Short stories published on Reddit have been selling for lucrative amounts to studios like Warner Bros, Amazon MGM and Netflix. It seems there’s no need to write a full screenplay: a few thousand words in a short story could be enough to kick start a Hollywood dream.

I Pretended to be a Missing Girl, the story attached to Warner Bros, with Sydney Sweeney producing, was posted in 2020 by English teacher Scott Cote to Reddit’s popular horror community r/NoSleep, where stories must be written as if true, in the first-person – and commenters must act in the same spirit.

Film rights sold last year. Marcus Kliewer.

Brian Van Wyk/Penguin Random House Stop-motion animator Marcus Kliewer also found success on r/NoSleep, where his short story We Used to Live Here attracted the attention of a producer who sold it to Netflix in 2021, with Blake Lively set to star and produce.

Kliewer then got a book deal. An expanded version of his story became his debut novel. His second novel, The Caretaker, published last month, was also based on a short story (unpublished), with film rights already sold; it will be produced by Sweeney, too.

Online platforms such as Reddit and Wattpad, a platform for publishing and sharing fiction, have become part of a legitimate acquisition pipeline. New York magazine reported in late 2024 on the “booming subgenre” of movies based on Wattpad stories (including Amazon Prime’s most popular original film worldwide in 2023, My Fault).

Why short stories suit film On these platforms, writers can test their skills by sharing their stories with a ready-made readership (in some cases, up to 20 million members). In some ways, these stories are audience-tested through the number of “upvotes” or “likes” or “shares” they receive.

So, the story may already have hype around it before being snapped up by a Hollywood producer. For producers, a short story is faster to read than a full screenplay. It also serves as a good indicator of how well a story will translate into a treatment: the summary of a film’s narrative prepared before investing in a full screenplay.

This makes economic sense too: buying the rights to a short story could be cheaper than investing in a full screenplay. But even with the backing of a big name, many short stories optioned for film will struggle to be made.

Projects that never make it to production are not unusual in film, where projects go through complex development and approval processes.

Jasper DeWitt’s Reddit story The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine, optioned by Ryan Reynolds in 2018, is one of many stories acquired this way yet to start production, along with Cote’s and Kliewer’s.

What is clear is that short stories are perfect material for film adaptation. A short story focuses on a single situation, turning point or crisis. This brevity makes it especially adaptable, while novels often need to be compressed for the screen.

Seen in this way, this trend is a new version of an old process. If there is a risk, it’s that writers may feel pressure to write for “likes” and the algorithm. It’s not the end of the short story, but another reminder that literary forms are shaped by the media systems they circulate in.

5 of the best short stories on film Some of cinema’s most memorable films began as short stories. Here are five of our favourites. 1. Rear Window (It Had to be Murder) It Had to Be Murder by Cornell Woolrich, first published in Dime Detective Magazine, provides the premise for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window.

The short story is about a man confined to his apartment, who suspects a neighbour has committed murder after he observes strange behaviour across the courtyard. Woolrich’s text is lean and restricted to the protagonist’s point of view, with clues gradually dropped in.

Hitchcock retains this restricted vantage point but elaborates it into a dense visual world. He turns the courtyard into a kind of stage where multiple narratives unfold. Adding a romantic subplot and the glamorous figure of Lisa (played by Grace Kelly) ramps up the intrigue.

Hitchcock also turned to a short story by Daphne Du Maurier as the inspiration for his 1963 thriller The Birds. Rear Window, based on a short story, added a romantic subplot for the screen. 2. The Shawshank Redemption (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption) Stephen King’s novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, was the inspiration for Frank Darabont’s 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.

The film largely follows the novella’s plot about the wrongful imprisonment of banker Andy Dufresne and his friendship with fellow inmate Red, while amplifying key motifs like institutionalisation, hope and the possibility of moral integrity under brutal conditions.

The adaptation gives more screen time to Andy’s quiet acts of resistance: building a library, playing opera over the loudspeakers. And it uses voice over to preserve aspects of Red’s narration, while exploiting the visual power of enclosed spaces and the climactic escape.

3. Jindabyne (So Much Water So Close to Home) Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home was adapted into Ray Lawrence’s 2006 Australian film Jindabyne. Carver’s original story presents a disturbing moral failure: four men discover a young woman’s body while on a fishing trip, but continue fishing before reporting the death.

The story is unsettling, focusing on the emotional aftermath within one marriage. Jindabyne relocates this premise to Australia’s rural New South Wales and expands the story’s ethical questions by making the discovered body that of an Aboriginal woman.

This change allows the film to explore broader questions of responsibility, silence, race, masculinity and national unease. Jindabyne relocates Raymond Carver’s short story to Australia, making the discovered body that of an Aboriginal woman.

IMDB 4. Brokeback Mountain Brokeback Mountain, by E. Annie Proulx, was originally published in The New Yorker and later adapted into a 2005 film by Ang Lee. Proulx’s original is spare and unsentimental, tracking the decades-long, intermittent relationship between ranch hands Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist.

Its tight third-person narrative summarises years in a few paragraphs.

The screenplay focuses on the Wyoming landscapes and recurring visual motifs (such as the main characters’ shirts hanging side by side in the wardrobe), demonstrating how a short story can be expanded into an emotionally and visually rich feature.

5. Burning (Barn Burning) Haruki Murakami’s Barn Burning is a disconcerting tale about a young man, an enigmatic woman and her new boyfriend who claims to burn barns as a hobby. The narrative is full of gaps and unresolved suggestions, typical of Murakami’s unique blend of the mundane and uncanny.

Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning relocates the story to South Korea. It introduces fiery class tension between the protagonist and the wealthy boyfriend, whose crimes extend beyond barn burning.

As an adaptation, it shows how the short story can be culturally and politically re-situated, without losing its original sense of mystery and emotional uncertainty.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/reddit-short-stories-are-popular-in-hollywood-joining-a-long-trend-here-are-5-of-the-best-short-stories-on-film/

Dean Purcell/Getty Images As New Zealand’s budget day looms closer, the government has already revealed one important figure – NZ$2.1 billion – that offers an insight into its approach to spending this year. That’s the government’s tight operating allowance – or the new money available for ongoing spending.

And that’s already been trimmed back from $2.4 billion since its budget strategy was announced in December. The $300 million cut is small relative to total operating expenses, but still significant. Operating spending funds ongoing commitments, such as public servants’ salaries, benefits and superannuation payments.

It also covers the costs of keeping services running: think medicines for hospitals, or electricity for school classrooms. Operating allowances, meanwhile, determine how much room the government has for new policies and for meeting cost pressures in these areas.

Ahead of Thursday’s budget, those pressures are already intensifying. The outlook now points to higher near-term inflation than was anticipated when the budget strategy was released five months ago, driven in part by rising oil prices following the US-Iran conflict.

If costs rise faster than operating funding, the government faces increasingly difficult choices over what it can continue to fund, expand or cut back. The risks behind the cuts We also now know a little about what some of those choices will look like.

Last week, it was announced government agencies’ operating budgets will be cut by 2% in the coming year, followed by a further 5% in each of the following two years. The government’s wider reform programme also includes reducing core public service employment to no more than 55,000 full-time equivalent roles by July 2029.

The savings will be redirected to health, education, building infrastructure, defence and police. All of these are worthy causes for extra funding, and in principle, there is nothing wrong with asking whether existing spending delivers value and reallocating spending to where it makes the greatest impact.

But, as always, the devil is in the detail – and this is not yet known. It matters where in health, education or policing the extra money goes. It also matters which public service roles are cut, because so-called “back-office functions” can still be essential to delivering frontline services.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has suggested greater use of artificial intelligence could help the public service do more with less. But some international studies have found higher AI adoption has yet to translate into higher productivity.

If AI does not deliver substantial productivity gains in the public sector, restraint in government spending will ultimately show up somewhere: in deferred maintenance, scaled-back programmes or lower service levels. Inflation, resilience and the politics of spending Rising operating costs are not the only impact that inflation has on the government’s books.

In some ways, it can help. Higher prices and wages can lift tax revenue through the goods and services tax (GST), income tax and company tax receipts. Inflation can also inflate nominal gross domestic product – the dollar value of economic activity – which in turn can make government debt appear smaller relative to the size of the economy.

In other ways, however, inflation adds pressure. Interest costs can rise as government debt is refinanced at higher rates, while benefit payments and other spending tied to inflation or wages also increase. Meanwhile, the government has announced it is increasing capital spending, which funds long-lived assets such as roads, hospitals, schools, defence equipment and infrastructure.

This would appear a sensible move, given that New Zealand faces an infrastructure deficit in many areas. Addressing it could help bring a much-needed improvement in productivity. There is also the wider question of New Zealand’s economic resilience.

Independent economist and commentator David Skilling has argued global supply chains are being rewired. Where efficiency and just-in-time delivery once took priority for nations, a more unstable geopolitical environment is now shifting the focus toward resilience and security.

In this context, government capital investment can help address vulnerabilities in New Zealand’s critical supply chains – even if its small-economy status means it will always remain dependent on overseas trade. At the same time, capital spending can also come with political and economic risks.

For instance, projects might be chosen more for their political appeal than for whether they genuinely strengthen productivity or supply chain resilience. Budget 2026 will therefore represent a test of priorities. Reprioritisation, allocations from the smaller operating allowance and new capital spending should all face the same question: where will public money produce the greatest value?

The answer should be based on economic and strategic need, rather than political visibility or electoral advantage.

Michael Ryan 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/in-a-tight-nz-budget-will-money-go-where-its-needed-most-or-to-political-priorities/

Mali and Nigeria, two of the countries in the Sahel region of west Africa, are separated by approximately 1,000 kilometres, with the Niger Republic between them. They differ in population size and government, but they face some of the same threats.

Mali has a population of about 22.4 million, while Nigeria has about 223.8 million. While Nigeria has been a democracy since 1999, Mali has had a military government since 2020. The two are similar in that they are threatened by multiple armed groups operating in their territories.

Three armed groups – Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP/ISGS), Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) – are shaping the conflict in Mali. This reached a new high in April 2026 when Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin and the Azawad Liberation Front carried out coordinated attacks across Mali.

The northern cities of Kidal and Mopti, as well as military bases in Sevare and Gao, were captured. The heart of Bamako, the capital city of Mali, was also struck, leading to the death of the defence minister, Sadio Camara.

Nigeria too has been threatened by jihadist insurgence and banditry in the north as well as secessionists and militancy in the south. Jama’at Ahl al-Sunna li al-Da’wa wa al-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) are active in the north.

Nigeria lost two brigadier generals fighting the insurgents in the north-east between November 2025 and April 2026. The weakness of the state plays a significant role in the vulnerability of both countries to attacks. As a scholar who has followed the unfolding events in the Sahel, I draw lessons for Nigeria from the April attacks in Mali.

Those lessons include the possibility of alignment among armed groups, the danger of the jihadists advancing to other Sahelian countries, the audacity of the groups, and the possibility that gains of JNIM in Mali could incite rival groups in Nigeria.

Key lessons for Nigeria The first lesson concerns armed groups teaming up to fight the state. The April attackers were a combined force of FLA and JNIM. These groups share a common aim: securing enclaves within Mali.

They joined efforts to carry out the attacks, each focusing on the areas they wished to control. In the same vein, Nigeria has battled many armed groups. Competition, rather than cooperation, has defined the relationship between these groups, especially in northern Nigeria.

This has always been to the advantage of the Nigerian state. The erstwhile charismatic leader of terror group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, survived for more than a decade but died during clashes between his group, JAS and ISWAP members.

This led to a decline in Boko Haram’s activities, although they are now gradually resurging. However, there is evidence of an unfolding alliance between terrorists in the north-east and bandits in the north-central and north-west areas of Nigeria.

Such alliance have often been in terms of tactical cooperation as well as exchange of members and arms.

There is also a possibility of closing ranks and joining forces between Boko Haram and ISWAP, especially if leaders who favour working together with ISWAP take over Boko Haram from Bakura Doro, the current leader of JAS, after the death of Abukakar Shekau.

If this happens, it may escalate terrorist activities that may be difficult for Nigeria to manage. The second lesson is that the audacity of the JNIM/FLA coalition and the results achieved can motivate related groups to act in other parts of the Sahel.

The al-Qaeda-linked and ISIS-linked terrorist groups have been involved in a competition for control of the Sahel for a long period. This comes in the form of direct armed attacks against each other, competition over territory and recruiting, and attempting to demonstrate the ability to cause more violence than the other.

This has led to an increase in jihadist attacks. JNIM’s takeover of some cities in Mali may encourage its ISIS-affiliated rivals in the Greater Sahara and Lake Chad to also increase their violence. In the Lake Chad Region, ISWAP has intensified attacks against military formations while also building parallel states in many areas of the Lake Chad basin, with Nigeria being the most affected.

Lastly, with the capture of Kidal and attacks near Bamako, JNIM may be close to capturing Mali. If Mali falls, it could be a training ground for terrorists in the Sahel. This fear was the reason Nigeria mobilised its forces for a peacekeeping mission in Mali in 2012.

And if Mali falls, Burkina Faso and Niger will be threatened. The threat to Niger is a significant problem because it is a buffer zone for Nigeria. Meanwhile Nigeria is a major target of the jihadist insurgents in their move to extend towards coastal west Africa.

What should Nigeria do? Mali’s experience could turn the lens on Nigeria. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have opted out of the Economic Community of West African States, Ecowas. But Nigeria and other countries in the region should not abandon the breakaway states at this stage.

Necessary regional support should be galvanised and Nigeria can still play a leading role in this. In my view, Nigeria also needs to rejig its counter-terrorism to be more responsive.

Rather than its current defensive posture, which gives jihadists the opportunity to plan, Nigeria ought to adopt sophisticated and strategic offensive counter-terrorism that takes the war to the jihadists.

Saheed Babajide Owonikoko 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/malis-security-crisis-holds-warnings-for-nigeria-heres-why/

When conflicts break out, most people around the world rely on international media to understand what is happening. These reports do more than inform. They shape how crises are interpreted, which actors are seen as responsible and where global attention is directed.

In complex situations, what is left out can matter as much as what is included. Ethiopia is a clear example of this problem. Since 2020, the country has experienced multiple, overlapping conflicts. The war in Tigray (2020-2022) has been one of the most widely reported, drawing sustained global attention because of its scale and humanitarian impact.

But at the same time, violence has broken out and continues in Ethiopia’s Amhara and Oromia regions, causing severe consequences for civilians and deepening regional instability. Our research set out to understand how these conflicts, which targeted ethnic groups, have been reported by the international media, and how the media understand the country’s current complex crises.

As a team of media scholars, we analysed news coverage from four major global outlets – BBC from Britain, CNN from the US, Al-Jazeera from Qatar, and CGTN from China – over a five-year period from January 2020 to March 2025.

We collected 1,412 stories from the four outlets on Ethiopia’s complex conflict. To further assess how they frame the conflict and the nature of their reporting, 60 stories were systematically selected from each media outlet, yielding a total sample of 240 conflict-related articles.

This allowed us to track patterns in attention, framing and sourcing. We found that the coverage tended to present Ethiopia’s crisis through a narrow lens, centred largely on one conflict: the Tigray war. More than three-quarters (77.2%) of all the stories we analysed focused on the conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Conflicts in Amhara (at 2.7%) and Oromia (at 0.4%) appeared only marginally in coverage. This risks producing a partial understanding of a much more complex reality. Ethiopia’s conflicts are not easily reduced to a single narrative.

They involve multiple actors, regions and historical trajectories. Capturing this complexity is challenging, but it is essential. When global media coverage is too narrow, it risks shaping responses that address only part of the problem.

Based on our findings, we recommend that there needs to be a more balanced approach to reporting. Secondly, a greater emphasis must be placed on context, which would include explanations of the historical and political background of conflicts.

A more comprehensive approach would not only improve understanding. It would also contribute to more informed and balanced international engagement with one of the most important and complex regions in Africa today. This matters because Ethiopia is a key player in the Horn of Africa.

Instability here has implications for regional security and international diplomacy. Our findings Our analysis revealed three major trends in the media coverage of conflict in Ethiopia. The first was that the Tigray conflict received significantly more media attention than other conflicts in the country.

The war, which began in November 2020 between Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, drew widespread international attention because of its scale. The conflict was marked by mass atrocities, civilian displacement and famine conditions.

An estimated 800,000 civilians were killed. Although violence persists across several regions – particularly Amhara and Oromia – the war in Tigray dominated reporting, accounting for 77.2% of total news coverage. This means conflicts were not subjected to the same level of scrutiny or narrative.

Humanitarian suffering in Amhara and Oromia was far less visible in our dataset. This does not mean it was absent on the ground. Rather, it suggests that some forms of suffering were more likely to be reported than others.

Second was a lack of context. We identified what we term “episodic reporting”. Around two-thirds of the stories we analysed focused on immediate events – including military clashes, political statements or humanitarian emergencies – without providing much background or context.

This meant that complex political dynamics were often reduced to simplified narratives. Long-standing tensions related to governance, federalism, identity and power were rarely explored in detail. Instead, the focus remained on visible crises and urgent developments.

Read more: Ethiopia’s national dialogue was meant to heal the nation, but divisions are deepening Third, that coverage was predominantly negative towards the Ethiopian government. Sources critical of the government were used far more frequently than those offering alternative perspectives.

While critical reporting is an essential part of journalism, the imbalance in sourcing suggests that some voices were amplified more than others. The implications This imbalance in the reporting has broader implications. Media coverage plays a significant role in shaping international agendas.

Media reports could assist policymakers, humanitarian organisations and international institutions to assess crises and determine priorities. In this regard, the Tigray war alone was discussed over 10 times at the UN Security Council. In this sense, visibility can translate into political and humanitarian action.

Conversely, conflicts that receive limited coverage may not attract the same level of concern. What needs to be done Improving this situation requires a number of steps. Firstly, a more balanced approach to reporting is needed.

International media need to widen their scope and pay closer attention to underreported conflicts. This does not mean reducing coverage of major crises, but rather ensuring that other significant developments are not overlooked. Secondly, context needs to be given.

Explaining the historical and political background of conflicts can help audiences understand not just what is happening, but why. Without this context, reporting risks reinforcing simplified narratives that do not capture the full picture. Thirdly, audiences themselves play a role.

Recognising that media coverage is selective can encourage more critical engagement with news.

Seeking out multiple sources and perspectives can help build a more nuanced understanding of complex situations.

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the DDMAC project at Oslomet University.

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the DDMAC project at Oslomet University.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/global-media-networks-simplify-ethiopias-conflicts-insights-from-5-years-of-data/

It is forgivable to think that an oil shock mainly hurts at the petrol pump. After all, that is where households feel it first.

But when my colleagues and I at the Bureau for Economic Research started digging through South Africa’s fuel data, a different story emerged – one that says as much about the country’s infrastructure failures as it does about global geopolitics.

As we began modelling the likely impact on the South African economy, it quickly became clear that diesel would inflict even more pain on the economy than petrol. (Our insights are based on ongoing analysis that has not yet been published.) There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, diesel underpins the South African economy’s cost structure. It powers the systems that keep the economy functioning: freight transport, food distribution, mining operations, agricultural machinery, generators and large parts of the country’s logistics network.

Higher diesel prices therefore raise the cost of transporting goods, distributing food, operating mines and running backup generators during electricity disruptions. This means the dominant economic impact of the Gulf war on South Africa is not simply that households are paying more at the pump.

The impact is also being felt through higher logistics, freight and operating costs as they feed through supply chains into broader inflation. Secondly, the price of diesel has spiked markedly more than the price for petrol.

Relative to the first quarter of 2026, diesel prices in the second quarter increased by almost 60%, compared with about 25% for petrol.

Our calculations suggest that higher fuel prices could add roughly R45 billion (US$2.7billion) – just over 2% of quarterly GDP spend – in additional fuel costs to the South African economy in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Nearly 70% of that additional cost burden would come from diesel rather than petrol. The main conclusion we draw from our insights is that South Africa needs to fix its fundamentals and shore up buffers so that it is better placed to withstand external shocks when they strike.

South Africa’s shift in fuel consumption To understand why diesel matters so much today, it is important to recognise how fuel consumption has changed. Over the past two decades, diesel consumption has steadily overtaken petrol consumption in the South African economy.

In 2005, petrol accounted for close to half of total fuel consumption, while diesel accounted for roughly a third (see figure below). Today, diesel accounts for almost half of all fuel consumed nationally, while petrol’s share has declined steadily.

Part of the explanation is relatively benign. Petrol vehicles have become significantly more fuel-efficient over time, allowing households to travel further on less fuel. Weak household income growth, higher fuel prices and expensive vehicle financing have also constrained discretionary driving and slowed petrol demand growth.

Diesel, however, is different. Diesel is primarily an operational input into the economy rather than a form of discretionary consumption. As such, its increased use reflects deeper structural changes in the South African economy: More freight has shifted to roads and trucks as the state-owned transport monopoly Transnet’s rail capacity has deteriorated.

These freight trucks run on diesel. Use of diesel accelerated sharply during the severe power-cut years between 2022 and 2024. This was particularly evident in businesses in the mining, manufacturing and agricultural sectors as well as hospitals, shopping centres and data centres.

All have increasingly come to rely on diesel generators to keep operating. Read more: Does South Africa have a future without power cuts? Ramaphosa intervenes, but the drama isn’t over During the worst periods of load-shedding in 2023, Eskom relied heavily on diesel-fired open-cycle gas turbines to help keep the lights on when the coal fleet failed.

At times, Eskom’s diesel usage was estimated to account for 20%-30% of national diesel demand. Fortunately, that dependence has eased considerably as electricity supply stabilised and diesel-fired open-cycle gas turbines usage declined. Still, diesel has quietly become South Africa’s shadow infrastructure system – the fuel that has compensated for failures elsewhere in the economy, from electricity generation to freight transport.

This means South Africa’s vulnerability to oil shocks cannot be easily remedied just by getting consumers to ditch their fossil fuel-guzzling SUVs in favour of electric vehicles. Vulnerability is embedded in the diesel-intensive systems that move goods, power operations, and keep the economy running.

The impact South Africa has always been vulnerable to oil shocks because it imports virtually all of its crude oil. But the nature of that vulnerability has changed. As domestic refining capacity has declined as several domestic refineries closed between 2020 and 2023, fuel (rather than crude) imports have increased.

This means South Africa has become exposed not only to higher oil prices, but also to disruptions in global fuel supply chains themselves. This creates the risk that external and domestic shocks will begin to reinforce one another.

A global fuel disruption on its own is painful but manageable. But fuel stress becomes considerably more destabilising. The impact is likely to be felt in a number of ways. Firstly, in the country’s agricultural sector.

South Africa is unlikely to face an immediate food supply crisis as domestic agricultural production conditions remain relatively favourable. Nor is there an immediate risk of food inflation as consumer food inflation began moderating earlier this year, supported by ample supplies of grains, fruits and vegetables.

Nevertheless, the sector will be affected. Fuel accounts for a substantial share of food distribution costs in South Africa’s highly road-dependent transport system. Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the Agriculture Business Chamber of South Africa, notes that roughly 80% of South African grain is transported by road.

Higher diesel prices, therefore, feed directly into the cost of moving food across the country. Farming is also highly diesel intensive. In addition, fertiliser prices have spiked as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

These price hikes will squeeze margins across farming and food distribution long before they fully appear in supermarket prices. Farmers may also lose important export markets. The Gulf states, together with Iraq and Iran, are important destinations for South African fruit and meat exports, much of which moves through shipping routes linked to the Strait of Hormuz.

The second major impact will be on the government’s finances. In April 2026, the government introduced temporary fuel levy relief of R3 per litre (or $0.18/litre), before extending and expanding the support specifically to diesel.

By May, diesel levy relief had effectively increased to R3.93 per litre ($0.24/litre), temporarily reducing the general fuel levy on diesel to zero. The total relief provided between April and June is expected to cost the fiscus roughly R17.2 billion in forgone tax revenue.

Since this exceeds the roughly R10 billion contingency reserve available in the current budget, the fiscal cost will need to be absorbed either through stronger-than-expected revenue or expenditure adjustments elsewhere. The third area of impact is inflation.

The cost of fuel shapes inflation expectations because it is highly visible and purchased frequently. Even temporary fuel spikes therefore risk de-anchoring inflation expectations. This is particularly important in the South African economy, where the Reserve Bank has spent several years cementing its credibility to aid the move to a lower inflation target.

This depends on inflation expectations continuing to fall towards 3%. This helps explain why policymakers are concerned not only about fuel prices themselves, but also about the possibility that higher fuel costs may become embedded in broader pricing behaviour and wage expectations.

The bigger lesson: resilience matters South Africa did not consciously choose to become more diesel dependent. It happened gradually, one workaround at a time. It spent years building diesel into its coping mechanisms. When rail failed, the country used trucks.

When electricity failed, it used generators and open cycle gas turbines. Those adaptations kept the economy moving, but they also quietly increased South Africa’s exposure to global fuel shocks. The lesson from the current crisis is, therefore, not simply that oil prices are volatile.

It is that resilience matters – just not the kind of home-grown resilience which depends on costly workarounds just to keep the lights on and the goods moving.

Lisette IJssel de Schepper 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/iran-war-is-exposing-south-africas-dependency-on-diesel-what-went-wrong/

Pakistan has made measurable progress in reducing the gender gap in voter registration. More women are now listed on electoral rolls than ever before. Yet this administrative success masks a troubling democratic reality: while the number of registered women voters increased significantly before the 2024 general elections, overall voter turnout declined from 52.1 per cent in 2018 to 47.6 per cent in 2024.

The contradiction raises an important democratic question: why are more women registering to vote while fewer citizens, including many women, are turning out on election day? According to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), Pakistan’s electoral rolls for the 2024 general elections included approximately 128.6 million registered voters.

Of these, around 69.3 million were men and 59.3 million were women. In comparison, about 105.9 million voters registered for the 2018 general elections, including nearly 46.7 million women voters. This means that between 2018 and 2024, the number of registered women voters increased by more than 12 million.

Turnout drops These figures reflect substantial administrative progress.

Over the past several years, the ECP and the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) intensified efforts to reduce Pakistan’s gender gap in voter registration through mobile registration campaigns, drives to provide them with national identity cards and awareness initiatives targeting women, particularly in rural and under-served areas.

Historically, many Pakistani women were excluded from electoral rolls simply because they lacked ID. Nonetheless, voter registration and voter participation are not the same thing. While millions more women were added to electoral rolls, Pakistan experienced a notable decline in turnout during the 2024 elections as national turnout dropped significantly compared to 2018.

The decline suggests that formal inclusion through registration did not automatically translate into active electoral participation. Why? The explanation lies in the difference between legal access and political agency. Social barriers Voting is not merely an administrative act.

It’s also shaped by social norms, family structures, economic conditions and political trust. In Pakistan, many women continue to face structural barriers that limit their ability to cast ballots even after they become registered voters.

One major factor is patriarchal gate-keeping. In many parts of Pakistan, women’s mobility and public participation remain influenced by male family members or local community dynamics. Research on electoral participation in Pakistan has consistently shown that household decision-making strongly affects women’s turnout.

In some communities, women require permission, accompaniment or logistical support from male relatives to travel to polling stations. Even where women are officially registered, these social barriers can prevent them from voting. The problem is particularly acute in rural and conservative regions, where informal restrictions on women’s political participation sometimes persist despite legal protections.

In previous elections, reports emerged from certain constituencies that local agreements among political officials discouraged or blocked women from voting altogether. Other factors affecting turnout Pakistan’s electoral laws already recognize that women’s exclusion from voting is a serious democratic problem.

Under provisions of the 2017 Elections Act, the ECP has the authority to declare polling or even an entire election in a constituency void if women are prevented from voting. The ECP exercised this authority following the 2018 general elections, when it annulled the results in Shangla and North Waziristan due to female voter turnout falling below the legal threshold and ordered fresh polls.

The political environment surrounding the 2024 elections also contributed to declining turnout. Pakistan entered the election period amid economic instability, inflation, political polarization and institutional tensions. Such conditions often reduce public confidence in electoral politics. When voters feel disillusioned or uncertain about whether elections will produce meaningful change, participation tends to decline.

This creates an important democratic paradox. Pakistan has become more successful at documenting women as citizens, but less effective at ensuring their meaningful political participation. The distinction matters because democracy cannot be measured solely by the size of electoral rolls.

Expanding voter registration is an important achievement, but democratic inclusion requires more than adding names to a database. Overcoming entrenched inequality A woman may possess an identity card, appear on electoral rolls and still face obstacles on election day.

She may lack transportation to polling stations. She may face family pressure discouraging political participation. She may not trust political institutions or feel represented by existing political parties. Registration gives formal access to democracy; turnout reflects whether citizens are actually empowered to participate in it.

Pakistan’s experience offers a broader lesson for democracies worldwide. Administrative reforms can improve electoral inclusion, but they cannot alone overcome entrenched social inequalities. The country’s next democratic challenge is therefore not only registering more women voters, but ensuring that women are able — and motivated — to cast ballots.

This requires stronger voter education campaigns, safer polling environments, transportation support, greater political outreach to women and stricter enforcement against practices that suppress women’s participation.

Until the gap between registration and turnout is addressed, the promise of equal democratic representation will remain only partially fulfilled.

Adnan Skhawat Ali is PhD Scholar at Meiji University and research linkage student at Queens University, Canada.

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/pakistans-voter-turnout-decline-why-more-women-registered-but-fewer-cast-ballots-in-2024/

The 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition was an unprecedented disaster in the history of British polar exploration, with the loss of all 129 officers and crew and the discovery ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The catastrophe has been the subject of novels, films and television series, as well as active research across several disciplines.

The British government offered a £20,000 reward for information on the missing Franklin Expedition. (Libraries and Archives Canada) In recent years, remarkable advances have been made, most notably the discoveries of the wrecks of both ships in astonishing states of preservation, which offer great potential for a new understanding of the expedition’s fate.

This same period has also seen major advances in the study of the expedition’s human legacy. On a cold day in late April 1848, having deserted Erebus and Terror a few days earlier, the sailors encamped near Victory Point on northwest King William Island.

Captain Francis Crozier penned the words “and start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River” in the margin of the most important written record of the 1845 Franklin expedition ever found. Their situation was bleak.

The ships had been trapped for 19 months in the ice of Victoria Strait, nearly 30 kilometres from the shore of King William Island.

Nine officers, including the expedition’s leader, John Franklin, and 15 sailors had died, food supplies had declined both in quantity and nutritional value, and many of the 105 survivors were undoubtedly suffering from declining physical and mental health.

The decision to attempt a long and dangerous escape, dragging heavily loaded sleds south over hundreds of kilometres of ice and land, proved fatal. The men stepped onto a path that would lead to their own deaths and into obscurity.

Identifying skeletal remains Douglas Stenton explains the research team’s work identifying the missing sailors. (CBC) The names of the officers and crew of the Franklin expedition are well-known, but their families — like their modern descendants — did not know if distressing reports of scattered bodies of sailors along the route of the retreat and grisly rumours of cannibalism described the fate of their loved ones.

Over the past decade, by combining archaeology, biological anthropology, genetics and genealogy, colleagues and I from the University of Waterloo, Trent University and Lakehead University, working in collaboration with genealogists, have revealed the identities of six of these men.

We’ve also shed new light on events that occurred more than 170 years ago during the ill-fated expedition’s final stages. Our work involved creating two DNA data sets. One is archeological and comprises mitochondrial (maternal) and Y-chromosome (paternal) DNA extracted from teeth and bones found at sites where members of the Franklin expedition perished.

The second consists of DNA donated by direct maternal or paternal descendants of Franklin expedition sailors who have been identified through genealogical research. We analyzed 50 tooth and bone samples from 10 Franklin archaeological sites on King William Island and obtained DNA from descendants of 33 members of the expedition.

These data were compared in a search for matching DNA profiles that would reveal a sailor’s identity.

Read more: DNA analysis reveals the identity of a member of the doomed Franklin Arctic expedition Connecting past and present James Fitzjames commanded the expedition’s flagship, HMS Erebus. (Scott Polar Research Institute/University of Cambridge) We made the first identification in 2019 through a match with DNA from the great-great-great grandson of Warrant Officer (Engineer) John Gregory from HMS Erebus.

Five years later, in 2024, Capt. James Fitzjames, also of HMS Erebus, was identified through a match with a distant paternal cousin. Fitzjames’ DNA was extracted from a tooth from a mandible bearing several cut marks, revealing that his body had been cannibalized.

Fitzjames is not the only member of the Franklin expedition whose body suffered that fate, but he is the only one whose identity is known. In 2025, we added four more names to the list of identified sailors through matches with second and third great-grandchildren of members of the sailors’ families.

Three of the sailors served on HMS Erebus: Subordinate Officers’ Steward John Bridgens, Able Seaman William Orren and Boy 1st Class David Young. Bridgens died in the same place as Gregory, and his identification means that two of the three men known to have died at that location have now been identified.

A stocking marked “W. Orren,” one of only two labelled articles of clothing found at the Victory Point camp, is a poignant reminder of Orren’s presence there. He later set out on the southward journey on which he would die after walking 65 kilometres.

Young’s identification also has an added element — a fictionalized version of him was the central character in John Wilson’s 1997 novel Across Frozen Seas, which presents the story of the Franklin expedition for a younger audience.

Read more: Inuit folklore kept alive story of missing Franklin expedition to north-west passage HMS Terror The skeleton of Harry Peglar from HMS Terror was excavated in 1973 by the 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment. (The Royal Canadian Regiment Museum Archives) The fourth identification in 2025, and the only sailor identified to date from HMS Terror, is Henry Peter “Harry” Peglar.

He joined HMS Terror in 1845 as a Petty Officer and Captain of the Foretop. Peglar died near Gladman Point wearing the uniform and presumably working as a steward or officer’s servant, probably the result of having been demoted in rank due to misconduct.

His positive identification solved a 167-year-old debate surrounding contradictory evidence found with his skeleton in 1859. Peglar joined HMS Terror in 1845 as a petty officer and Captain of the Foretop (a senior sailor). His seaman’s certificate was among the papers in a pocketbook found with the body, which pointed directly to the remains being Peglar.

However, the dead sailor was dressed as a steward or officer’s servant, a rank or rating that Peglar had never previously held. Because of the clothing, a narrative emerged that the dead sailor was not Peglar, but a friend who was a steward on the Terror, who was carrying Peglar’s papers back to his family.

Our DNA analysis has proved that theory to be incorrect. So far, we have identified a senior officer, warrant officer, petty officer, able seaman, steward and boy. Five of these men died within two kilometres of each other, and all five served on HMS Erebus.

More data is needed, but these results raise the interesting question of whether the Erebus and Terror crews might have travelled separately by design or, due to unforeseen circumstances, became separated during the retreat. Our genetic research has opened a new chapter in the investigation of the Franklin expedition that allows people to connect with the story in a more personal way.

It is fitting that this chapter is being written with help from descendants of the men who never returned home.

Douglas Stenton has received funding from the Nunavut Department of Culture and Heritage.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/new-dna-analysis-identifies-more-members-of-the-ill-fated-franklin-expedition/

Damita Flynn/Los Angeles Times/Wikipedia, CC BY Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Errol Flynn. The Tasmanian born Hollywood actor was arguably our most famous export to the United States until Murdoch moved in to control much of its media.

Between 1934 and his final film in 1959, Flynn was one of the stars of the “golden age” of Hollywood, known for his swashbuckling roles in films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood.

There is already a considerable literature on Errol Flynn, including his own autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, but Patricia O’Brien has taken his life as a way of exploring the intertwined assumptions around race and sex that make Flynn a remarkable epitome of his time.

Errol Flynn: The true story of Australia’s Hollywood Icon – Patricia O’Brien (Allen & Unwin) Flynn died in 1959, after appearing in 57 films, listed in an appendix. He was subsequently portrayed on film by Guy Pearce, Jude Law and Kevin Kline.

His fame lives on in the expression “in like Flynn”, though the phrase was in use long before it became associated with him. There is even an Australian film of that name, about Flynn’s time in New Guinea, which has, deservedly, been largely forgotten.

When Errol Flynn died, he had appeared in 57 films, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Olivia de Havilland. Wikipedia Times have changed, and most of Flynn’s films now seem at best B-grade, replete with assumptions of white male privilege.

In the interest of research, I subjected myself to several of his lesser-known films, Gentleman Jim and The Adventures of Don Juan. Sadly, I remained impervious to his charm. Whether cast as a boxer in 19th-century San Francisco or a Casanova in 16th-century Spain, he seemed to be playing the same role: smooth, charming and the inevitable winner against impossible odds.

Bodies have changed over the past 80 years; once regarded as a perfect male, Flynn would hardly measure up against the gym-toned buffness of today’s Hollywood actors. During his career, Flynn was often described as Irish, but he grew up in Hobart, where he attended all the best schools, and was expelled by most.

His parents had a tumultuous marriage, and his mother soon moved to Sydney. Flynn followed, to attend Shore Grammar, from which he was also expelled. Do we need yet another biography? A wealth of unnecessary vulgarity?

Much of what O’Brien writes repeats the basic story Michael Freedland recounted in The Two Lives of Errol Flynn, though without the overwhelming emphasis on Flynn’s reputation as “a man’s man whose principal hobby was women”.

While Freedland revelled in sexual gossip, O’Brien approaches Flynn as emblematic of a larger culture than the Hollywood world. The year before his death Flynn hired a ghost writer, Earl Conrad, to help produce his own autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which had mixed reviews.

It is, as one might expect, self-serving but entertaining, in the way bad reality shows are when one is tired, stressed and willing to suspend judgement. In the conclusion to his autobiography, Flynn claimed: “few others alive in the present century have taken into their maw more of the world than I have”.

Contemporary readers might agree with Noel Coward’s judgment: “Such a wealth of unnecessary vulgarity”. O’Brien approaches Flynn’s life in her capacity as a Pacific historian, based both in Australia and the United States.

Her contribution is to situate Flynn within the racist culture of British imperialism, most notably in the discussion of his time as a young man in New Guinea. After World War I, the former German colony of New Guinea was added to Australia’s control of Papua and remained under Australian rule until Whitlam declared independence for the colony in 1975.

The 18-year-old Flynn was lured to New Guinea by the gold rush of 1927, and remained there for six years, seeking his fortune in mining and tobacco.

In ways that are rather unusual for the biography of a movie star, O’Brien dissects the appalling racism of Australian rule, which reinforced the sense of racial superiority Flynn had learnt from his father back in Tasmania.

Theodore Flynn, who was the first professor of biology in Tasmania, had strong views about the superiority of the white race and the undesirability of interracial sex, but his son’s sexual appetite meant he was soon taking advantage of his colonial privilege to bed local women.

From his teenage years, Flynn seems to have regarded any woman he found attractive as fair game. He continued to bed a large number of young women, despite his three unsuccessful marriages. O’Brien calls him “the greatest heartthrob of his time”, which ignores actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, neither of whom are acknowledged in this book.

But his reputation as a great lover was established from his first days in Hollywood, through three marriages, countless affairs and several accusations of rape. A sexual culture like Epstein O’Brien devotes a chapter to the major rape trial in Los Angeles in 1943, where the judge appears to have shown extraordinary sympathy to Flynn, who was eventually acquitted.

O’Brien is right to point to the ways Flynn represented a sexual culture we associate with Jeffrey Epstein today. There are echoes of Ernest Hemingway in Flynn’s life; he also spent time as a sporadic war correspondent in Spain during the Civil War, where he sympathised with the Republicans.

More interesting was his time in Cuba in 1959, where he spent five days alongside Fidel Castro. Cuban Rebel Girls was Flynn’s final film. IMDB His final film, Cuban Rebel Girls, is a mixture of support for Castro and heterosexual titillation.

This provided the basis of a novel by Boyd Anderson (Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls) that even my duties as a reviewer could not persuade me to pursue.

Most of us will share a dislike of the racism and sexism central to Flynn’s life and career – but at times O’Brien’s judgements grate, as when she refers to Nabokov’s Lolita as “a tawdry tale of abuse and ‘perversion’”.

Claims of a liaison with Tyrone Powell – and a rebuff from David Niven – are dismissed by O’Brien as “preposterous”. Without accepting the gossip relayed in Charles Higham’s Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, I would have liked more willingness to explore the persistent rumours of Flynn’s possible bisexual side.

Occasionally, O’Brien lapses into the sort of exaggeration common to movie star biographies, as when she writes: “he was about to conquer the vast land that lay ahead of him in ways no man had done before”. (Maybe she intended irony?) But Errol Flynn is compulsive reading – even if few of his films deserve re-screening.

Dennis Altman 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/24/errol-flynns-biographer-calls-him-the-greatest-heartthrob-of-his-time-but-racist-and-a-rapist-too/

Camden, New Jersey, has seen a dramatic drop in homicides over the past 15 years. peeterv/iStock via Getty Images Plus In 2025, Camden, New Jersey – a city of about 72,000 residents that sits across the Delaware River from Philadelphia – experienced its first homicide-free summer in nearly 50 years.

The city ended the year with 12 homicides – a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a per capita rate 18 times the national average at the time. I’m a professor of criminal justice who wrote a book on police reform efforts in Camden over the last 15 years.

The stunning turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly formed Camden County Police Department, which was established in 2013 and replaced the Camden City Police Department, to be hailed as a model of reform.

In 2015, then-President Obama visited the city to highlight the progress made. Positive national and international attention on police reform in Camden continued in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. This attention stemmed from the Minneapolis city council’s unanimous decision to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department and start anew – much as Camden had done seven years earlier.

Yet one topic that I believe such discussions and commentary often overlook is the role that community and activist groups, as well as local media, played in better policing by the Camden County Police Department.

County takeover of city police department Under-policing came to define the final years of the Camden City Police Department, or CPD. Police presence in the community was largely absent. In contrast, the Camden County Police Department, or CCPD, began its new mandate with an aggressive, broken-windows style of policing that included targeting low levels of disorder and quality-of-life offenses, like loitering.

Residents were concerned about this new aggressive stance. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, researchers and local media used New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act to collect measures of the CCPD’s activity.

This data pointed to a troubling rise in officer-initiated vehicle and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of force, and citizen complaints of excessive force through 2014 and 2015. CCPD officers in 2014 made 60,352 total stops, including 16,742 of people on foot.

The per capita rate of pedestrian stops exceeded the rates in both New York City and Philadelphia during those cities’ peak stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, before stop-and-frisk tactics spurred court-ordered reforms. Beyond the stops, CCPD officers issued more than 6,000 citations from May 1, 2013, when the new department launched, through the end of the year.

They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. During its first year or so, the CCPD’s total number of cases in municipal court increased by nearly 30% relative to the year prior. Similarly, the number of tickets issued for minor infractions – such as riding a bicycle without a bell or a light, and disorderly conduct – rose steeply.

For example, the number of citations for having tinted car windows more than tripled, while citations for not having proper car lights or reflectors more than quadrupled. A Camden County Police Department officer watches demonstrators take part in a Black Lives Matter protest march in Camden, New Jersey, on June 13, 2020.

Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images Backlash to broken-windows policing Citizen complaints against CCPD alleging excessive use of force increased from 35 in 2013 to 65 in 2014. Organizations like the Camden County chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up attention to these figures by issuing announcements and press briefings.

On the same day in May 2015 that President Obama heralded the CCPD, the ACLU-NJ issued a scathing rebuke to the President’s message.

It read, in part: “Before we hold Camden up as a model of community policing, we must address the troubling indicators that point to Camden’s use of practices that appear to take a page from a broken windows approach to policing.” Former President Barack Obama tours the Real-Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Center at the Camden County Police Department headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, on May 18, 2015.

Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images Mobilized residents and groups, including clergy members, made it clear that they did not appreciate this level and type of aggressive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Star-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the coverage of Camden’s heavy-handed tactics.

What followed was a complete change in behavior among the CCPD from an activity, training and policy perspective. The numbers and rates of police stops declined. CCPD officers began issuing more warnings compared to tickets, to the point that “warnings over summonses” became an unofficial slogan of the department.

The top brass at CCPD sought out and implemented two types of de-escalation training, starting in the spring of 2015, for all officers. The CCPD also started to explore a complete overhaul of the agency’s use of force policy.

It eventually adopted a more restrictive policy that emphasized de-escalation and the sanctity of life, while prohibiting tactics like chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. The CCPD’s innovative policy even inspired the New Jersey Attorney General to revamp its statewide policy years later.

As a result, complaints of use of force, in general, and of excessive force dropped from 43 in 2015 to 28 in 2016, and declined to 16 in 2017 and just three in 2018. Such complaints have usually been in the single digits each year since.

The CCPD deserves credit for course-correcting. But I believe it’s important to remember where that impetus came from: community and activist groups, as well as local media attention. Many fewer murders, but persistent challenges Camden has undoubtedly made progress.

The city’s homicide rate in 2025 was four times the national average – a marked change from 18 times the national average in 2012. Homicides across the country have also declined in recent years. Yet, problems persist. Camden is still a perennial contender for the most violent city in New Jersey.

Despite a .6 billion economic package from the state to the city during the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the form of tax subsidies to encourage businesses to either stay in or relocate to Camden, almost every census tract is among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in the state.

Most companies that receive tax breaks do not employ a meaningful number of Camden residents. The city is racially segregated from the rest of Camden County and the broader South Jersey region. In my opinion, Camden, like most other cities, relies too much on the police, giving them a monopoly on public safety.

I believe both the city and the CCPD should take a cue from places like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to find innovative ways to collaborate and engage more with community groups, business associations and other non-police entities.

Together they can co-produce public safety and take a more holistic approach to reducing crime, violence and disorder.

John A. Shjarback 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/how-community-groups-activists-and-local-media-turned-camden-into-a-model-of-police-reform/

During the Hajj pilgrimage, Muslims go around the cube-like sacred structure, the Kaaba, which is covered with a black cloth, the kiswah. MASTER/Moment via Getty Images As Muslims gather for the annual pilgrimage of Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, they will circle around the “Kaaba,” a black cube draped in gold-embroidered cloth.

A ceremonial textile – known as the “kiswah” – covers the Kaaba, around which Muslims will walk seven times in a ritual known as “tawāf.” It is the central act of the annual pilgrimage.

The Kaaba itself is a roughly cubic gray granite structure about 43 feet tall, which Muslims believe was established by the Prophet Abraham – Ibrahim in Arabic – and his son Ishmael as a place of monotheistic worship in antiquity.

The Kaaba is empty inside, with no altar, idol or relic on display. Yet, it is the geographical and spiritual center of the Muslim world. Muslims across the globe turn toward the Kaaba during their five daily prayers.

The kiswah is what they actually see when they get there. As a scholar of Islam, I study how spiritual objects carry meaning across generations. For all Muslims, the black cloth covering the Kaaba is deeply sacred as it touches Islam’s most sacred site and is believed by many to perform miracles simply through a touch.

The history of the kiswah The earliest documented covering, recorded in ninth-century Arabic chronicles, is attributed to a Yemeni king named As’ad Abū Karib who reigned around 400 C.E. He is said to have draped the shrine in striped red wool.

For centuries afterward, successive coverings were laid one on top of another. As a result, by the eighth century, the accumulated weight threatened to collapse the structure. Al-Mahdi, an Abbasid caliph, the dynasty which governed from Persia to Spain between the eighth and 13th centuries, performed the pilgrimage in 777 C.E.

He ordered everything stripped down and replaced annually with a single cloth. This cycle has governed the practice for nearly 1300 years. The color wasn’t black, as it is today. For most of Islamic history the kiswah was white, red, green, yellow or striped.

White linen came from Coptic Christian weavers in the Nile Delta during the seventh century. The Mamluk sultans of Egypt, who ruled from 1250-1517, favored a saffron-yellow silk. The transition to black happened only around 1224 C.E. under an Islamic ruler in Baghdad.

The transformation has become so complete that most Muslims would be startled to learn it was ever otherwise. What is the cloth made of, and where does it come from? Today the kiswah is woven at a state factory called the King Abdulaziz Complex in Mecca, in a neighborhood called Umm al-Joud.

It uses about 1,500 pounds of high-grade silk dyed black. Roughly 260 pounds of gold-plated and pure silver thread are embroidered into Quranic calligraphy along a wide belt that runs two-thirds of the way up the cube.

A separate, even more ornate curtain covers the door. History of the kiswah and the story of it manufacture. The whole assemblage costs over US$5 million annually, paid from the Saudi treasury; the covering is replaced once a year on the first day of the Islamic calendar.

Previously, it was replaced during the Hajj. But the kiswah is not only an artifact. It is, and has always been, a political object. For roughly a thousand years, the right to manufacture and ship the cloth from Cairo to Mecca was symbolic of who claimed legitimate rule over the Muslim world.

Egyptian sultans sent it under the Mamluks; Ottoman sultans sent it from Cairo for four centuries beginning in 1517. The cloth traveled in a ceremonial caravan accompanied by a richly draped, empty palanquin called the “maḥmal” — a sort of mobile throne announcing the absent sultan’s protection of the holy cities.

In 1926, when the founder of modern Saudi Arabia conquered Mecca, his religious militia attacked the Egyptian caravan in a clash known as the Maḥmal Incident. Saudi Arabia’s founder had just taken control of Mecca with the help of a fiercely puritanical religious militia.

When Egyptian pilgrims arrived with the ceremonial caravan, accompanied by music and public celebration, the militia viewed the displays of reverence as contrary to “true Islam.” They attacked the Egyptians, killing dozens of people. The clash marked a deeper shift in the Muslim world’s center of gravity.

Religious authority and prestige, long anchored in cosmopolitan Cairo, were moving toward the Arabian heartland, where a rising Saudi order was reshaping Mecca through a far more austere version of Islam. The Saudi state has manufactured the kiswah itself ever since.

When the old kiswah comes down each year, it is cut into pieces by the Banū Shayba, a family that has carried out this duty for generations. The fragments are then distributed as gifts to heads of state, museums and ordinary pilgrims who happen to be present at the right moment.

In Muslim belief, whoever holds a fragment is holding something that connects the earthly world with the divine.

Iqbal Akhtar 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/the-sacred-cloth-at-the-center-of-the-hajj-pilgrimage/

Many online shoppers who order from independent small retailers have no idea who ships their goods. Odds are growing that it’s Amazon. AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes You did the right thing this morning. Instead of the one-click default to your laptop’s last opened tab, you opened Etsy and bought a ceramic mug from a maker you’d been following on Instagram.

Yesterday, your sister’s birthday gift came from a Shopify store run by a kitchenware designer in Sacramento, California. You felt something when you clicked “buy,” a small, warm, fuzzy feeling. Not Amazon. Not a giant.

Someone real. The package will arrive on time, in unmarked brown cardboard, in two days. It will arrive that way because Amazon delivered it. On May 4, 2026, Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Supply Chain Services.

It opens Amazon’s warehouses, trucks and delivery network – built over decades to ship products from its own website – to outside companies of any size. Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End and American Eagle are among the first customers.

The headlines framed it as a logistics story – Amazon is coming for UPS and FedEx – and most coverage stopped there.

Amazon’s announcement that it would open its logistics network to other companies has major implications for consumers trying to ‘shop small.’ But the bigger shift is one that consumers can’t see, and it has to do with how they support small businesses.

A 2024 Pew Research survey found that 86% of Americans say small businesses have a positive effect on the country. For the millions of shoppers who have been redirecting their dollars away from corporate giants and toward small and local businesses, the May 4 announcement isn’t a logistics story at all.

It’s about whether that effort still means what they think it means.

We’re scholars of consumer behavior and marketing who study how people square their purchasing decisions with ethical considerations, and we see a growing dilemma for consumers: If you pick the small brand instead of the giant, part of your payment actually goes somewhere you don’t expect.

You may think you’ve made a conscious choice, but you’ve just walked through a different door into the same store. And it’s getting harder and harder to escape. Invisible but growing Dragon Glassware is a small kitchenware company that began in a garage in Sacramento in 2017.

You may have bought one of their wine glasses on their Shopify website, drawn in by the founder’s story and the small-business feel. Yet the order was picked, packed and shipped from an Amazon warehouse.

Another example is Poppi, which started at a Texas farmers market and went viral on TikTok as a cooler, healthier alternative to the giant soda companies. For years, the cans you ordered from Poppi’s own website – the ones that felt like a vote against Big Soda – were shipped to you by Amazon.

Poppi was sold to PepsiCo for nearly US$2 billion in 2025, which is its own David-becomes-Goliath story. These aren’t rare cases. Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment program, the service that ships these orders, now serves more than 200,000 U.S. merchants, and the network grew by roughly 70% in 2024 alone, according to Amazon.

The same Amazon service also handles fulfillment for sellers on Shopify, Etsy, eBay and TikTok Shop. But you wouldn’t know this — the packaging is left unmarked by design.

What changed on May 4 is that Amazon opened this service up for all businesses – not just the small brands that have been there all along, but every kind of company at every size, from American Eagle retail orders to Procter & Gamble raw-material shipments between factories.

Peter Larsen, the executive quoted in the May 4 press release, said Amazon is doing for shipping what Amazon Web Services did for the internet. But there’s more to that comparison. Most people don’t know which websites run on AWS, and they don’t care.

That’s the kind of invisibility Amazon is now building underneath physical things, too. Amazon Supply Chain Services announced on May 4, 2026, that it’s opening up its shipping and logistics services to all companies, a sign of its growing reach.

Business Wire photo illustration It’s also extremely lucrative. Amazon collects a fulfillment fee on every order it ships for an outside brand – roughly for a three-pound package shipped in two days, according to Amazon’s own published rates.

It also collects monthly storage fees on that brand’s inventory. And it gathers real-time visibility into what every competitor sells, to whom, in what quantities, at what moments of the year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy publicly described Supply Chain Services as a “major growth opportunity.” When Amazon says growth opportunity, it means the same thing it said about AWS – a business that could one day rival its retail arm.

Why the small brands are using Amazon It’s tempting to think the small brands are selling out. They’re not. They’re doing the math. A small kitchenware founder shipping out of her own garage can only get a wine glass to a customer in three to five days.

Amazon’s network can get there in two. After 15 years of Amazon Prime, two-day delivery isn’t a luxury – it’s what shoppers expect. Small brands that can’t match it lose sales. Independent fulfillment companies exist, but Amazon’s service is typically cheaper and integrates directly with the platforms small brands already sell on, such as Shopify, Etsy, TikTok Shop and eBay.

The bigger implication is upstream, however. Amazon now controls roughly four out of every 10 dollars Americans spend online – more than four times the share of its nearest competitor. A small brand that wants to be discovered by new customers has little choice but to be on Amazon.

Once there, the path of least resistance is to use Amazon’s warehouses for everything – including the orders that come in from Shopify and Etsy. So for consumers, the choice technically exists. But the economics make it a decoy.

And the more small brands are routed through Amazon’s network, the more Amazon can raise fees, change terms and shape the conditions for small commerce. In fact, Multi-Channel Fulfillment prices have already risen for three years running.

If even Procter & Gamble has decided to route part of its logistics through Amazon, what can a kitchenware founder in Sacramento realistically do? For years, you’ve been telling yourself something every time you supported a small business – that your dollars meant something, that you weren’t pouring every dollar into the same handful of giants.

But what does shopping your values even mean when the system underneath is invisible? The impulse to shop your values isn’t naive. But it’s becoming harder to act on. For small businesses caught in the middle, deeper dependence on Amazon’s logistics means rising fees, with no leverage to push back.

For those consumers who want choices, it means something uncomfortable: They can keep trying harder to avoid the giants, but the giants keep getting bigger anyway. The mug will arrive Tuesday. It will be beautiful, made by hand, wrapped in brown paper tied with twine.

The truck pulling up outside won’t have a logo on it. None of that is an accident.

All of it is by design.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/youve-been-trying-to-get-around-amazon-but-its-not-that-easy/

Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving of Pocahontas is the only known portrait made during her lifetime. National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia Commons Thanks to the Walt Disney Company, Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who lived in the 17th century.

The animated film version of her early life included her speaking with a willow tree, befriending animals, singing about “the colors of the wind,” and being caught up in an ill-fated romance with Captain John Smith.

The 1995 film created an enduring visual image of Pocahontas, and contained some details drawn from the historical record, though plenty is pure fiction. Smith was, in fact, one of the English colonists who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, soon after its founding in 1607.

Pocahontas’ father Wahunsonacock – whom colonists and Disney called Powhatan – was the paramount chief of the Powhatans, who lived in communities along the edges of Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Only one portrait of Pocahontas from her lifetime exists – a sharp contrast with the Disney-drawn image most Americans know.

And it speaks volumes about how the English saw colonization. Powerful family As I describe in my 2026 book, “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680,” Wahunsonacock was the most consequential political figure in early Virginia, the land Powhatans knew as Tsenacommacah.

Through personal alliances and shrewd stratagems, he controlled perhaps 30 communities along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. An engraving of Wahunsonacock by William Hole appeared on a map John Smith created of Virginia.

Virtual Jamestown/Wikimedia Commons Pocahontas, also known as Matoaka and Amonute, was probably about 10 or 11 years old when she encountered Smith in late 1607. At that moment he was a captive of her father, who, Smith later wrote, was about to have him killed.

Though scholars believe Wahunsonacock was likely putting Smith through a ritual adoption, the colonist claimed Pocahontas saved his life. In 1613, the English took Pocahontas captive during a conflict known as the first Anglo-Powhatan War. After obtaining his daughter’s freedom in 1614, Wahunsonacock approved her marriage to John Rolfe, who played a leading role the colony’s tobacco economy, and she converted to Christianity.

Sometime between 1615 and 1617 she gave birth to their son, Thomas. Pocahontas in England Two years after the marriage, Pocahontas and Rolfe sailed to England, where she played a leading role in her father’s diplomatic mission.

During her stay in London, which included meeting King James I, Pocahontas sat for a portrait by the artist Simon van de Passe. Her clothing and pose echoed portraits of other elite English women of the era.

The image emphasizes her tall stovepipe hat, ample lace collar, a dress with detailed embroidery or brocade, and a pearl earring dangling from her left ear. Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving of Pocahontas is the only known portrait made during her lifetime.

National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia Commons In addition to her English clothing, Pocahontas holds a quill pen, suggesting that she had learned to write. Since Europeans considered literacy a crucial marker of civilization, the engraving highlights English hopes that Indigenous Americans could rapidly embrace the colonists’ culture.

Power of art The engraving of Pocahontas was not the first image of Native peoples of the mid-Atlantic coastline circulating in England. Illustrations in one widely reprinted book played a crucial role in convincing the English to establish settlements in North America.

In the late 16th century, advocates of English colonization understood that descriptions of North America could make foreign territory more enticing to potential migrants. They wanted to demonstrate to English men and women that they could create profitable economies and coexist with Native peoples.

The title page of the 1590 edition of Theodor de Bry’s ‘A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia.’ Livinncary/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Some promoters recognized that watercolor images painted in 1585 by the artist John White depicting the Carolina Algonquians of the Outer Banks could perhaps generate interest – and investments.

The promoters, who had ties to leading figures in the English court as well as to printers, also saw the benefits of an in-depth study of the region by the young English mathematician and writer Thomas Harriot, “A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia.” In 1590, the promoters worked with the Flemish printer Theodor de Bry to produce an illustrated version, which contained engravings based on White’s paintings.

The volume described Carolina Algonquians’ practices and enumerated commodities that could be extracted for profit. Some of the Native Americans depicted in these pages are clad with only a deerskin loincloth. Some of the women wear skirts but not tops.

To Europeans bred on the idea that clothing an entire body was a marker of civilization, these Alqonquians’ appearance was significant. People who colonizers considered “savages” were often depicted nude, like the Tainos whom Christopher Columbus encountered a century earlier.

English men and women reading the book about the Algonquians, on the other hand, saw them as a people who would, under the right tutelage, adopt English-style culture – including Protestant Christianity.

“Some religion they have alreadie,” Harriot wrote in “A Briefe and True Report,” “which although it be farre from the truth, yet being as it is, there is hope it may been the easier and sooner reformed.” To make the point that Native Americans could be converted to European culture, the engravers added depictions of ancient Britons, allegedly based on an old chronicle.

Three of these images of Picts depicted them as nude, bearing tattoos more extensive than the Algonquians’. These individuals are also portrayed as more violent: A Pict man holds a head still dripping blood, with another head at his feet, while a Pict woman brandishes spears and a broadsword.

Reality check When Pocahontas sat for Van de Passe, his portrait did more than create a resemblance of the young woman, who would die the following year, soon after leaving London – felled either by disease or, as a Virginia tribe’s oral history suggests, poison.

Like the images popularized by Harriot’s book, her portrait suggested that Native Americans would soon embrace English ways. Pocahontas herself, as the words on the engraving noted, had become Rebecca Rolfe after her marriage.

In his writings, her husband celebrated her conversion to the Anglican faith. The proof of the model of cultural conversion seemed to be on plain view in the portrait. Pocahontas’ father died in 1618. Four years later, the Powhatans launched a rebellion against English colonists.

On March 22, 1622, under the direction of a war captain named Opechancanough, they killed approximately one-fourth of the colonists in Virginia.

The English labeled the violence a “barbarous massacre” and launched a war of vengeance, which included a mass poisoning of Powhatans in 1623 – an action that the English at the time knew violated the emerging law of war.

Seeing Pocahontas poised on a chair, wearing an elegant hat and holding a quill pen, the English had assumed that Native Americans would embrace the colonizers’ ways. March 1622 proved them wrong.

Peter C.

Mancall has received funding from the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/beyond-disney-a-1616-portrait-of-pocahontas-shows-how-english-colonizers-saw-indigenous-americans/

Several of Mali’s major cities experienced coordinated attacks in April by a new coalition of jihadists and separatist groups. As the coalition took over the town of Kidal in the north of Mali, images of Russian troops being escorted out of the town after negotiations were cabled out across global media.

Russia, now in the shape of Africa Corps and previously the Wagner Group, has been the Malian military’s external security partner since the beginning of 2022. It replaced French and European troops from the counter-terrorism operation Barkhane and Taskforce Takuba.

France had deployed a force of 5,000 troops from 2014 to 2022. European special forces numbered 1,000 between 2020 and 2022. Both missions were forced to leave as relations between France and the Malian junta grew tense. The strategic realignment, from western and multilateral forces to Russian troops, expanded in the region.

In Burkina Faso, which experienced two coups in 2022, the French troops were expelled at the start of 2023, as 200 Russian troops moved in. In the summer of 2023, the Malian authorities also kicked out the decade-old 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission.

Niger’s junta, which took power the same year, followed suit and expelled the EU’s operations in the country six months later, before accepting a few hundred Russian troops. During the past decade I have researched external security interventions in the Sahel and analysed their justifications, development on the ground, and consequences for political and security environments.

I conclude from my research that the external interventions have not stabilised the region. More than a decade after the first major interventions, the Sahel is more fragmented, militarised and violent than before. Yet the persistence of insecurity also serves political purposes.

For military juntas, the jihadist threat justifies continued rule and repression. For Russia, the region has become a showcase for anti-western influence and security partnerships in Africa. For western actors, jihadist expansion, migration concerns and fears of regional instability are used as reasons for security engagement despite repeated failures.

The complex interactions between these actors have resulted in a continuous, strategic circle of violence, where civilians are the first victims. On the ground On the ground, interventions have often evolved in unpredictable ways through ad hoc decisions and informal interactions between local and external actors.

For example, they have shared logistical and medical assistance and intelligence. More broadly, the external interventions strengthened militaries as political actors, reinforcing an already biased civil-military balance across the region. “Security in the Sahel” became the moniker that framed the western and multilateral interventions in the region from 2013 onwards.

Improving the capacities, capabilities and professionalism of the national security forces became the official objectives of these interventions, closely linked to the broader aim of defeating the jihadist insurgencies. Framing the intersecting crises in the Sahel as a security issue also meant that security actors had the task of resolving it.

The importance, status and budgets of the national militaries thus increased as the security situation deteriorated. A heavily tilted civil-military imbalance was the result. As military officers took over power through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, a strategic realignment towards Russia began, to maintain military rule.

The Russian Wagner group allowed the newly installed juntas to entrench their power, while “deprofessionalising” the forces through harassment, attacks and massacres of civilians. Research shows for example that civilian targeting accounted for 71% of the Wagner Group’s involvement in political violence in Mali between December 2021 and July 2022.

This strategy of attacking civilians has made recruitment easier for jihadist groups. They could increase their ranks by exploiting grievances. The latest attacks in Mali in April 2026 demonstrate the military junta’s failure, together with its Russian security partners, to contain the jihadist groups’ expansion.

They also reveal that Russia is in the country mainly to keep the military junta in power. Assimi Goïta, Mali’s military leader, reconfirmed the partnership with Russia after the attacks in spite of their failure on the battlefield.

The military leader needs regime maintenance more than ever, and the Russians need to be in the country for continued geopolitical influence on the African continent. Conclusion The result is that while all external actors claim to fight instability, the current regional order depends on continuing insecurity.

Stabilisation risks becoming less about resolving conflict than about managing insecurity in ways that sustain regimes, partnerships and geopolitical influence. Foreign interventions, in combination with national actors’ ambitions, have helped to transform the region into a space of militarised regime survival, jihadist expansion and geopolitical competition between Russia and western democracies.

As military approaches have repeatedly proven insufficient to solve the intersecting crises in the Sahel, pressured military juntas may now be forced to negotiate with jihadist groups. That is likely to result in new, hybrid spaces of power and governance.

Nina Wilén has received funding from the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA).

She is the Direoctor of the Africa programme at Egmont Institute of International Relations and Associate Professor in Political Science at Lund University.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/the-sahel-region-is-less-secure-than-ever-foreign-forces-just-add-to-the-cycle-of-violence/

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now. Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded.

People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act. As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest.

It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate. Wired for bad news Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce.

Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened. The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived. This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science.

Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer. A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset.

The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive. Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then.

We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats. Scanning the whole world For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local.

A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant. Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning.

In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential. Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation.

For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin. Read more: Diaspora distress: When geopolitical conflict follows immigrant workers into the office Looking away is not the fix What’s the solution to news fatigue?

Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens. Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem.

We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another. The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input.

They were, however, built to learn to adapt.

Ali Jasemi 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/why-40-per-cent-of-people-are-avoiding-the-news-according-to-a-psychologist/

As women navigate hot flushes, sleep issues and changing waistlines, there’s another quieter change that can often occur during perimenopause and post-menopause that deserves just as much attention: heart health.

While women often worry more about the visible signs of midlife and menopause, they are less aware of the hidden shifts in blood fats, blood vessels and metabolism that can silently raise the future risk for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women worldwide.
Women in their peri-menopause (i.e. from the time when periods start to become more erratic till one year after the complete loss of menstruation) and post-menopause become more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease because falling oestrogen levels trigger an unfavourable shift in blood fats, body fat distribution, blood pressure, glucose control, and inflammation.
This untimely cocktail pushes the heart and arteries under additional strain. By the late 50s and 60s, many women’s cardiovascular risk approaches – and in some respects exceeds – that of men of the same age, although the pattern and timing of disease differ between men and women.
Lipid metabolism made simple
We term “lipid metabolism” the way our bodies handle fats: from how we absorb them from food, to how they move through the blood, are stored, and are used up for energy our organs and cells need.
Because fat does not dissolve in water, the body packages it into tiny particles called lipoproteins that travel in our bloodstream. LDL particles carry cholesterol out to tissues; when there is too much LDL, or the particles are small and dense, they can more easily enter artery walls and help form plaques. HDL particles move cholesterol back from tissues and artery walls to the liver for disposal, which is why they are often called “good” cholesterol. However, their quality and function matter as much as their amount.
What changes at peri- and post-menopause?
Oestrogen has important protective effects on the cardiovascular system: it helps keep LDL (so-called bad cholesterol) lower, supports healthy HDL (“good cholesterol”), improves how blood vessels relax, and modulates inflammation.
Around the menopausal transition, ovarian oestrogen production drops sharply, and this is often associated with a rapid change in several metabolic pathways rather than a slow, gentle ageing process we would perhaps expect.
Large studies show that around and after menopause women develop higher total and LDL cholesterol, while HDL particles that are smaller and less effective at clearing cholesterol from arteries become more predominant. Triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in our blood acting as one of our body’s main fuel stores, also increase post-menopause. This combination of fats creates what we call a more “atherogenic” or atherosclerotic plaque-promoting profile. When too many of these fats circulate in the bloodstream, they can build up in arteries over time, contributing to the development of fatty plaques that can gradually narrow the space for blood to flow. Eventually, they sometimes rupture and trigger a clot, raising the risk of heart disease and stroke.
At the same time, women are more likely to develop other cardiovascular risk factors:

Weight gain, especially around the abdomen
Higher blood pressure
Insulin resistance.

All of the above further raise cardiovascular risk.
Modern studies on the collection of metabolites circulating in our bloodstream (metabolomics) confirm that over half of menopause-related metabolic changes are in lipid-related molecules, tightly linking this hormonal transition to cardiovascular risk.
How do women’s risks compare with men’s?
Before menopause, women generally have a lower risk of heart attack and stroke than men, helped in part by higher oestrogen levels and overall more favourable lipid profiles.
Data from large cohorts show that pre-menopausal women have lower total and LDL cholesterol than men of the same age, along with slightly lower blood pressure and better control of their glucose levels.
After menopause, this advantage shrinks or even disappears.
In a very large study carried out on British people, post-menopausal women actually had higher total and LDL cholesterol than similarly aged men, despite lower rates of other risk factors, such as smoking, hypertension and diabetes.
Clinically, women tend to develop cardiovascular disease (CVD) roughly 7–10 years later than men, but their risk accelerates sharply after menopause and ultimately converges.
Women are also more prone to certain presentations of heart disease, such as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (where the heart looks as if it is pumping normally on scans, but is too stiff to relax and fill properly between beats), and microvascular angina (chest discomfort caused by problems in the heart’s small blood vessels). These forms of heart disease have historically been underrecognised and understudied.
Current approaches: lifestyle changes and lipid-lowering drugs
Across sexes, the foundations of cardiovascular prevention are the same:

Not smoking

A diet rich in plant foods and low in trans fats

Regular physical activity

Adequate sleep

Weight management.

For peri- and post-menopausal women, guidelines emphasise checking blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose, and acting early if these are abnormal, because the risk can increase quickly during this time.
Statins remain the mainstay medication for lowering LDL cholesterol and preventing cardiovascular events in people at increased risk. Large meta-analyses show clear benefits in women and men for secondary prevention (after a cardiovascular event such as a stroke).
For primary prevention (before any event occurs), the evidence of benefit in women is less robust than in men, and some analyses suggest that absolute risk reductions may be smaller. However this remains an active area of research. Regardless, women who meet established criteria for statins are still less likely than men to receive them or to stay on therapy – a major implementation gap that extends to other lipid-lowering drug classes, as discussed below.
Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT)
For many years, oestrogen was thought to be a heart-protective therapy, but clinical trials and their overall analysis have painted a more complex picture. MHT is prescribed primarily to relieve troublesome menopausal symptoms: hot flushes, night sweats and vaginal symptoms, and also helps prevent bone loss and fractures. It is not a heart-prevention pill, but its relationship with cardiovascular risk is relevant for any woman considering it.
Our understanding of MHT and the heart has changed substantially over the past two decades. Early large trials raised alarm, but they largely studied women who started hormones in their 60s, long after menopause, using older formulations. When the data were re-analysed by age at the time starting treatment, and newer studies focused on women closer to menopause, a more reassuring picture emerged: for healthy women who begin MHT before 60 or within about 10 years of their final period, cardiovascular risks appear low.
Some studies suggest possible cardiometabolic advantages, but the evidence for hard clinical benefits such as fewer heart attacks or lower mortality remains inconclusive, and MHT is therefore not recommended as a cardiovascular prevention strategy.
Timing and formulation matter.
Modern MHT uses low-dose oestradiol, preferably via the skin (patches or creams) rather than taken orally, since transdermal oestrogen bypasses the liver and avoids the increase in clotting factors associated with oral preparations. Starting hormones around the time of menopause looks very different from starting them in the late 60s or 70s, when baseline cardiovascular risk is already higher.
Current guidelines from menopause societies in North America and Europe recommend a personalised approach: using the lowest effective dose, reviewing risks regularly, and making decisions jointly with a clinician who understands both a woman’s menopausal symptoms and her cardiovascular profile.
In late 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration began removing the broad warnings that had linked MHT to cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and dementia across the board, describing those old labels as misleading when applied to healthy women in their 50s (this regulatory change occurred after the primary literature for this article was gathered). The most prominent warning that remains is for endometrial cancer with oestrogen-only therapy in women who still have a uterus, underlining the importance of using an adequate progestogen alongside oestrogen in those cases.
Newer cardiometabolic therapies
Several newer drug classes offer promising additional tools, especially for women with obesity, diabetes or very high cholesterol.
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs), such as semaglutide, were first developed for diabetes but are now also used for obesity. A large analysis of clinical trials found that GLP-1 RAs reduce blood pressure and lower the risk of myocardial infarction, with
neutral effects on stroke. The landmark SELECT trial showed that weekly semaglutide (at 2.4 mg) reduced major cardiovascular events by about 20% in people with obesity and existing CVD but without diabetes, an advance that is already changing clinical guidelines.
For people whose LDL remains high despite maximally tolerated statins, PCSK9-targeting molecules (monoclonal antibodies) can lower LDL by around 50–60% and have been shown to further reduce cardiovascular events.
Recent sex-specific analyses indicate that women and men achieve similar LDL reductions and cardiovascular benefits from these drugs.
Unfortunately, as with statins, women are somewhat less likely to receive them in practice – illustrating a persistent treatment gap across lipid-lowering drug classes that warrants urgent attention.
Where is research heading?
The trend is towards a more personalised approach.
Current priorities include better understanding of how menopause-related lipid and metabolite shifts translate into plaque formation, and identifying which women are at greatest risk so that prevention can be more personalised. There is also a call for more trials designed from the outset to answer sex-specific questions, including optimal use of statins, GLP-1 RAs, PCSK9 inhibitors and MHT across different menopausal stages – particularly large randomized controlled trials powered to detect differences in clinical events (heart attacks, strokes, deaths) that can establish whether the promising but inconclusive cardiovascular signals seen in studies using surrogates as endpoints and observational studies translate into robust evidence that is guideline-changing.
For now, the key message is that cardiovascular disease is not just a “man’s disease”, and that peri- and post-menopause is a crucial window to analyse your risk factors, adjust your lifestyle and diet, and, when appropriate and with your medical specialist’s recommendation, use evidence-based medications to protect your heart and blood vessels in the long-term.

The AXA science philanthropy is now part of the AXA Foundation for Human Progress, which brings together the commitments of AXA Group and Mutuelles d’Assurances in the fields of Science, Nature, Solidarity, and Culture. Before 2025, the global science philanthropy was held by the AXA Research Fund, which has supported over 750 projects around the world since its inception back in 2007. To learn more, visit Axa Foundation for Human Progress.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Inés Pineda-Torra est membre de The Endocrine Society and is funded by the following organistations: Instituto Carlos III- (grant PMPTA23/00023), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Agencia Estatal de Investigación-PROYECTOS DE COLABORACION PUBLICO-PRIVADA 2021-2023-(grant CPP2022-010039), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – Agencia Estatal de Investigación -PROYECTOS DE GENERACIÓN DE CONOCIMIENTO-2021-(grant PID2021-126077OB-I00), Axa Research Fund (Axa Chair 2023).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/25/beyond-hot-flushes-what-menopause-can-do-to-your-heart-and-why-it-matters/