Getty Images/The Conversation Sir Donald Bradman needs little introduction.

Cricket – and possibly world sport’s – most dominant figure, “The Don” is known for his staggering batting feats, including a scarcely believable batting average of 99.94, and his leadership of Australia’s 1948 team nicknamed the “Invincibles”.

However, few would know Bradman was a key figure behind cricket’s transformation from time-consuming five-day matches to the chaotic world of one-day and Twenty20 (T20) games that dominate the sport’s calendar, broadcasts and finances today.

And it was all sparked by Melbourne’s oft-criticised weather, some worried bean-counters, and a bright idea. Sports can change dramatically in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, these moments create immediate shockwaves. Other times, it’s not until much later that their impact become obvious.

This is the first story in a rolling series that explores key (and sometimes long forgotten) moments in sports history.

Read more: Game changers: how soccer’s mega-money era was sparked by a little-known Belgian athlete The first one-day international Domestic one-day matches of between 40 and 60 overs a side had been played in India and England since the 1950s.

These shorter, more dynamic games were aimed at attracting new spectators. However, they had not been considered for international matches. The first one-day international (ODI) in 1971 was an accident: an unscheduled match played as a last-minute replacement for a Test abandoned due to heavy rain.

According to Australia’s captain Bill Lawry, the match was conceived by Bradman for financial reasons. Facing heavy financial losses the English and Australian cricket boards agreed to play a game on what would have been the last day of the Test.

Around 46,000 spectators saw Australia win after each side was allotted 40 eight-ball overs. It was a financial hit, popular with spectators and deemed an “overwhelming success” by the media. But growth of this format was slow, mainly due to the conservative nature of international boards.

The next ODI did not happen until August 1972, and other countries did not start playing them until 1973.

Remarkably, considering the amateur status of women athletes at the time, the first limited-overs World Cup was a women’s tournament in England in 1973 – two years before the maiden men’s World Cup was played.

One-day cricket’s popularity soon soared, especially after the men’s World Cup in 1975. Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, launched in 1977, confirmed its place on the international cricketing calendar and played a huge role in the shorter format’s popularity.

The media baron was desperate to showcase cricket on Channel Nine but his TV rights bid was rejected by the Australian Cricket Board. Aggrieved, Packer instead set up a breakaway competition, signing many of the world’s best players.

The new-look competition featured brightly coloured team kits, white balls, games under lights and batters wearing helmets – all of which are still in place today. How ODIs changed cricket Test cricket was, and often still is, criticised for being too slow and boring.

The limited number of overs in ODIs increased the speed of the game: batters looked to score more quickly and take more risks, which resulted in more boundaries. Clive Lloyd, who captained the West Indies to two World Cup wins, called limited-overs cricket the greatest innovation for the sport.

He specifically referred to improved standards of fielding and tactical awareness. ODIs have greatly increased athleticism: batters need to be stronger to hit more boundaries and quicker to ensure they are fast enough when running between wickets.

Fielders need to be faster and more athletic to stop boundaries and extra runs. They also need stronger arms to throw the ball faster. In 1992, fielding restrictions were introduced for the first 15 overs, only allowing two fielders outside of a 30-yard circle.

This promoted early aggressive batting. These fielding restrictions forced captains to rethink field placements and bowling rotations. While Australia scored 191 runs to win the first ODI, current teams regularly surpass 300. Scoring has increased because of power hitting, bigger bats, specific training and better running between wickets.

Boundary ropes introduced for player safety also reduced the distance required to hit a boundary. Bowlers have had to develop more variations, such as slower balls, to make it harder for them to score runs.

In this shorter format, the importance of all-rounders (players who can bat and bowl competently) has increased greatly. Wicketkeepers are also expected to be better batters. Former Australian wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist had success opening the batting, which gave his team more flexibility to include other batters and all-rounders.

Player uniforms also evolved. One-day clashes originally used traditional white clothing, but colour uniforms introduced a new dimension for televised cricket. They have been used permanently since the 1992 World Cup. As the format evolved, player names and then numbers were gradually added to playing tops, making identification easier for commentators and spectators.

Read more: Game changers: how one team’s dominance transformed rugby league forever Continuing relevance Limited-overs cricket laid the platform for even shorter formats such as T20s, the Hundred and even ten over games.

Ironically, these innovative formats now threaten the continued relevance of 50-over cricket. Analysis of more than 340 ODI matches played in Australia between 1985 and 2015 shows average attendances have declined over time. In the 1980s, games in Australia regularly drew crowds of more than 35,000, but in recent years attendance has struggled to regularly reach 25,000 per match.

However, major events like World Cups can still draw large crowds. The 2023 tournament was attended by a record 1.25 million people and made Australian captain Pat Cummins “fall in love with ODI cricket again”. ODIs have given fans decades of drama and achievement.

Older fans still remember classic games such as Australia’s tied 1999 World Cup semifinal against South Africa, and Michael Bevan’s last-ball four to beat the West Indies on New Year’s Day in 1996. Michael Bevan’s last-ball four against the West Indies captivated Australian audiences.

But 50-over cricket now faces a challenge to stay relevant alongside more exciting and more profitable T20 tournaments.

If ODIs are to keep their place in a busy cricket calendar, they must continue evolving to ensure they maintain player and audience interest.

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/2026/05/28/game-changers-how-a-rainy-week-led-a-frustrated-don-bradman-to-reinvent-cricket/

Most of us don’t worry too much about where our data goes. We store documents in the cloud, collaborate online with Slack and Zoom and rely on platforms like Microsoft 365, Amazon Web Services and Google Workspace.

These tools are efficient, convenient and deeply embedded in how universities, businesses and governments operate. Our everyday digital life also involves online banking and payment systems, streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+, news and social media platforms, loyalty programs, fitness apps and smart-home services.

Many of these services are developed, hosted or routed outside Canada. They are part of global systems shaped by governance frameworks, commercial interests and geopolitical dynamics. This raises simple but uncomfortable questions: Who controls the systems through which our data flows?

Who can access our data and how is is used? The answers to these questions impact our privacy, as well as the autonomy of our institutions and the economic competitiveness and sovereignty of our nation.

Data sovereignty is not just a technical issue — it is a collective challenge that all Canadians need to start taking seriously. CTV’s Austin Lee tours ThinkOn’s data centre in Nepean, Ont., and considers data sovereignty.

Dual-use technologies In the United States, the 2018 CLOUD Act means that the government can demand access to data held by U.S.-based companies, even if that data belongs to foreigners and is stored on servers outside the U.S.

Read more: How Eurostack could offer Canada a route to digital independence from the United States This point was confirmed in an exchange between Microsoft and the French Senate, in which Microsoft admitted it cannot oppose an American injunction targeting data hosted in France.

This is why countries like France are moving some public services away from U.S.-based platforms and toward domestically or European-controlled alternatives. The concern is not that foreign providers are inherently dangerous, but that dependence on infrastructure controlled elsewhere can become a vulnerability.

Canada is not exempt.

Our reliance — across government and the public and private sectors — on platforms such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (which underpins our banking systems) and Google creates a tension between operational convenience and control over sensitive information.

This is also an example of a broader phenomenon known as “dual use.” Beneficial intent, harmful use Dual use refers to research, data and technologies that are developed for beneficial purposes but can also be repurposed in ways that are harmful or contrary to the public interest.

Familiar examples include nuclear research that can produce energy or weapons and biomedical research that can be used to support public health or create biological threats. However, dual use is not confined to these high-risk fields.

Dual-use dynamics are embedded in many areas of everyday research and innovation, including digital technologies, environmental data and even the social sciences. Read more: Is someone watching you?

Facial recognition tech is here and Canada offers little privacy protection What matters is not only what a technology is designed to do, but how it is taken up and used in different contexts, by whom and for what purposes.

Wildfire monitoring, doorbell cameras Health research data provides an example as it can be used to both improve care and enable new forms of surveillance — as with COVID-19 contact-tracing apps during the pandemic. Similarly, satellite imagery used for wildfire monitoring can support climate science and disaster response but is also used by open-source intelligence communities to identify military strikes in the war in Ukraine.

Artificial intelligence systems developed for productivity can also be adapted to generate deceptive content. Research in psychology or communication can be used to design effective public health campaigns or to shape political opinions. Smart-home technologies such as doorbell cameras can help protect homes and even help people find their pets, but also raise concerns about surveillance of a neighbourhood.

The original intent may be benevolent. But as knowledge, data and technologies circulate across institutions, sectors and countries, they can be repurposed in ways that are difficult to predict and with impacts that are hard to control.

Dual use, in this sense, is not a property of specific technologies. It is a feature of how modern knowledge and communications systems operate. Fragmented responsibility Responsibility for managing dual-use risks is spread between individual researchers, universities, companies and governments.

Each plays a role, but none has a full view of, or control over, how knowledge is used. In Canada, current approaches tend to focus on research security. This involves protecting sensitive data, managing partnerships and ensuring compliance with regulations.

These efforts are important, but they often address risks that have already been identified rather than anticipating those that are coming. Governments and research institutions are expected to manage these diverse risks, but their respective roles and powers are not clearly delineated.

The result is that while responsibility is widely shared, the regulatory toolkit is still fragmented and incomplete. Awareness is the first step Dual-use risks cannot be eliminated. They are part of a world in which knowledge is produced within global systems, information moves freely across borders and technologies are widely accessible.

The question is how to manage these risks in ways that are informed, proportionate and legitimate. That begins with awareness. For individuals, this means asking basic questions about the tools and platforms we use: Where is our data stored?

Who has access to it? What protections are in place and are they sufficient? For universities, it means integrating dual-use considerations into decisions about research, partnerships and infrastructure: Are researchers sufficiently informed and engaged? Are they adequately supported?

Are existing policies adapted to the range of potential risks? For governments, it means moving beyond reactive approaches toward co-ordinated strategies that align innovation, security and public accountability, and that provide clear, actionable guidance. A collective problem None of these responses is sufficient on their own.

Dual use is a collective problem. It requires shared attention, ongoing dialogue and a willingness to make trade-offs between different priorities. It also requires a shift in posture — from assuming that risks are isolated to certain sectors and managed elsewhere to recognizing that risks are diffuse and responsibility is distributed.

Awareness is not a solution in itself. But without it, there can be no sustained pressure — from citizens, institutions or governments — to take dual-use risks seriously and to act on them.

As debates over cloud infrastructure and data sovereignty continue, the question is no longer simply where our data is stored, but who ultimately controls how it can be used — and whether those uses align with our collective interests.

Bryn Williams-Jones 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/2026/05/27/after-you-upload-your-data-to-the-cloud-where-does-it-go-the-challenge-of-dual-use-technologies/

Ethiopia’s general election on 1 June 2026 will take place amid armed conflicts and political fragmentation. This has raised questions over voter participation and legitimacy and the future of the country’s multi-ethnic federal system. Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country and a key regional actor in the Horn of Africa.

Redie Bereketeab, who researches state- and nation-building, identity and nationalism in the Horn of Africa, unpacks the 2026 election. Who is on the ballot, and what is at stake? Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party remains by far the strongest political force nationally.

The party controls most federal and regional state institutions. The incumbent faces more than 45 opposition parties that are contesting the election. These include the Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, the National Movement of Amhara, Enat Party, the Freedom and Equality Party and the Oromo Federalist Congress.

But the result will not necessarily indicate broad political inclusion. This partly stems from widespread restrictions on opposition parties, such as arbitrary arrests and preventing meetings. This has been documented by rights groups, including the US-based Freedom House.

Most of the parties face organisational, financial and security constraints too. Others have limited regional reach. Read more: Ethiopia’s national dialogue was meant to heal the nation, but divisions are deepening Some of the country’s most influential political actors are either weakened, fragmented or excluded altogether.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, long the dominant political force in Tigray and previously central to Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades, has been banned from the election by the National Election Board. As it now controls the region, an election there is highly unlikely.

So, there is little uncertainty over who will govern after the votes have been counted. Instead, the key election issue is whether the process itself will be regarded as sufficiently inclusive and legitimate across Ethiopia’s highly diverse regions and political constituencies.

How significant is the shadow of conflict on the election? The elections will take place against the backdrop of multiple overlapping conflicts. These have displaced millions and weakened state authority in several parts of the country.

Insecurity is expected to limit voting in large areas. Among constituencies reportedly considered too unstable for normal polling operations are Humera, Raya Alamata and Tselemti in northern Ethiopia. The central question will be how much of the population can realistically participate.

In the north-western Amhara region, fighting between federal forces and Fano militias has continued since 2023. Armed conflict persists in parts of Oromia to the south, involving the Oromo Liberation Army. In both regions, insecurity, displacement and communications restrictions have complicated political organising and voter mobilisation.

Elections are therefore unlikely to be organised across large areas. In the northern region of Tigray, large-scale fighting formally ended in 2022. Nevertheless, unresolved disputes over territory, political representation and the return of displaced populations continue to fuel tensions.

The fragile post-war environment is further complicated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front being barred from contesting the election. The party’s legal status was cancelled by the National Election Board of Ethiopia in May 2025 for failure to hold a national assembly within the legally mandated period.

In addition, tensions within the movement have produced rival factions. In early May, Tigray People’s Liberation Front chairman Debretsion Gebremichael assumed full control of the region, pushing out Addis Ababa-backed Tadesse Werede. These developments raised tensions with the federal government.

The government needs to hold elections to demonstrate its legitimacy. But with Tigray not participating, as well as major parts of Amhara and Oromia, that legitimacy will be in doubt. What are the other factors shaping the election?

The economy is one main factor. Ethiopia has high rural poverty, a mounting public debt burden and the economic, social and humanitarian consequences of years of conflict and displacement. The last general election was held in 2021.

This was before the economic impact of the Tigray war hit the country. Since then, the currency has been devalued, contributing to rising inflation and living costs. Higher prices of imported goods and fuel placed additional pressure on households already affected by conflict and economic hardship.

Deteriorating economic conditions could fuel further internal unrest and strengthen the position of armed movements in parts of the country. Regional tensions could also influence the political atmosphere and security environment surrounding the election. Relations with Eritrea have deteriorated sharply in recent months amid disputes over Red Sea access and growing fears of renewed confrontation between Addis Ababa and Asmara.

Read more: Ethiopia’s 2026 elections: without reforms, the vote may not be free or fair Ethiopia’s involvement in the wider Sudan conflict is another source of tension. An escalation with Eritrea or further spillover from Sudan could intensify nationalist rhetoric and divert political attention away from domestic reform.

It could further complicate already fragile security conditions during the electoral period. Civic and political space has also narrowed in recent years. Journalists, activists and opposition figures have faced arrests, harassment, travel restrictions and pressure from security forces, particularly under emergency measures introduced during the conflicts in Amhara and Oromia.

Several opposition parties have accused the government of using state institutions and security structures to tilt the political playing field in favour of the ruling party. This further undermines faith in the electoral system. How does the election shape Ethiopia’s federal project?

Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic federal system was introduced in 1991. It was designed to accommodate diversity and grant significant autonomy to regional states. But in practice it has also sharpened struggles over territory, autonomy and access to political power.

Today those unresolved tensions are visible in the insurgency in Amhara, the conflict in Oromia and the fragile post-war order in Tigray. If voting cannot take place across those three major regions and ethnic groups, then the elections lose legitimacy.

Rather than resolving competing claims, the federal system has in many cases institutionalised them by linking territory, political representation and state power to ethnic identity. For some the system has failed as power was never fully devolved to the states.

For others it could never succeed as it fuels ethno-nationalism at the expense of national identity. The result is that identity has been turned into a central axis of political competition. What conclusions do you draw?

Without broader political dialogue and efforts to address the underlying conflicts, the election risks reinforcing divisions. A better approach would be to resolve the conflicts and then convene an election where the entire population can participate.

There is scope for the European Union and the US to play a constructive role.

They have the capacity to exert pressure on the Ethiopian government given their strong economic, military and diplomatic ties, and their weight in international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

There may be little appetite in Brussels or Washington for such moves.

Redie Bereketeab 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/2026/05/27/ethiopia-votes-dominant-ruling-party-seeks-a-new-mandate-in-a-deeply-fragmented-nation/

Surveys and polls help societies understand what people think about issues in politics, health, education and much more. But fewer people these days tend to respond, so pollsters have to reach out more widely, which raises cost considerably.

One survey provider prices a 10 minute survey of 1,000 people in the tens of thousands of dollars. Could AI models stand in for hundreds or thousands of people, emulating the range of answers humans would provide?

This practice, known as synthetic surveys or silicon sampling, is already happening, and it’s far less expensive. But are the results trustworthy? I am a machine learning researcher. I study large language models and their uses in medicine and science.

These systems change constantly as companies update them. Different prompts, settings and model versions can produce very different answers to questions.

That trait can make models difficult to use reliably in social science research, but it can help simulate replies of many humans, what researchers call “synthetic respondents.” To create 10,000 answers from ChatGPT, for example, a pollster would prompt the model with some basic respondent demographics and context, such as “You are a young college-going urban voter with conservative political views.

Respond to the following questions.” Researchers can change the demographic settings to elicit many different responses from ChatGPT for the same query. The model also has its own internal randomness, so it naturally generates different replies to the same question asked repeatedly.

In this way, researchers can combine prompting and randomness to create 10,000 different synthetic responses. Simulations are not opinions Pollsters have long used statistical models to generalize results from a finite number of replies. And analysts can reach different conclusions from the same survey data.

Studies of synthetic respondents suggest they may be even more sensitive than people to small changes in prompts or settings, producing sharply different results. But the use of synthetic respondents raises a deeper issue. Surveys are not just prediction tools.

They are measurement tools meant to capture what people actually think. A thermometer measures your temperature directly. You would not trust one that estimated your temperature by consulting an AI model instead. Researchers who poll AI systems instead of people are not measuring public opinion, they are only simulating it.

Jose Carlos Cerdeno Martinez via Getty Images Large language models and other AI tools inherit biases and blind spots from the data they train on. For example, AI can oversimplify or distort opinions from groups of people who are underrepresented online.

Traditional polling also has biases, but many biases in modern AI systems are hidden from public view inside closed proprietary models. To make matters worse, pollsters may present results from synthetic respondents to the public as if they came from surveys of people.

These shortcomings can erode trust in polls and survey research. They also raise an interesting paradox. Synthetic data, created by computers or simulations, is widely used in modern AI. It helps train AI systems for medicine, finance, robotics, self-driving cars and other disciplines.

So why do synthetic survey responses seem more problematic? The key difference is that synthetic data is checked against reality. A self-driving car may train on synthetic images and videos of different road conditions, but an automaker would never deploy the car on public roads without extensive real-world testing.

If synthetic data hurts performance, engineers can correct, retrain or replace the system. Researchers may treat synthetic survey responses as public opinion itself, but the system is not measuring public opinion. It is running a simulation of public opinion based on data it was trained on.

If the simulated opinions distort reality, researchers may not realize it until flawed conclusions have already shaped public policy, business decisions or scientific research. More efficient design and analysis Nevertheless, there are ways AI can help survey research without weakening the measurement of public opinion.

AI tools can help survey researchers write clearer questions by simplifying wording, reducing ambiguity and eliminating repetition. They can help avoid unnecessary questions, making it easier for people to respond. These tools can also adapt surveys across languages.

Once a survey is done, AI can help researchers organize large volumes of open-ended responses, summarize recurring themes and handle incomplete surveys more efficiently than human analysts. Some researchers are exploring hybrid approaches that combine smaller human surveys with AI-assisted analysis.

Decision makers use surveys and polls to listen to and understand the voices of people affected by their decisions. Replacing human respondents with synthetic respondents risks weakening that connection. At the same time, falling response rates and rising costs are real survey challenges.

I’m confident that further research can find ways to use AI transparently and effectively, in a scientifically defensible way, without replacing people.

Ambuj Tewari receives funding from NSF and NIH.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/ai-is-replacing-humans-in-responding-to-some-surveys-but-simulated-opinions-are-not-the-same-as-public-opinion/

Koitjärve wetland in Estonia is a five-hour drive from St Petersburg in Russia. Maksim Shutov/Unsplash As geopolitical tensions rise and climate-related risks intensify, Europe is rethinking how it handles security on multiple fronts.

One idea being developed relates to how nature and restoring landscapes can play a role in strengthening national resilience. Our recent study explores how restoring biodiversity, such as wetlands and forests, can even complement military defence strategies.

And he EU’s commissioner for the environment, Jessika Roswall, has said that rewilding border regions could make terrain harder for invading forces to cross. Finland and Poland are already restoring wetlands, forests and other natural systems, delivering vital carbon storage and biodiversity recovery.

But these moves could also, in a combat situation, slow, channel or deter advancing forces. Restoring nature can alter the geography of politically sensitive areas. Some rewilding – such as the restoration of wetlands which creates soft ground – makes terrain trickier for mechanised forces such as tanks or supporting ammunition trucks to navigate.

There are precedents. In 1941, the Pripet Marshes of southern Belarus played a key role in Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which involved some 3 million soldiers. This vast wetland, since partially drained, acted as a geographic wedge that split the German frontline and created a huge gap in the advance.

The winter weather made the landscape difficult to navigate. Forested areas surrounding Moscow further slowed the advance, allowing Russia to regroup and resist.

Read more: 40 years on from the disaster, why there are foxes, bears and bison again around Chernobyl In 2022, during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the intentional flooding of the Irpin river’s floodplain created an impassable swampy ground that trapped Russian mechanised invaders on a few elevated road embankments north of Kyiv.

This made them easy targets for light anti-tank teams, and proved critical in the defence of Ukraine’s capital. Historically, a similar strategy was employed in 1914, when Belgian forces opened the sluice gates at Nieuwpoort to halt the German “race to the sea”.

Nature’s resilience While a concrete anti-tank ditch is an expensive eyesore that requires constant maintenance, a rewilded landscape is a self-repairing, dynamic asset. Unlike industrialised forestry monocultures with uniform rows of trees, the structure of rewilded forests is messy.

The Irpin river played a key role in Ukraine’s defence of Kyiv in 2022. Andrii Kosenko/Shutterstock, CC BY-NC-ND In 1944, defending German forces used dense forest terrain as an ecological barrier during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest on the German-Belgian border.

This turned a solid American advance into an 88-day war of attrition – the second-longest battle US soldiers have ever endured. Restoring a river’s natural, sinuous path creates wet gaps that far exceed the 26-metre span of standard tactical bridges.

Soft, marshy banks may prevent the use of amphibious rigs. For example, during the 1812 Berezina river crossing, soft river banks decimated Napoleon’s retreating army. Restoring and rewetting drained or degraded peatlands creates the permanently wet conditions ideal for sphagnum moss to grow.

This creates sponge-like landscapes capable of storing massive amounts of carbon and rainwater. On this terrain, even walkers sink up to their knees. Peatlands like these are impassable, even to light armoured vehicles. On the coast, restoring mangroves and creating artificial coral reefs can have many benefits ecological benefits.

And mangrove forests were virtually impenetrable to landing craft in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands during the second world war. Natural reef structures can also ground vessels. This led to devastating casualties at the Battle of the Tarawa Atoll within the Pacific’s Gilbert Islands in 1943.

Trade-offs Investment in resilience through nature restoration is supported by Nato’s new national resilience funds. These include a 1.5% GDP target for civil preparedness and resilience. But restoring nature can lead to complex trade-offs, such as the cost of losing productive agricultural land.

One possible solution is the wet soil cultivation of crops such as reeds or sphagnum moss which can be used to make insulation and composite boards used for low-carbon building construction. There is an ethical risk that designating ecosystems as defensive assets makes them valid military targets under the laws of armed conflict, potentially inviting ecological destruction.

However, modern warfare often decimates natural landscapes. In the UK, coastline management is already changing. The country’ environment agency is retreating from maintaining sea defences and allowing saltmarshes and tidal incursions to re-establish natural habitats.

We believe protecting territory by letting it return to its most impenetrable, natural state is one of the best ways to ensure both ecological survival and national security.

Sam Jelliman receives funding from Horizon Europe & UK-Ukraine Twinning Initiative to deliver projects on Nature-based Solutions and sustainable conflict recovery.

Sam Jelliman is a Reservist in the Royal Air Force; however, this publication is written entirely in his capacity as a researcher at the University of East London and does not necessarily reflect the official views of the RAF or the Ministry of Defence.

Alan Chandler receives funding from UKRI and the British Council.

Alan Chandler is an academic at University of East London and a registered architect, developing and delivering professional CPD to develop sector understanding of sustainability, health and heritage aspects of professional practice. The outcomes of this can be viewed as being politically relevant as established norms are frequently debunked or challenged, but this is not party political in any way.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/the-bogs-of-war-landscapes-play-a-huge-part-in-conflict-and-restoring-them-can-strengthen-security/

ANALYSIS: Global Sumud Flotilla

As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable.
This role goes beyond the US State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information; it includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured.
It also includes the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.

READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla urges probe of US complicity in members’ abduction and torture by Israel
Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture

The US-funded ‘torture ship’
The vessel at the centre of many severe abuses, including systematic torture and sexual assault, was a converted naval landing craft that participants have come to call the “torture ship”.
The vessel is the INS Nahshon, built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding (a subsidiary of Bollinger Shipyards) and fully financed under the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.
Delivered to the occupation navy in 2023, this ship was used as a floating prison during the illegal April 29 and 30 interceptions off the coast of Crete, where at least 30 participants were injured severely enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.

Brutality inside ‘The beating container’
During the vessel’s deployment, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container.
Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalised each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.
“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” said humanitarian activist Yassine Benjelloun, who was also tasered multiple times.

“What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”
Megan Marie Dominguez, a US activist, was thrown into the “beating container”, struck with sufficient force to render her nearly unconscious, then passed to a second set of soldiers armed with tasers and what she describes as “other toys to beat people up with.”
Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on board, described a medical situation unprecedented in her professional experience.
She documented:

35 participants with fractures, including broken ribs, shoulder dislocations, and humerus fractures.
Severe head injuries, concussions, and eye/ear trauma.
At least two individuals forcibly injected with unidentified substances that left them drowsy and disoriented.
14 cases of sexual assault, as well as the systematic, deliberate removal of Muslim women’s hijabs.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” said Dr Jihan. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and the most horrible feeling that I have.
“It was so devastating.”

Dr Jihan: ‘I was punched, kicked and choked” by the Israeli military Video: News Straits Times
American munitions used against civilians
The weapons deployed on board were also American-made. Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI).
These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.
A structural policy of complicity — the weapons.
The ship. The diplomatic silence. None of this was accidental. Former US State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest over US arms transfers to Israel, is unequivocal:
“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorised by law.
“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.
“When this sale was authorised, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform. The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 [in which 10 Turkish people were killed by Israeli forces], but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse — whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

This is not an isolated incident or the failure of a single administration; it is a structural, bipartisan commitment by the United States government to prioritise its strategic relations above the protection of its own citizens and its own laws.
By using a separately constructed, “broken” vetting process, the State Department routinely circumvents the 1997 Leahy Law, which strictly prohibits US military assistance to foreign units credibly accused of gross human rights violations like torture and rape.
While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away.
Demands to the United States government
The israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons.
The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access.
The Global Sumud Flotilla calls on the United States government to take immediate action:

Open immediate hearings into the deployment of FMF-funded military assets, including INS Nahshon, against US citizens.
Suspend all arms transfers to the israeli regime pending that investigation.
Enforce the Leahy Law without exemption or special processes for the regime.
Provide a full accounting of every consular and distress request filed by families of detained participants that was dismissed or ignored.
Investigate the use of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) munitions, produced under Department of Defense (DOD) contracts, against unarmed civilian humanitarians.
End unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/us-built-torture-ship-and-us-funding-played-role-in-kidnapping-torture-of-gaza-flotilla-crews/

Europe is staring at a dual crisis it hasn’t managed to solve. House prices across Europe have risen 60 percent and rents 30 percent over the past 15 years, while the number of building permits has fallen 20 percent.

The European Investment Bank estimates the EU currently needs 2.25 million additional housing units, roughly 50 percent more than is actually being built. And yet the buildings that do get built remain among the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the continent.

Between 2010 and 2024, construction costs in the European Union rose by 56 percent, and the European Commission expects housing demand to grow by more than two million units per year. The housing affordability crisis and the climate crisis are not two separate problems.

They are one interlocked systemic failure, and Europe’s construction and real estate sector sits at the centre of both. The challenge: three tensions, one industry The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector has suffered four decades of productivity stagnation.

Complex permitting regimes, fragmented governance, and an industry structure built around one-off projects have prevented it from delivering affordable, liveable, and sustainable homes at scale.

By late 2025, the supply of new housing units in the EU met only 50 percent of actual demand, compounded by soaring costs for labour and materials and a construction sector that has historically struggled with low innovation and productivity.

At the same time, buildings account for roughly 40 percent of Europe’s energy consumption and 36 percent of its CO₂ emissions.

The EU Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan, and the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities are demanding deep decarbonisation – but as theWorld Economic Forum’s Reimagining Real Estate framework (2024) makes clear, technology and sustainability commitments alone are insufficient without a reconfiguration of who builds, who owns, and who governs the built environment.

The WEF’s earlier Framework for the Future of Real Estate (2021) similarly warned that affordability and decarbonisation would only align if the industry fundamentally changed its business models and governance structures. Neither framework, however, mapped the concrete alternative pathways by which this transformation might actually unfold.

France is an example which shows how quickly Europe’s housing and climate goals can collide. On April 23 2026, the government announced a housing stimulus bill to accelerate construction, decentralise some decisions, and launch a third urban-renewal programme.

Its most controversial proposal would allow F- and G-rated energy-inefficient homes back onto the rental market if owners commit to renovation within three years for houses and five years for apartment buildings. Under current rules, G-rated homes have been barred from new or renewed leases since 2025, with F-rated homes due to follow in 2028.

The question is whether enforcement and finance will make renovation real. Across Europe, governments are trying to expand supply without weakening climate targets. Spain has turned to industrialised construction, using EU funds to build social housing faster and cheaper, while also confronting tourist rentals and a small social-housing stock.

Germany faces the opposite pressure: housing completions fell to a 13-year low in 2025, while earlier estimates put annual need at 320,000 apartments until 2030. At EU level, the Affordable Housing Plan now links faster permitting, renovation and cost-efficient construction.

Supply measures increasingly depend on whether governments can integrate affordability with decarbonisation targets. Four plausible futures for 2040 To address this gap, we conducted a multi-year strategic foresight study with over 30 senior industry experts from across Europe, architects, developers, material suppliers, energy companies, and real estate services firms.

Published in the journal Futures our study combines a horizon scan, impact-uncertainty analysis, and three rounds of expert workshops to construct four consistent scenarios for the European AEC industry by 2040. The scenarios are not predictions.

They are structured explorations of four plausible development pathways, each with a distinct logic for how decarbonisation, circularity, and housing affordability might interact under different governance arrangements. In the first scenario, Giants rule the AEC industry, Big Tech firms and OEM-like construction companies dominate through data-driven, off-site, industrialised building.

Homes become subscription services; platforms set the standards and productivity rises sharply. But affordability and tenant agency remain contested, and small firms struggle to survive. In the second, the Circular Future: a coalition of regulators, financial institutions, and pioneering firms embeds circular principles into planning law, procurement, and finance.

Buildings become documented material banks; biomaterials replace concrete; renovation dominates. Progress on carbon and resource targets is strong, but urban affordability challenges persist without deliberate policy attention to housing typologies and ownership models. In the third, public sector leadership: governments take direct control after market mechanisms fail to deliver at scale.

Binding targets, standardised typologies, and public investment programmes drive rapid decarbonisation and housing supply, but at the cost of private innovation and creative experimentation. In the fourth, the Green energy revolution whereby the rapid decarbonisation of the electricity grid reshapes the entire housing question.

Buildings become active nodes in bidirectional smart grids, and operational carbon largely disappears. But attention shifts to embodied carbon, energy poverty, and the distributional effects of a transition that benefits some households far more than others.

Scenarios for a net positive, regenerative construction sector to tackle Europe’s housing shortage. The call for action What our scenario analysis makes clear is that there is no automatic alignment between building more homes, decarbonising the stock, and making housing affordable.

The same headline instruments, green finance, circular procurement, digitalisation, lead to very different outcomes, depending on who orchestrates the system and which governance logic dominates. This has direct implications for policymakers, investors, and industry leaders right now.

Three no-regret priorities emerge across all four futures: Deep renovation of the existing building stock is non-negotiable in every pathway; the question is only who pays and who profits. Digital infrastructure for monitoring energy and material performance is needed regardless of which actor is in charge.

And new skills and organisational capabilities for industrialised construction and lifecycle thinking must be built now, not after the transition has arrived. The EU’s first Affordable Housing Plan, launched in late 2025, and the upcoming first-ever EU Housing Summit in 2026 offer a rare political window.

The question is whether policymakers will use it to address the structural governance failures our scenarios reveal, or simply add more instruments to a system whose fundamental tensions remain unresolved. The building industry has a decade and a half to get this right.

The futures exist; the choices are ours. 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.

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Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/europe-needs-10-million-homes-and-net-zero-buildings-by-2040-here-are-four-ways-it-could-happen/

During the entire course of World War I, approximately 25,000 American women crossed the Atlantic Ocean to attend to the needs of wounded soldiers and civilian communities in Europe. Women traditionally operated in medical units and helped care for wounded soldiers.

Following US entry in the conflict, the newly established Women’s Overseas Hospitals and the American Women’s Hospitals in France drew hundreds of trained nurses to get involved in the war effort. Women’s participation, however, was not limited to the medical field.

Female physicians and stenographers brought valuable skills to the front and helped the US military in a variety of domains.

In 1918, for instance, the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 trained telephone operators to France to take over from inexperienced soldiers who were struggling to keep general headquarters connected with the troops who were under fire.

At a time when women experienced domestic confinement within their homes, taking part in relief organisations and being actively involved on the Western Front gradually reinforced their quest for equal rights, furthered their political agenda, and strengthened their claim for full citizenship.

Many American women seeking meaningful wartime jobs in France came from a very specific background, and many “hoped that the war would prove the forcing house in which long-standing feminine aspirations for the vote and economic equality would finally mature”.

Considerations for telling the story of the mothers to ‘America’s French orphans’ Any course focusing on American women in World War I should acknowledge the social backgrounds of the American wealthy expatriates, businessmen’s daughters, leisured wives of diplomats, and middle-class professionals who served as doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, stenographers, and radio operators.

When teaching World War I in relation to 20th century American history to high school pupils and undergraduate students, educators traditionally focus on the neutrality of the United States and then expand on the reasons why Woodrow Wilson gradually dragged his country into the global conflict (Editorial note – For further reference: The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America by Michael S.

Neiberg, Oxford, 2016; Neutrals, Belligerents and the Transformation of the First World War by Abbenhuis Maartje and Ismee Tames, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Military historians linger on battles, strategies, and the decision-making process; cultural history gravitates around cultural encounters, war atrocities, and public reaction to the outbreak of the conflict; and scholars specialised in diplomacy dig into government archives, private papers, and conference proceedings to determine the responsibility of each country.

But historians of women, childhood, and philanthropy have much to add to the understanding of WWI. Presenting the big picture fatally necessitates omitting important details, but in the case of World War I studies, some entire facets of the conflict have been overlooked.

Out of interest in humanitarian organisations that operated in my home country, France, between 1914 and 1921, I have recently shifted the focus of my teaching to the plight of children during World War I. Cultural historians have long demonstrated that the French school system mobilised its youth to perpetuate a sense of national belonging in wartime and how state propaganda shaped children’s worldview.

Yet I find that the various pictures of the conflict remain ethnocentric and neglect the silent but vital action of American women in rescuing France’s children. Between 1914 and 1921, thousands of American women acted as mothers for French children displaced by the war.

In 1915, a group of American philanthropists envisioned the creation of Franco-American colonies to rescue youngest war victims from starvation and misery. Twenty-eight colonies were established by the Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF) to shelter displaced orphans from France and Belgium.

All the colonies were managed and staffed by French nuns, but heavily depended on American donations and volunteers – American women. Among them were Alma A. Clarke, a former student at Bryn Mawr College, and Erica Thorp de Berry, the granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard University professor and a towering figure in 19th century American literature.

American women helped to feed, educate, and nurse the orphaned and traumatised children who were moved to the colonies to recover and prepare for life on their own after the war. They tucked little orphans into bed, kissed them goodnight, told them stories of the gigantic country across the Atlantic Ocean, and even sang songs when they could not sleep.

Colonies operated as “humanitarian wombs” and though the survival of approximately 800 children from France and Belgium could look relatively insignificant, they carried out the first humanitarian actions toward children. That same year, in 1915, another humanitarian organisation reached out to thousands of Americans.

Envisioned by Paris-based French industrialist, Émile Deutsch de la Meurthe, the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS) encouraged Americans to “adopt” France’s children who had lost their fathers to the war. Although considered orphans by virtue of being fatherless, the children were not “adopted” but rather sponsored at the rate of $36.50 per year (what would be today $900/€773).

Though the tireless and skilled efforts of the FCFS staff and volunteers (mainly women), between 1915 and 1921, some 300,000 French children were spared hunger and destitution because they were sponsored by Americans. Both organisations drew Americans’ financial support and mobilised hundreds of women across the United States.

To engage donors and volunteers, they organised fairs on July 4 to remind Americans of Lafayette’s role in the American War of Independence, and spurred Americans to contribute to France’s survival. In the aftermath of the war, mourning families and those who had served were moved to support the cause of the FCFS.

The Fatherless Children of France Society more than doubled the number of sponsorships between November 1918 and January 1921, the date the organisation officially ceased to exist. American women’s roles in reforging post-WWI communities In the years after the war, individual Americans helped rebuild devastated France.

American women set up schools and reconstructed devastated villages. For example, the American Committee for Devastated France (ACDF), co-founded by Anne Morgan, the daughter of American financier J.P. Morgan, operated on several fronts. From the Château de Blérancourt, some 350 French-speaking American women joined her task force.

Among them were Mary Carson Breckinridge, the daughter of an Arkansas congressman and future founder of the Frontier Nursing Service; Lucile Atcherson Curtis, a militant suffragette who would later become the first female in the US Foreign Service; and Anna Lander West McDonnell, the niece of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Washington.

Though the ACDF’s initial mission was to combat infant mortality, rebuild devastated villages, and finance the reconstruction of the industrial network, children’s well-being rapidly became a focus of the organisation. The ACDF established a network of public libraries for children in the former occupied zones of Northern France.

Jessie Carson became the director of a new American-style network of lending libraries for children. In April 1919, the first reading room for children was opened in the Northern French town of Vic-sur-Aisne. The ACDF inspired American women at Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Radcliffe, Stanford and other American colleges and universities to tackle problems related to agricultural production and devastated villagers.

For example, in France’s remote and war-ravaged regions, a lack of milk contributed to infant mortality. Funds from humanitarian organisations brought cows to the devastated regions, where underfed mothers could not breastfeed their babies.

In early 1920, in Verdun (Meuse), the American-Franco Children’s League bought several cows, and Miss Butler, the president of the Vassar College unit of volunteers, organised the distribution of milk for babies; at the same time, in Reims (Marne), a “Drop of Milk Institution for Babies” opened, through the efforts of American women.

In short, when it came to humanitarian efforts to shield France’s children from destitution, hunger, and death, American women got the job done. And this is an untold story. American women’s experiences in humanitarian missions in France during WWI are important for many reasons.

First of all, they pave the way for future research on American humanitarian action during the Great War, and complement studies dealing with Franco-American relations.

Additionally, the archives of these associations are a treasure for those teaching history at the K-12, college, and graduate levels, as they contain letters from the women serving in France during and after the war.

These primary sources are important first-hand accounts of the conflict.

For example, in teaching my unit on American action in France during WWI, I invited my pupils to analyse several fragments of Anne Morgan’s letters to her mother, held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

Her letter, dated April 30, 1919 (Anne Tracy Morgan Papers,1888–1952, Morgan Library and Museum, New York), read as follows: “We had proudly repaired a room to be used for the school at Camelin, when the Mayor came in and told us that in the brook, just outside the door of the school house, the head of a Boche had appeared in the water, as the brook had washed away the covering of soil that was over the body.” With all the archives available online and the different tools to communicate, schools and universities in France and in the United States could easily partner with each other on digital projects, along with local repository, library, museum, or university collection.

From across the Atlantic Ocean and from more than a century ago, American women’s voices bearing important witness are still waiting to be heard. 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!

Emmanuel Destenay ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/who-were-the-american-mothers-to-frances-orphaned-children-during-the-first-world-war/

As the US and Iran try to come to terms on a peace deal to end their months-long war, US President Donald Trump this week has introduced a new demand – that other countries in the Middle East sign on to his Abraham Accords, normalising relations with Israel.

There are reasons for this. The US and Israel are militarily, strategically and economically weaker than they were on the eve of launching “Operation Epic Fury”, their joint military operation against Iran, in late February.

Their carefully built-up alliances with Persian Gulf countries are now being reevaluated, given these ties didn’t prevent Gulf states from being attacked by Iran. And Iran – despite losing many political and military leaders in months of devastating strikes – seems more powerful than ever.

In this context, both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu desperately need a symbolic victory they can sell to their respective electorates before the US midterm elections and Knesset elections later this year. This partially explains why Trump is trying to re-invigorate the Abraham Accords, which he has long touted as one of the biggest foreign policy successes of his first term in office.

In a phone call over the weekend with regional partners, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, he insisted their inclusion in any Iran deal depended on all joining the accords.

This means establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. Read more: After the Iran war, Persian Gulf nations face tough decisions on the US – a former diplomat explains What are the Abraham Accords? The Abraham Accords were part of a package of diplomatic initiatives overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during Trump’s first term.

The accords were an attempt to “solve” the long-running Palestinian-Israeli and broader Arab-Israeli conflicts. Since the first Arab-Israeli War and Israel’s creation in the 1940s, the question of Palestine has plagued the Arab world.

It remains the most important political concern of the public in Arab countries today, despite growing disinterest from many Arab leaders. With the assistance of the US, Israel has, over the decades, slowly chipped away at the collective Arab opposition to its illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territories.

This started with its peace agreements with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 and continued with the Abraham Accords.

Before the accords were signed in 2020, the Trump administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, closed the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Washington office and declared that the US no longer viewed Israeli West Bank settlements as illegal.

Then, in 2020, Trump and Netanyahu launched the Peace to Prosperity Plan. While past peace efforts had at least gestured towards Palestinian participation, this one promised economic development at the expense of Palestinian statehood. The UAE and Bahrain then signed onto the Abraham Accords in September 2020, followed by Morocco in December 2020, Sudan in January 2021 and then Kazakhstan in November 2025.

There were many carrots offered to these countries in exchange for recognising Israel, largely economic, military and diplomatic agreements. For example, the UAE secured advanced weapons and military technology from the US. And Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara was recognised by the US and Israel.

Would any countries join now? The jewel in the crown, however, has always been Saudi Arabia. This was purportedly a key driver behind the timing of Hamas’ attacks on Israel in October 2023. The group was desperate to derail normalisation talks between the two.

Since Israel’s devastating retaliatory war on Gaza began, Saudi Arabia has been a prominent advocate of Palestinian statehood. It has publicly refused to sign the accords without firm guarantees of Palestinian self-determination. The remaining regional powers, such as Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey, must take account of their restive populations, who are overwhelmingly supportive of Palestinian self-determination.

The US would have to apply significant pressure and offer large carrots for any of them to be persuaded to change course. Pakistan, in fact, has already rejected Trump’s demands and Saudi Arabia is likely to follow.

So, while it might make sense to link Iran and Palestine together through a regional peace agreement, the Abraham Accords are simply too toxic in their current form for most countries to entertain. The region is looking for its own solutions But this won’t stop Trump and Netanyahu from trying to press their case.

If Israel can get other nations on board, Netanyahu can craft a narrative around closer regional ties as he continues Israel’s destruction and occupation of southern Lebanon in its fight against Hezbollah. This would still be a paltry prize compared to its long-desired aim of removing the Iranian threat altogether.

And it may not alleviate the growing pushback he is facing from an increasingly overstretched army. Closer ties with Arab countries would also not offset the rapid erosion of regional public opinion against Israel. Such negative views are now widely entertained even among Trump’s MAGA base.

The Trump Administration also needs a win.

It is reeling from its latest Middle East misadventure: its weapons stocks are massively depleted the global energy shock is fuelling domestic discontent its Gulf allies are questioning the US security umbrella and it faces Israeli reluctance to any Iran peace deal.

But in a region undergoing a dramatic strategic reconfiguration, the Abraham Accords are increasingly seen as a US-imposed framework. Some countries are trying to reshape the region in ways that would benefit them instead. Most notably, Saudi Arabia has reportedly floated a regional non-aggression pact (including Iran) along the lines of Europe’s Helsinki Accords that aimed to ease Cold War tensions in Europe.

Perhaps Trump is trying to re-invigorate the Abraham Accords as a way to counter the Saudi move. Undoubtedly, he is also trying to appease Netanyahu.

The silence his demand has received, however, may indicate the region is no longer amenable to US persuasion, no matter how big the carrots are.

Michelle Burgis-Kasthala 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/2026/05/27/trump-cant-sell-the-abraham-accords-on-a-middle-east-that-has-lost-trust-in-the-us/

Inflation actually fell in Australia last month, thanks to temporary government fuel discounts that saw fuel prices come down by 7% from their record peaks in March. New Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show the monthly consumer price index (CPI) rose 4.2% in the 12 months to April 2026 – down from 4.6% in March and lower than market expectations.

However, the underlying picture was less reassuring.

The closely watched “trimmed mean” measure rose to 3.4%, up from 3.3% a month earlier. (The trimmed mean is the average rate of inflation after “trimming” away the items with the largest price rises or falls, leaving the weighted average of the middle 70% of items.) Australia’s latest inflation figures will give the Reserve Bank a reason to hold interest rates steady at its June 15-16 meeting, but not a reason to relax about inflation.

With fuel prices still much higher than before the Middle East war began, the risks of further spikes in inflation and more rate rises this year have not gone away. How fuel discounts helped cool inflation When oil prices surged following the war in Iran, which began on February 28, the immediate effect was obvious: petrol became more expensive, soaring nearly 33% higher in March.

The new ABS data showed fuel prices actually fell 7% in April. On April 1, the federal government dropped its fuel excise by around 32 cents per litre from April 1, as well as cutting road user charges for heavy vehicles.

Both of those discounts are set to end on July 1. The government is yet to decide whether to extend them. But central banks worry less about the initial jump in fuel prices than about how higher transport and energy costs are feeding into many other prices across the economy.

Spreading oil price shocks According to the new data, the largest contributors to annual inflation were housing, up 6.3%, transport, up 6.6%, and food and non-alcoholic beverages, up 2.8%. These are essential parts of household budgets, which helps explain why inflation still feels acute for many families even as the headline rate has eased.

At the same time, the rise in trimmed mean inflation to 3.4% suggests price pressures are not limited to a few volatile items in the basket of goods used to measure inflation in Australia. Read more: What exactly is inflation, and are interest rates the only option for dealing with it?

In a speech last week, Reserve Bank Assistant Governor Sarah Hunter warned this was exactly the risk policymakers were monitoring. Hunter noted fuel accounts for around 2–2.5% of the cost of producing and distributing other goods and services in the CPI basket.

Travel, transport and postal services, grocery items (particularly fruit and vegetables) and new home construction are all especially exposed, as Hunter highlighted with this chart. The parts of Australia’s economy most exposed to oil prices, according to the Reserve Bank.

RBA, May 2026 Oil also affects inflation indirectly through global supply chains of fertilisers, plastics and other industrial inputs. So higher oil prices can eventually feed into the prices of imported goods that are not obviously energy-related.

A likely interest rate hold – for now Last month, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Michele Bullock warned more interest rate hikes may be on the way to fight inflation and get it back to the bank’s target of between 2–3%.

April’s softer-than-expected headline inflation number of 4.2% will reduce the case for another immediate rate rise at the bank’s June 15-16 meeting. However, the rise in underlying inflation to 3.4% means Bullock is unlikely to sound relaxed after that meeting.

Its concerns about “second-round effects” from higher oil prices have not gone away. The Reserve Bank now faces a difficult balancing act. Higher oil prices reduce household purchasing power and slow growth. But if businesses pass rising costs through more broadly, inflation may stay above its 2–3% target for longer.

That is the classic “stagflation” dilemma central banks fear. In its May statement on monetary policy, the Reserve Bank revised up its inflation forecasts, saying it expected headline inflation to peak at 4.8%, while underlying inflation is projected to reach 3.8%.

That suggests policymakers expect the oil shock to have a more persistent effect over coming quarters. The Reserve Bank has already increased rates three times this year, lifting the cash rate from 3.6% to 4.35%. There are now signs the economy is softening, giving the bank’s board more reason for pause.

The latest labour force data showed the unemployment rate rose to 4.5% in April, its highest level since December 2021. This is happening as households are under pressure from high interest rates, weak real income growth and elevated living costs.

Together, these figures strengthen the case for the Reserve Bank to keep rates on hold in June. But the rise in trimmed mean inflation means the Bank is still likely to emphasise caution, rather than signal Australia’s inflation problem has passed.

Looking ahead The next few months will be critical. If global energy markets stabilise and supply disruptions ease, some inflation pressure could fade relatively quickly. That would give the Reserve Bank more confidence that inflation is moving back towards 2–3%.

But if oil prices remain elevated, or if businesses keep passing higher transport, freight and import costs through to consumers, the inflation problem could become more persistent.

The Reserve Bank is particularly alert to the possibility that repeated global inflation shocks – first the COVID pandemic, then supply chain disruptions, and now oil prices – may gradually change how businesses and households think about inflation itself.

That is why the Reserve Bank’s focus is shifting from the direct impact of higher petrol prices to the broader behavioural response across the economy. Today’s data was therefore reassuring, but only up to a point.

The headline number was better than expected. The underlying number was not.

That’s why the Reserve Bank will be cautious about declaring victory too early.

Stella Huangfu 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/2026/05/27/interest-rates-look-set-to-hold-after-inflation-and-fuel-costs-fell-in-april-but-its-unlikely-to-last/

To say this year’s federal budget has ruffled some feathers would be an understatement. The Albanese government announced major reforms to two tax breaks long seen as politically untouchable – negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

In response, some banks are reportedly tightening their lending to property investors. And there are early reports of lower attendance at open homes, suggesting buyer caution. The government’s budget changes are not yet law.

But two weeks on from budget night, are we already beginning to see the first ripple effects hitting the Australian property market? And how much of what we’re seeing in the housing market right now – such as falling sales at auction – can really be attributed just to the budget?

Auction sales have been sliding for months Auction clearance rates – the percentage of listed properties successfully sold at auction – fell the week after budget. Despite a slight rebound last week, they remain lower than usual.

The longer-term average rate sits in the mid-60s – meaning more than six out of ten homes successfully sell at auction. The rate has now slipped to around 50–60% nationally, so it is clearly down. But auction activity was already trending down months before the budget was announced, as interest rate hikes and economic uncertainty subdued the market.

Adding to this, figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show both investor and homeowner borrowing in decline since December last year.

Competing forecasts on house prices Based on Treasury modelling, the federal government estimates house prices will still grow – but by 2% less than they would have without these tax reforms over the next couple of years.

Similarly, forecasts by the Commonwealth Bank predict slower growth over the next couple of years, not an outright fall. Previous research estimating the effect of removing negative gearing on the Australian housing market suggested house prices would fall by just 1%, while homeownership for young people could rise by up to 3%.

At the other end of the scale, investment bank Morgan Stanley made a bold prediction: that housing could see “one of the largest price corrections over the past 40 years”, with falls of up to 10%. However, as noted by most analysts, Australia’s property market was already softening ahead of the budget.

Borrowers have endured three interest rate hikes already this year, with further increases still possible.

Why home ownership is still out of reach for many For young people feeling locked out of the housing market, the media storm surrounding possible house price falls since the budget may be hard to understand.

House price growth has been highly volatile over the past two decades, from slight falls in some years to spikes of 10–20% in others. But it has averaged about 8% per year – still far faster than the growth in most people’s wages.

The median home value is now more than eight times median Australian household income. That means homeownership is far less affordable than it once was. Different markets, different impacts Looking to where things might be headed, another important nuance arises from the fact investors and prospective owner-occupiers operate in different markets.

That means the changes could impact prices unevenly across Australia. Research has shown investors are far more likely to buy small properties, preferring apartments over houses. Investors purchase 25% of all one-bedroom properties, compared to only 16% of three-bedroom properties and just 10% of four-bedroom properties.

For those seeking to buy an inner-city apartment, where investors are more active, the government’s reforms may have a bigger impact on prices. But for those buying family homes on the outskirts of the city, these changes may have only a small impact because investors were never as active in those housing markets in the first place.

Over the next few months, the Australian property market may continue to weaken, especially with the possibility of further interest rate rises before the end of this year. In the short term, it does appear that many home buyers, investors and banks have reacted cautiously to this federal budget.

But it would be wrong to attribute the current cooling down of the market entirely to the reforms announced in the budget – as some commentators may try to do.

James Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

James is a member of Sydney YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), a grassroots group advocating for increased housing density in the inner city to improve affordability.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/26/auction-sales-are-sliding-banks-are-tightening-loans-but-is-the-budget-really-the-only-factor/

GoldenDayz/Shutterstock You unlock your phone with your face, your fingerprint sends your laptop whirring into action, you pass airport security by glancing at a camera. Biometric technology has become so woven into the daily routine that for many people, it barely registers any more.

That invisibility is part of the point. These systems are usually fast, convenient and feel secure. Unlike a password, you can’t forget your face. But that doesn’t mean they are without risk. Biometrics fall into two broad families: physiological (fingerprints, faces, irises, even nailbed patterns) and behavioural (how you walk or type, the rhythm of your speech, the angle you hold your phone).

Both forms are already being widely used – you just may not realise it.

Many banks and retailers now monitor how you interact with your device – from swipes, taps and scrolls to the angle you hold your phone, the rhythm of how you move between fields, and the pressure of your touch.

If someone else picks up your unlocked phone and tries to access your banking app, this can automatically trigger a fraud alert. My research with colleagues even shows it’s possible to infer a user’s name and native language from the timing patterns of their keystrokes.

The graphic below shows the full extent of biometric technologies. Those marked dark green are in widespread commercial and government use today – including less-familiar examples such as the veins in your hand and other bodily vein patterns.

Physiological and behavioural biometric systems: Biometric technology colour-coded by use status, from active to still in research. Oli Buckley, CC BY Gait analysis – reading how you walk – is already used for security and surveillance purposes, from venue access to detecting potentially suspicious behaviour.

You can wear a mask, pull up a hood, avoid looking at a camera – but you can’t easily change how you walk. China’s authorities have been using this technology for nearly a decade.

And in 2023, the UK’s Biometrics and Forensic Ethics Group flagged gait recognition for ethical guidance. This is usually a sign that operational use isn’t far behind. A number of other biometric technologies (marked light green), ranging from skin texture and ear shape to micro-expressions and hand-grip patterns, are being actively researched for use in the near future.

A further group (marked red) have so far only been demonstrated in the laboratory. But even body odour and breath signatures are further along than their novelty might suggest. What once felt like science fiction is now embedded in our everyday lives.

You can’t always see this technology, and you can’t always opt out. But knowing it exists is the first step to understanding how much of yourself you’re already sharing. V is for vulnerability In April 2026, financial security expert Li Chang showed Chinese TV viewers how AI tools could extract a celebrity’s fingerprints from a single selfie.

The culprit? The classic V-sign, finger pads pointed straight at the lens. This built on work by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics which in 2017 showed that usable fingerprints could be lifted from photos taken up to three metres away.

And phone camera technology has only got better since then.

In the UK, police have made at least two arrests based on fingerprints lifted from photos: one from a WhatsApp image of a hand holding ecstasy pills, the other when a drug dealer was identified from a photo of him holding a block of Stilton cheese.

This technology can work in the other direction too. In the Chinese city of Hangzhou in July 2025, criminals reportedly tried to unlock a smart door using a photo the homeowner had posted online with his fingers visible.

The attempt failed but the intent was clear. While this kind of targeted, technically demanding attack is still unusual, there are some precautions I would advise taking as the use of biometric technology grows. China’s use of biometric surveillance technology explained.

Video: The New York Times. How to protect yourself First, be selective about when you agree to share biometric data – fingerprints, face, iris, voice, all of it. Most modern smartphones store biometric templates in a secure chip that never leaves the device.

But third-party apps and workplace systems rarely offer the same guarantee. In July 2024, US tech giant Meta paid the state of Texas US.4 billion (£1.1bn) after running facial recognition on users without consent. This followed a class-action settlement with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in Illinois for US million over similar allegations.

So, try to keep track of which apps have access to your camera and microphone. On both iOS and Android, this takes about two minutes. And don’t use biometrics as the only layer of security – make sure there’s a second step.

Three potential biometric weakpoints Voice: This is probably the most casually surrendered biometric. AI voice cloning requires only seconds of audio to produce a convincing replica, and it’s being used in fraud calls impersonating family members.

This is a far more realistic – and terrifying – version of the virtual kidnapping scam that’s been around for years. Establishing a safe word with the people closest to you for any unexpected financial request is a simple and underrated defence.

Eyes: Iris recognition is considered robust because this coloured eye muscle has around 250 measurable features – far more than a fingerprint – and remains stable throughout your life. But the quiet expansion of eye-tracking data collected through VR headsets, for example, is going unnoticed.

Check the privacy settings on any VR device you use, and be aware that gaze data is increasingly treated as a commercial asset by platforms that collect it. Fingerprints: Beyond being careful what you point at the camera, know where you’ve enrolled your fingerprint.

Workplace access systems and payment terminals vary widely in how they store and protect data – and unlike your phone, they’re not legally required to tell you. None of this means biometric systems are broken.

For most purposes, they are more secure than the passwords they are replacing. The question is not whether to engage with these systems – they’re already too embedded to avoid. It’s whether we’re engaging with our eyes open – eyes that are, of course, already regularly being scanned.

Oli Buckley receives funding from UKRI (including EPSRC and ESRC).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/26/from-gait-analysis-to-fingerprint-theft-how-worried-should-we-be-about-the-latest-advances-in-biometric-technology/

Natural selection can efficiently explore a range of options, some obvious and some less so. Justin Paget, DigitalVision via Getty Images NASA had a big – and little – problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight.

The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.

Design using natural selection is based on a simple but powerful idea with broad applications across the world: When variation in replicable traits exists, and some variants succeed more than do others, those variants will tend to spread to larger and larger percentages of future populations.

For instance, early gazelles that happened to be faster were harder for predators to catch, so they were – generation after generation – more likely than slower gazelles to live, reproduce and pass on their capabilities for higher speed.

The X-band antenna for a group of satellites was designed by a computer program using the principles of natural selection to refine an idea. NASA via Wikimedia Commons The NASA team adapted that idea to work inside a computer.

They first created two very rough “parent” programs for designing the antenna. They then bred them together, creating digital “offspring” that shared varying halves of each parent, mimicking sexual recombination. To mimic mutation, some coding elements were randomly switched from 0s to 1s, and vice versa.

The better-performing offspring programs were kept to become the parents of the next generation, while the rest were discarded.

Repeated over many cycles, this process quickly refined the programs that produced antenna designs until a design outperformed a human-designed version – with stronger signal, greater range and lower energy use – and took less time to develop.

It was built, was launched into space in 2006, and performed admirably for the planned 90-day duration of the mission.

To me, as a professor of both law and biology, that success points to a broader truth: When people harness the logic of natural selection, they can often find efficient and effective ways to solve complex problems.

As I explore in my book, “Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic – And Putting It to Use,” natural selection is the most relentless efficiency-seeking force in the history of life. Deepening understanding Ignoring the power of natural selection can mean missing opportunities – or making things worse.

For example, consider fishing: As global demand for fish has grown, industrial fishing has become highly efficient at removing all the individuals above a certain size. Anything small enough to fit through the holes in a net survives; anything larger dies.

At first that might seem sensible: Take the big fish and leave the small ones to grow. But that strategy shifts the factors that work to change the population for generations to come. Fish that mature at smaller sizes are more likely than larger ones to escape the nets and reproduce.

Over time, the trait of maturing smaller spreads. The result is a population composed primarily of smaller adults. For instance, a 2025 study found that heavily fished Baltic Cod became 48% shorter in length from 1996 to 2019. The consequences compound.

Smaller adult females produce far fewer eggs.

In Atlantic Cod, for instance, a female that is one-half as large as a 66-pound female doesn’t lay 50% of the number of eggs; she lays about 4% as many – and her eggs are smaller, reducing the energy available to boost the chances of survival.

By ignoring how selection pressures work, the fishing industry has ended up breeding its future generations primarily from smaller fish with less reproductive ability. That has shrunk not only the average size of adults but also their overall numbers – and contributed to a global overfishing crisis.

Photographed in an aquarium, an Atlantic cod. Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Treating cancer Across many fields, tuning into the evolutionary results of selection offers powerful – and often underused – insight. Medical scientists increasingly understand the dynamic by which over-using antibiotics has helped to foster the rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

Killing off the bacteria that are easiest to kill reduces competition for the more resistant ones. That insight has inspired a new approach to treating some cancers, called adaptive therapy. Tumors tend to consist of cells that vary in their resistance to cancer treatments.

Traditional approaches assume that eradication of all cancer cells should be the goal. But efforts to eradicate often backfire and kill the patient too, because treatment-resistant cells survive, have newly lessened competition, and consequently thrive and expand.

By contrast, adaptive therapy aims to keep the most dangerous cancer cells in check by preserving some of the treatment-susceptible cancer cells to compete with them. When a tumor starts to grow, doctors increase the treatment dosages.

When a tumor starts to shrink, doctors dose less. For some patients, this approach can help manage cancer over significantly longer periods, even if – and in fact precisely because – this treatment does not seek to entirely eliminate the cancer.

The nose of a Japanese high-speed train resembles a kingfisher’s beak. Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images A world of opportunities Other engineers are finding even more sources of untapped inspiration in the solutions natural selection has already designed.

A kingfisher’s beak allows it to dive into water for its prey.

James Manning/PA Images via Getty Images The nose of a Japanese bullet train, for example, was redesigned based on the beak of a kingfisher, a bird natural selection enabled to dive into water with minimal splash.

The result was a quieter, faster and more energy-efficient train. The remarkably strong and tough scales of the Brazilian pirarucu, a fish that evolved among the voracious piranha, inspired new approaches to improving body-armor. A gecko’s ability to walk upside down on glass, with toe-filament nano-features harnessing the attractive power of subatomic particles, inspired a new class of adhesives.

Beyond physical attributes Natural selection doesn’t only operate on anatomical or physical traits. It also works on behavioral traits.

In psychology, natural selection perspectives are showing how human brains – which have been shaped by natural selection to process information in ways that influence behaviors – incorporate some forms of information more easily than identical information conveyed in a different way.

For instance, people are far better at calculating the conditional probabilities of various risks when those are expressed in natural frequencies, such as “3 out of 10,” than when expressed in the modern language of statistics, such as “0.3” or “30%.” That’s because for 99% of human history, information arrived into brains mainly as whole integers – as people, things and events.

In law, this perspective is illuminating such insights as the origins of the sense of fairness in primate relatives.

There is evidence that natural selection has favored the propensity of a person to notice when they are being treated inequitably, to remember who is behind it and to respond negatively both in the present and in the future.

In economics, people tend to value an item they have just acquired far above the maximum price they would have paid to acquire it.

There is evidence that this tendency, known as the endowment effect, was favored by natural selection when bargains were risky in a pre-modern world, a time when giving over one item, in trade for another, might risk getting nothing at all from an untrustworthy trading partner.

But that behavioral leaning makes less sense in the context of modern economic innovations like legal rights, banks and laws, and with mechanisms to enforce bargains, such as police and litigation.

This is therefore part of a larger research stream that centers on the ways that some modern problems stem from a mismatch between our evolved brains and our modern human environments, which have changed dramatically in an eye-blink of evolutionary time.

What all this means is that the logic of natural selection has enormous practical value: It can help us identify problems, inspire new solutions, and recognize when our own actions are silently undermining our goals.

Owen D.

Jones has received funding from The MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Glenn M. Weaver Foundation.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/26/how-natural-selection-helps-design-antennas-cancer-treatments-and-adhesives/

AI can detect financial fraud more efficiently than previous technology did, but it also flags legitimate transactions that it shouldn’t. CardMapr.nl on Unsplash, CC BY Imagine you’re at the supermarket checkout. Your cart is full.

The line behind you is long. You tap your card. Declined. You try again. Declined. You haven’t overspent. You haven’t done anything suspicious. But somewhere inside your bank’s computer systems, a machine made a decision about you in less time than it takes to blink – and it made a mistake.

What just happened? And why does it keep happening to people who haven’t done anything wrong? This isn’t a rare glitch, but something that happens to millions of people every day. And most of us have no idea why it happens or what we can do about it.

The answer lies inside a fraud detection system powered by AI. As a data science teaching professor and former financial-services data scientist, I understand how this system works and can explain why it sometimes fails the very customers it’s meant to protect.

Just as important, I can help you find out what you need to know and what you can do if you or your loved ones are unfairly flagged. A decision in milliseconds When you tap your card, a signal travels to your bank’s fraud detection system in the time it takes to blink.

The transaction processing at your checkout is fully automated, operating within AI systems that handle millions of payments simultaneously, and computes a risk score based on dozens of features extracted from that single moment.

Those features might include the transaction amount relative to your recent spending average; the type of merchant; your geographic location; the time of day; the device used for online purchases; and how this purchase compares to your historical patterns.

Once those factors are plugged in, an algorithm scores your purchase in real time. A model trained on millions of past transactions then assigns each combination of features a probability on how likely it is that this transaction would be fraudulent.

If that probability crosses a threshold, the transaction is blocked or flagged for review. The whole process takes less than 200 milliseconds. ‘99% accurate’ still fails millions of people What sets this technology apart is speed. Financial institutions process millions of transactions every day, which is far greater than any human team can effectively monitor.

Banks also have fraud analysts, but their work happens at a different layer entirely – reviewing patterns, investigating cases, and handling disputes that the automated system escalates to them. To their credit, these new systems are usually accurate at catching fraud.

Banks lose far less money due to card fraud today than they did before machine learning – one of the foundational technologies that power today’s AI systems – became standard. Still, the word “accurate” conceals a problem.

Consider the numbers. The Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans lost more than .5 billion to fraud in 2024 – a 25% increase from the year before. As banks process more transactions than ever, fraudsters are keeping pace, too.

And here is the part that is especially worth noting: According to Stripe, one of the world’s largest payment processors, “false declines” (legitimate transactions wrongly rejected) are a structural problem across the entire industry, and industry research consistently suggests they cost the financial system more than actual fraud does.

These errors aren’t random. They cluster around people and situations that the algorithm wasn’t properly trained to expect. Buying gas in a city you’ve never visited or making a large rent payment for the first time aren’t inherently suspicious.

But to a machine trained on past patterns, they can look that way. There’s something even more troubling. These algorithms learn from historical data, which is almost always imbalanced. Because fraudulent transactions are rare on a per-transaction basis, the model has seen relatively few examples of what fraud looks like across every type of customer.

What does this mean? Research has found that customers in lower-income areas and communities of color face higher rates of erroneous declines. When a model hasn’t seen enough transactions from a particular group of people or in a given situation, it has less data to build an accurate baseline for them.

So when something slightly unusual happens, it flags it. Not out of intent, but out of unfamiliarity. The model isn’t necessarily explicitly discriminating against anyone. But its outputs can still produce what researchers call disparate impact – unequal harm, distributed unequally.

As researchers at MIT explain in their book “Fairness and Machine Learning,” this is a known limitation. A model trained on incomplete representation will perform less reliably for the groups it saw least. The fix isn’t to blame the algorithm, but to train it on better, more representative data, and to test its error rates across different customer groups before deployment.

When machine learning declines a payment, you’re faced with a black box that isn’t designed for human interpretation. Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash, CC BY Why you don’t have the right to an explanation What makes these cases worse is the lack of any information.

When a loan officer denies your mortgage application, the law requires a written explanation. But when an algorithm declines your debit card, you get “flagged by our system” message. If you’re lucky enough to connect with a human representative, they can’t tell you much more.

This gap isn’t an accident. Most high-performing fraud models are black boxes. Their internal logic isn’t designed for human interpretation. A bank may genuinely be unable to articulate plainly why your transaction was stopped.

That’s not because it’s hiding something, but because the model itself doesn’t produce a reason. It produces a number. In response, some financial institutions are moving toward tools that make their algorithms more transparent.

Known in the industry as “explainable AI,” these systems are designed to surface the most influential factors behind a given decision – flagging, for instance, that a transaction was blocked because of an unusual location combined with an atypically large amount.

It’s a meaningful step toward accountability. However, these adoptions are uneven, and the explanations that do exist are rarely surfaced to customers. Meanwhile, those pressures haven’t yet translated into a consistent, enforceable right to a meaningful explanation when your card gets declined.

Challenging a decision made by AI can be enormously difficult, and most of us don’t even know we have the right to try. For most people, the path of least resistance is simply to move on, switch to another card, take their business elsewhere or say nothing.

Research suggests a quarter of consumers who experience a false decline never return to that merchant at all. Some people go further and close the account entirely. That instinct is understandable. However, it carries a hidden cost.

A declined transaction won’t appear on your credit report, but closing the card can. Shutting down an account reduces your available credit and can shorten your credit history, which can directly affect your credit score.

What you can actually do right now? You have more power here than the banks would like you to think. Call your bank immediately: A fraud flag is probabilistic, not final. A bank representative can override a declined transaction in real time.

The model made a guess, but a human can correct it. Do not wait. Set alerts if you’re planning to make unusual purchases: Most banks allow you to notify them of upcoming travel, large purchases, or changes in your spending pattern.

This doesn’t override the model, but it gives it new information to work with, which can prevent the flag from triggering in the first place. Know your rights: Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you can dispute erroneous transaction blocks and request an explanation.

If you believe you’ve been systematically and unfairly blocked, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accepts consumer complaints. Ask your bank what appeal processes are available: Increasingly, banks are building more customer-facing appeal services.

Visa reported 106 million disputes globally in 2025, a 35% rise since 2019, and has called dispute management a “strategic priority.” Improper declines are expensive for payment companies and financial institutions, too, through customer service costs, lost revenue and eroded trust.

The bigger picture The algorithm that blocked your payment isn’t all-knowing or neutral. It’s a machine making a statistical guess about you, based on data that was probably never perfectly fair to begin with.

As AI spreads further into our daily lives, the question of who controls these decisions, and whether we can challenge them, becomes ever more urgent. The technology will keep expanding into new realms.

The rules, and our own financial fluency, need to keep up.

Pragati Awasthi 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/2026/05/26/your-banks-ai-just-blocked-your-payment-what-can-you-do/

Andrew Merry/Getty Renewables and energy storage were pitched as a way to drive down power prices. But the hidden costs of the clean energy transition mean lower prices haven’t fully eventuated. That’s why this week’s news power prices will fall by up to 10% have been gratefully received by the government – and consumers.

The falls are real, though they do not apply everywhere. There are important caveats. The cheaper power will directly apply to customers on the default market offer, the safety net power plan overseen by the Australian Energy Regulator.

Fewer than 10% of consumers are on this offer. Despite this, the decision by the Australian Energy Regulator will be influential. Just as banks tend to follow a Reserve Bank decision on interest rates, energy retailers tend to be guided by the prices set under the default market offer.

Why are prices falling? Solar, wind and batteries can provide power more cheaply than fossil fuels, and renewables have reached as high as 50% in Australia’s main grid. They could have driven retail prices down further if not offset by the rising costs of new transmission lines.

What drives power prices? The power savings are uneven. In South East Queensland, retail power prices will fall by 10.7% and in New South Wales by up to 7.7%. In South Australia, some customers will have a small price rise of 1.4%.

Small businesses will see larger falls – as much as 20.9% in NSW. In Victoria, which has its own separate default offer, retail prices will fall 5%. The average power bill for an Australian household is around A$2,000 a year.

The actual cost of wholesale power accounts for 30–40% of the bill. Network costs – the cost of getting the power to the consumer – make up another 40%. The remaining amount is due to environmental and retailer costs.

In recent years, the cost of producing wholesale power has dropped. This is because more wind and solar farms have come online, while grid-scale batteries are pushing gas power out of the grid at times.

This means there’s less reliance on coal and gas. The role of gas is key, as this fossil fuel has become more expensive. It tends to be used only when demand is very high.

At these times, gas acts as a price-setter for the energy market and the price it sets is high. So, other things being equal, less reliance on gas means lower prices. Network costs have mostly increased, in a range of 5–10%.

The key contributor has been the cost of building new transmission lines, and damage from extreme weather has also added costs in Queensland. Inflation adds extra cost to big projects. What’s next? This dynamic is likely to continue for some time.

We can expect wholesale prices to keep falling, or at least not rise. We may also see network prices rising more sharply, given community pushback against some new transmission projects and slow progress. Without new transmission lines, many renewable projects won’t be viable.

In the next few years, more Australian households will have smart meters installed. In NSW, SA, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland, rollout is meant to be complete by 2030. Western Australia and Tasmania have their own programs and Victoria’s rollout was completed more than a decade ago.

Smart meters make it possible for power retailers to charge customers different rates at different times. This encourages people to use more power when it’s cheap to produce, and less during peak times such as evenings.

These time-of-use tariffs will become increasingly important. For the first time, the energy regulator included both flat tariffs and time-of-use tariffs in its default market offer. Over time, and with further market reforms, we can expect to see more people take up time-of-use tariffs.

We can also expect big batteries to flex their muscle in the grid, outcompeting gas peaking plants and keeping wholesale prices lower. The influence of these batteries is beginning to show, and it is accelerating.

Household batteries, too, may play a role. The government’s hugely popular household battery incentive scheme will let people with solar store power at home, and use it during peak times instead of relying on expensive grid power.

In the messy middle We are in the middle of reshaping the electricity grid. The 20th-century model was built around peak demand – the handful of times a year when huge demand required standby plants to fire up and produce power at high cost.

That’s now changing. Gas will go from providing perhaps 20% of Australia’s electricity to as low as 5%. It will be needed as a backup during low wind or sun days for some time. But the big unknown is new transmission – the missing piece of the clean energy transition.

Until this is done, we will keep seeing lower wholesale costs offset by higher network costs.

But when it is complete, network costs, too, should fall.

Tony Wood 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/2026/05/26/why-are-retail-power-prices-finally-falling/