make them easier to scale up. Companies and government labs take these academic results along with their own basic research and apply them, doing the difficult engineering to create large-scale quantum processors for practical use.

Superconductor pioneers

Unsurprisingly, the Nobel laureates made and continue to make huge contributions beyond their work in the 1980s. In addition to their academic work, Martinis formerly headed the Google quantum processor effort and now has his own company, while Devoret now assists with the Google effort. Clarke, now retired, also did much of his late-career work on quantum circuits. And they have had major impacts on my career and on so many others.

I had the privilege to do a panel discussion with Devoret on May 22, 2025. He made a memorable claim: Picking an academic adviser can be even more of a big deal than picking a spouse, because “you can’t divorce your adviser.”

It’s often joked that half the researchers in the field of quantum superconductors can trace an academic lineage to Clarke. I can do it twice: My Ph.D. adviser, Irfan Siddiqi, was advised by Devoret, and Clarke was my secondary adviser. And one of my proudest accomplishments as a grad student was not panicking when Martinis snagged me after I gave a talk to grill me on the details.

Today they are honored for their work, and tomorrow I and the other researchers they trained will do our best to continue it.

Eli Levenson-Falk 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. Nobel Prize in physics awarded for ultracold electronics research that launched a quantum technology – https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-for-ultracold-electronics-research-that-launched-a-quantum-technology-266979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emery Schubert, Professor, Empirical Musicology Laboratory, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney

If you’ve watched the movie KPop Demon Hunters and see the word “golden”, what happens?

Pause and think about it for a moment.

For those unfamiliar, nothing will come to mind. But if you’ve heard the song of the same name, you may start hearing a fragment of the tune repeating in your head, over and over. You might even mouth or sing the words “we’re goin’ up, up, up”.

Did that happen to you? If so, you just experienced “involuntary musical imagery”, colloquially known as an earworm.

More than 90% of the population experience earworms, and researchers are beginning to understand how they work, why they happen, what they tell us about the brain, and even how to get rid of them – if you want to.

Baby shark, doo doo doo

The humble earworm has taught music psychologists that repeated fragments of music are recycled from the same mental storage location. In Golden, the music accompanying the words “we’re goin’ up, up, up” is repeated several times.

The most earworm-inducing feature is “contiguous” repetition: a fragment of the music that repeats immediately and without delay, like the repeating chorus of a pop song.

Baby Shark, Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, and many, many other songs contain such repetition, and have gone through periods of mass exposure – another important ingredient for earworms because it increases familiarity.

When a song becomes an earworm, the mind repeats the musical phrase, seemingly indefinitely. That’s because the way music recall is organised in the mind is not like a sound file or tape recording that plays from beginning to end.

Rather, the music is efficiently organised into “pockets” based on familiarity and similarity, with some pockets recycled where possible.

Exposure to the music binds the various pockets together through the mental network, not unlike a series of instructions: “start with this introduction, play the verse through twice, then go to the chorus and repeat it four times, go to the next section, back to the verse, repeat that”, and so on.

These “instructions” are a crucial part of the earworm story.

How it’s done, done, done

Several triggers can initiate an earworm: recently having heard some or all of the song, or even just hearing or seeing a relevant phrase (like in this article), or hearing another song that sounds similar.

Habits and environmental triggers can play a role too. For example, if you’re on the bus listening to music every morning, a song fragment might jump into your head one morning even if your playlist is off.

There’s a deeper reason for this. Earworms are more likely to start their musical wriggles when a particular set of brain regions is activated, called the default mode network. The network is associated with daydreaming and mind-wandering, allowing intrusive and repetitive thoughts to surface more easily.

When it comes to song recall, this network is like a naughty, antisocial sibling who picks their favourite part of the song and spends all night in their room listening to it, over and over again.

The parts of the brain involved in focused attention that know how many times the song fragment should be played – and what should come next – are locked out of the default mode network’s room.

When a song has strong repetition, that becomes the network’s focus. The instructions for mentally replaying the song become more akin to “when you reach the end of the fragment, go back and play it again”, with the “correct” number of repetitions and the other parts of the song nowhere to be seen.

The mind is freewheeling, circling around the repeated fragment with no reason to stop.

Mamma mia, here we go again

Some researchers have found people enjoy their earworms, but there are also reports of song fragments being stuck in people’s heads for hours and even days. What if you’ve just had enough of Golden?

To evict an unwanted earworm, you need to disengage your default mode network. One method is to sing the song aloud to other people. The social engagement deters the network from activating, but at the expense of some embarrassment. So … effective, but not always optimal.

Another approach is to replace the song by another, less repetitive one, to keep the looping desires of the default mode network at bay. Happy Birthday and God Save the King are examples of songs that don’t have the kind of repetition that suits earworms.

Software company Atlassian even published a 40-second audio track that’s supposed to squash earworms, based on the principles explained above. With such a tune, there is no contiguous repetition for the earworm to hook on to.

Earworms are providing insights into how music is organised, but they can also bring pleasure by repeating the music you’re enjoying.

If you have a bad relationship with those pesky sound loops, and none of the above tips worked, here’s a final bit of advice. Listen to lots of different music and grow to love your inner earworm.

Emery Schubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Why do some songs get stuck in our heads so easily? The science of earworms – https://theconversation.com/why-do-some-songs-get-stuck-in-our-heads-so-easily-the-science-of-earworms-265863

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher K. Woolley, Post-doctoral Researcher in Ecology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand’s land animals are not well protected when land is developed for new uses. Recent and proposed policy changes risk putting many species at further risk, and native lizards are particularly vulnerable.

New Zealand has more than 120 species of native lizards in two families: skinks and geckos.

As a group, lizards are widespread across the country and many occur in cities. While some species have strong habitat preferences, others live in a wide range of habitats, including non-native and weedy vegetation.

These habitat characteristics mean lizards are often present in places destined to be cleared, degraded or disturbed for development.

All but four lizard species are threatened or at risk. The pressures imposed by human land uses are a serious threat to them.

Two primary statutes determine how lizards are managed during land-use activities. The Wildlife Act 1953 provides protection from hunting and killing and the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) requires the sustainable management of resources. However, both have significant shortcomings in policy and implementation when it comes to preventing the loss of native lizards, and both are under review.

Policy issues

Our recent research explores some of the issues affecting native lizards during changing land use.

One of the problems with having different laws at play is that authorisation of activities and monitoring of compliance are split between several agencies.

The Department of Conservation (DOC) is in charge of the Wildlife Act and the Ministry for the Environment and various local authorities deal with applications under the RMA.

This means no one agency has complete regulatory oversight. While DOC has the authority to prosecute anyone who kills or disturbs lizards while clearing land for development, this almost never happens because there is rarely enough evidence or public interest.

Developers are far more aware of the need to gain resource consent from councils who regulate land use than a Wildlife Act authority from DOC. In many cases, DOC will not even be aware lizard habitat is being cleared.

Under the RMA, councils are required to protect significant areas of indigenous vegetation and habitat for indigenous fauna. In most cases, this is done by designating “significant natural/ecological areas” (SNAs). The criteria used to assess these areas vary among regional policies, but typically include values of representativeness, diversity, rarity and size of the area.

Because we lack knowledge of where lizards exist, these protected areas only cover a fraction of lizard habitat. This is especially true where lizards are present at sites of otherwise low ecological value (for example, weedy non-native vegetation or rank grass).

Outside of SNAs, rules often allow activities such as vegetation clearance and earthworks with few or no conditions. No ecological assessments are required. The fate of any lizards present therefore rests on developers and contract ecologists being aware and proactive about the need to manage them.

As a result, there is little consideration given to lizards during most land-use activities.

Issues in practice

Even when timely consideration is given to lizards and plans are made for their management, we lack evidence that the tools commonly used to mitigate impacts actually work.

Over the past 15 years, the capture and relocation of lizards away from the site of development (mitigation translocation) has become common practice. But international evidence shows translocations of lizards and other reptiles have high rates of failure.

Measuring the population outcome of a lizard translocation is difficult. Because lizards are commonly released at sites where other lizards may already be present, it is usually impossible to know whether the translocated individuals survive and breed at the new site.

Likewise, there is little evidence that attempts to improve the habitat at release sites by adding rockpiles or plantings, or even predator control, help to increase the population.

The breadth of these problems and the involvement of multiple actors and agencies makes protection of lizards and other wildlife during land-use changes challenging.

Both the Wildlife Act and the RMA are currently under review. The proposed reform of the Wildlife Act aims to clarify protection for native wildlife and to add better tools to address current and future threats to species. We argue any new law must ensure native species receive protection regardless of land ownership and the location of habitat.

This could be achieved through stronger monitoring and compliance auditing by DOC, requiring better evidence for the success of mitigation and compensation practices, and better integration with the RMA and resource consenting practices.

Underpinning all of this is the need for more information about where lizards live, so they don’t disappear without us even noticing.

Christopher K. Woolley receives funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment’s Endeavour Fund. He is affiliated with the Society for Research of Amphibians and Reptiles.

Jono Sylvester practices as a lawyer in resource management and works for Corcoran French. He advises a range of clients including in local government, private clients and non-governmental organisations. His contributions to this article were done in his personal capacity.

Nicola Nelson receives funding from Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment’s Endeavour Fund. She is affiliated with the Society for Research of Amphibians and Reptiles.

Catherine Iorns 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. NZ’s native lizards are at risk from land development – future policy must ensure better protection – https://theconversation.com/nzs-native-lizards-are-at-risk-from-land-development-future-policy-must-ensure-better-protection-264765