The UK government’s defence investment plan (DIP) will guide the spending decisions of the Ministry of Defence and armed forces not only for the remainder of this parliament, but also for the five years from 2029.

So far, the plan has been praised and criticised in equal measure. But one element that has attracted widespread attention is the overall spending figures. Part of the settlement that has been agreed with the Treasury rests on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) finding around £11 billion in efficiency savings between now and the end of the financial year in 2030.

This will be a significant challenge – but efficiency details like these are often used in government funding calculations to increase the headline figure.

There will be an additional hurdle for the new chancellor however: there is still a a shortfall of around £4.5 billion in the funding available against the expected spending, even once the savings have been factored in.

This will have to be found before the next general election if the commitment to spend 2.7% of GDP on defence from 2027-2028 is to be met.

Andy Burnham has said that if he becomes the UK’s next prime minister he will not deviate from either the current plan or the longer-term policy for the UK to spend 3.5% of GDP on core defence by 2035.

Achieving this will mean there are various constituents that will have to be kept happy. Backbench MPs will not want local infrastructure and construction projects cancelled to fund defence. On the other hand, Burnham cannot afford to lose a defence secretary in the way that Starmer did.

But if the planned spending doesn’t happen, the UK’s Nato allies may question the nation’s commitment to both the alliance and wider collective defence. Funding defence without resorting to spending cuts in other departments, increased taxes or borrowing will continue to be challenging as the UK navigates an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.

Light on detail Spending shortfalls are not a new problem for government calculations, however. They are often seen in the MoD, particularly with regard to the purchase of major weapons systems. These projects often start without a guaranteed funding stream in the hope that the extra money will be made available in future years.

This often means that money is transferred from one project to another in order to continue progress. But the DIP is light on the details of how these efficiencies will be found. Some of the ideas involve greater automation and the use of artificial intelligence, as well as the removal of around £1 billion that is currently spent on external assistance, which includes consultancy.

The ambition is that 20% of human resources, finance and commercial functions within the MoD will become automated. The plan does not, however, set out how much money the move towards automation will free up. As such, it will be difficult to hold service chiefs to account on this.

When such efficiency savings were proposed in the past, such as in 2015 when savings of £9.2 billion were earmarked, this was money that was required to support programmes like the purchase of new weapons systems. These programmes depended on the savings being made in order to continue.

When journalists challenged the MoD on this recently, they were assured that this is not the case with the current investment plan. In other words, money clawed back through efficiency savings will be used to bolster frontline military activities.

In theory, this means that there should be an increase in the capability and efficiency of the UK’s armed forces, providing more security and protection for the population. This in turn should strengthen the UK diplomatically and give it more influence in global affairs.

But of course it depends on whether the efficiency savings can actually be found – and if they meet the original estimates. Often, savings are harder to find in real life than they are to identify on paper and may not lead to the kind of figures originally estimated.

This can of course increase the projected shortfall, meaning further difficult choices over UK security in future. The MoD has agreed to find around £11 billion in efficiency savings. Neil Bussey/Shutterstock But one very welcome move, among others, within the plan is the increase in funding for the air defence of the UK.

This has been an area of weakness for several decades and is desperately in need of modernisation. Radar systems, sensors and counter-drone technology will be upgraded to minimise the threat from Russian drones over UK military bases and civilian airports.

The plan is a compromise, but one that tries to meet the most serious defence needs of the country. The UK simply does not have the financial resources to create a military force that can do everything, and so tough choices are necessary.

The big question is whether the efficiency savings on which the plan depends can be achieved. Given increasing global instability, the need for action is more pressing than at any point since the end of the cold war.

Delays in decisions today due to a lack of funding could have catastrophic consequences in the years and decades to come.

Matthew Powell 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/2026/07/03/defence-investment-plan-should-make-the-uk-more-secure-but-it-will-need-to-find-the-money-from-somewhere/

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Russia endured a period of violent criminal lawlessness known as the “wild 90s”. Organised crime spiked, with gangs taking control of banks, factories and other lucrative markets. Contract killings, shootings and car bombings became part of urban life.

There are now fears that the Ukraine war will give rise to a similar situation as members of Russia’s army, as well as former convicts who were pardoned in exchange for military service, return from the frontlines.

A variety of conditions enabled organised crime to flourish in the 1990s. Weak state institutions, economic turmoil and mass privatisation following the Soviet Union’s collapse created a governance vacuum in Russia. As criminologist Federico Varese, of the University of Oxford, explains in his work, criminal groups stepped in to provide “private protection” in areas where the state was ineffective or absent.

They provided services such as contract enforcement, debt recovery and physical business security. Sociologist Vadim Volkov, meanwhile, describes the rise of “violent entrepreneurs” who commodified coercion in an environment where legal institutions had largely collapsed.

Russia’s murder rate surged in this period. Between 1990 and 1994, it more than doubled to a peak of over 33 killings per 100,000 people. This made Russia’s murder rate among the highest globally. Russian soldiers preparing for military action in Ukraine.

Dmitriy Kandinskiy / Shutterstock Contemporary Russia presents a different picture. Following Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 1999, the Russian state has consolidated its authority. Putin quickly expanded the state’s security apparatus while reasserting control over criminal networks.

In many cases, organised crime has become integrated into systems of governance, complementing the state’s political or strategic interests. For example, criminal networks have facilitated sanctions evasion by transporting restricted goods through parallel trade routes and acquiring sanctioned technologies via intermediary networks in third countries.

Reinforcing this transformation The Ukraine war is likely to reinforce this more recent transformation. Expanded western sanctions imposed since the start of the war have widened opportunities for illicit trade and smuggling networks. But the most significant consequences arise from the social and security challenges associated with large-scale military demobilisation.

Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has mobilised hundreds of thousands of military personnel. This includes up to 180,000 former convicts. Many of these people have experienced prolonged exposure to combat. Military service does not inherently lead to criminality and it would be inaccurate to suggest that all returning veterans are likely to become offenders.

However, evidence from post-conflict societies such as Colombia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzegovina suggests that poorly managed demobilisation can reshape criminal markets. Research on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration consistently demonstrates that unemployment, psychological trauma and weak institutional support creates opportunities for criminal groups to recruit former combatants.

Military service also teaches soldiers organisational skills beyond battlefield experience such as logistics, intelligence gathering and network management. These skills are all transferable to contemporary organised crime. In modern organised crime environments, traditional racketeering is complemented by cybercrime, cryptocurrency laundering and transnational financial crime.

Even if only a small proportion of military personnel returning from Ukraine become involved in criminal activity, they could change the composition and improve the operational sophistication of Russian crime groups. While the circumstances differ, the case of Colombia illustrates how poorly managed demobilisation can transform organised crime.

In the 2000s, over 30,000 fighters from right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia were demobilised. A minority of these former combatants subsequently joined or established criminal organisations. They provided military training, discipline and networks, aiding the capabilities of organised crime.

These groups rapidly became major players in the Colombian organised crime ecosystem. A Human Rights Watch report found they became major perpetrators of drug trafficking, extortion and violence. Estimates suggest they controlled up to half of the Colombia’s cocaine exports by 2011.

The Russian state is far stronger than the one that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. WorldStockStudio / Shutterstock The Russian state is far stronger than the one that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This makes a wholesale resurgence of traditional criminal violence unlikely. Instead, the Ukraine war looks set to accelerate a new generation of criminal networks that are more professional, militarised and embedded within state structures. However, the Kremlin still faces a difficult balancing act.

Contemporary Russian governance has relied upon managing and exploiting criminal groups. And Moscow appears wary of the broad social instability that would emerge if criminal organisations become sufficiently powerful or autonomous to operate beyond state control.

Russia has thus began preparing plans for the return of veterans from Ukraine. The Kremlin has implemented initiatives such as the “Time of Heroes” programme. This programme channels selected veterans into public administration and political office following their demobilisation.

Although limited, such planning reflects official recognition that domestic consequences of war will extend beyond the battlefield.

Regardless of these efforts, the distinction between organised crime and state power in Russia is likely to become harder to draw than at any point since the end of the cold war.

Adriana Marin 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/2026/07/03/ukraine-war-sparks-fears-of-an-organised-crime-resurgence-in-russia/

Gajus/Shutterstock When a student can’t submit their essay because the household’s only device is being used by three siblings for school, or because their mobile data ran out mid-lecture, they are experiencing digital poverty.

Digital poverty describes a cluster of overlapping disadvantages: lack of access to devices, unreliable or unaffordable internet connectivity, and insufficient digital skills to make meaningful use of online resources even when access exists. According to a 2023 report, between 13 and 19 million people over the age of 16 in the UK are experiencing this in some form.

Researchers describe digital poverty as operating across three levels. These are poor access to digital technologies, poor digital literacy and skills, and a reduced ability to convert digital access into real-world benefits, such as securing a job, managing finances or navigating health systems.

Each level compounds the next. In higher education, all three levels matter. There’s an assumption that young people are naturally tech-savvy because they grew up with Instagram and TikTok.

But a student who owns a smartphone but has never used a university’s virtual learning environment, an online library database or a collaborative document platform is not digitally “ready” for modern degree study, regardless of how fluent they might be on social media.

Yet many universities continue to design their courses, and assess their students, as if reliable broadband and a personal laptop are simply a given. They are not. Witnessing digital poverty COVID-19 forced higher education online almost overnight.

The effect on students without adequate digital access was stark.

An Office for Students survey of 1,416 students during lockdown found that 52% said their learning had been affected by slow or unreliable internet, 71% reported lacking a quiet study space, and 18% were affected by not having access to a suitable device at all.

At the Open University, where many students come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and have non-standard entry qualifications, the picture was even more complex. Students sharing a single device with four household members. Adults studying on their children’s tablets.

People trying to write assignments on smartphones. This might be practical for browsing, but not for sustained academic work. The pandemic made these realities visible. But the inequalities that produced them had been building for years – rooted in income inequality, regional infrastructure gaps and a cost-of-living crisis that pushed broadband off the list of things people could afford.

Some students are hit harder than others The evidence consistently shows that digital poverty does not affect everyone equally. Research carried out in the UK found that Black, Asian and minority ethnic students were significantly more likely to face digital barriers than their white peers.

Among Black, African and Caribbean students surveyed, 43% reported poor wifi as a problem during online learning, compared to 35% of white students. More than one-third struggled with mobile data costs. Nearly one in five had no safe, private space to work.

Some students do not have anywhere private to do their work without interruptions. Bricolage/Shutterstock Digital exclusion doesn’t just make learning harder – it reduces engagement and accelerates dropout. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, those classed as Neet (not in education, employment or training), and those enrolled in access-level qualifications such as foundation degrees are particularly vulnerable.

Data from Open University access modules shows that of students who visited the module website fewer than 20 times, only seven out of 289 submitted their final assessment. Of those who visited over 100 times, 342 out of 356 did.

Digital engagement and academic success are deeply intertwined. A human rights issue There is a growing international consensus that internet access is not a luxury but a right. Mexico recognised it as a constitutional right in 2013.

Finland enshrined it in law as far back as 2010. In 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council called on all states to accelerate efforts to bridge digital divides. The UK is a signatory to that resolution.

Framing digital access as a human right matters because it changes what we think is required of institutions and governments. It is not enough to treat digital poverty as an unfortunate circumstance that universities might occasionally help students navigate.

It needs to be understood as a structural injustice that demands a structural response. Institutions are not powerless here. Lending laptops and wifi hotspots, offering hardship grants that cover broadband costs, integrating digital literacy training into curricula rather than bolting it on as an afterthought.

These measures make a real difference to real students. But universities also need to audit their own assumptions. Designing courses that require simultaneous video streaming, real-time collaboration tools and high-bandwidth content without considering students on capped mobile data plans is not neutral.

It is, in effect, a design choice that advantages the already advantaged. The most important shift, though, is cultural. Digital poverty needs to stop being treated as a personal failing or a logistical inconvenience and start being treated as what it is: a systemic barrier to equal participation in education.

Until it is, the sector’s commitments to widening access will ring hollow for the students who need them most.

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/2026/07/03/digital-poverty-is-holding-university-students-back/

Maka S/Shutterstock The UK’s borrowing costs are higher than the government would like them to be. Economic growth remains weak, and public finances are under constant pressure. All of this make things difficult for pretty much everybody.

But one particularly vulnerable group are the small businesses which survive mainly through continued borrowing. Known as “zombie” firms, these are companies with persistently weak profitability which struggle to generate enough income to cover their debt costs over long periods of time.

Recent evidence suggests that the pressures on these companies are becoming more acute. Around one in six medium sized businesses in the UK is thought to be at risk of becoming a zombie firm. And some sectors are more vulnerable than others.

Businesses operating in leisure and hospitality, for example, often need substantial amounts of external finance to support tight margins, leaving them particularly exposed when borrowing costs rise. But the worry is not simply that borrowing has become more expensive.

It is that a combination of higher refinancing costs, weaker growth and geopolitical shocks could really damage firms that were already financially vulnerable. The current pressure on firms is coming from several directions. One is the sharp increase in long-term borrowing costs across the UK economy.

In May 2026, the cost of borrowing for the UK government rose to its highest level in almost three decades after bond markets reacted to worsening tensions in the Middle East and the possibility of renewed inflationary pressure.

Borrowing then tends to become more expensive for businesses as well. But not all companies are affected equally. Large firms with strong balance sheets (like a bank or a big pharmaceutical firm) may be able to absorb higher financing costs relatively easily.

Companies already carrying high debt and weak profitability are much more exposed. Many firms borrowed heavily during the long period of exceptionally low interest rates that followed both the global financial crisis of 2008 and COVID.

As those loans now mature, refinancing them becomes significantly more expensive. For some businesses, that shift may prove difficult to manage. Zombie apocalypse now? The rise in UK borrowing costs is closely tied to geopolitical developments.

Escalating tensions in the Middle East have increased fears of disruptions to energy supplies and shipping routes, particularly around the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Higher oil prices can feed quickly into inflation through fuel, transport and production costs.

Businesses that were already struggling with narrow profit margins may now face a devastating combination of higher refinancing costs, rising energy and transport bills, as well as weaker consumer demand and tighter lending conditions. On their own, any one of these pressures might be manageable.

Together however, they create the kind of environment in which financially fragile firms can quickly come under strain. COVID led to cheaper borrowing. 1000 Words/Shutterstock Smaller businesses are likely to face the greatest pressure because they depend heavily on bank lending and often operate with limited financial buffers.

Unlike large corporations, many small and medium-sized enterprises cannot easily raise money through financial markets. Their survival is closely tied to bank lending conditions and day-to-day cash flow. But British banks may become more cautious as economic uncertainty rises.

If lenders become less willing to refinance weaker companies, some firms that survived during the era of cheap credit could struggle to continue operating. There is also evidence which suggests that prolonged periods of cheap borrowing can allow financially weak firms to survive longer than they otherwise would have.

Some economists argue that this can reduce productivity by trapping labour and capital in inefficient businesses. The current environment may therefore become a test of which firms remain viable once borrowing costs stay higher. The recent surge in UK borrowing costs is often discussed as a problem for government finances.

But it may also signal something broader about the post-crisis economic model that dominated much of the past decade. For years, exceptionally low borrowing costs helped support companies through periods of economic stress. Now that financing conditions are tightening again and geopolitical uncertainty is rising, some firms may find that survival becomes much harder.

That does not necessarily mean a sudden wave of collapses is imminent. Many businesses remain fundamentally healthy. But the combination of higher refinancing costs and external shocks could increasingly expose firms whose survival depended on the unusually cheap borrowing conditions of the past decade.

If that happens, the demise of zombie firms may start to become a much more visible feature of the UK economy.

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/2026/07/03/how-economic-pressures-are-damaging-britains-zombie-firms/

John Trumbull’s 1819 painting depicting the Declaration of Independence being presented to Congress on July 4 1776. US Capitol rotunda/Wikimedia Commons This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

This weekend marks 250 years since the Second Continental Congress, representing the 13 American colonies, assembled in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. The country had already been at war for more than a year and would continue its armed struggle against Britain for another seven.

But on July 4 1776, the United States of America was born. The ideas that found expression in the Declaration were not new. Tensions between the British crown and its American colonies had been percolating for years.

And the philosophical ideas behind America’s revolutionary fervour were also finding expression in Europe, particularly in France and Britain.

As Tom Cutterham, a professor of American history at the University of Birmingham, writes, the sort of ideas that inspired America’s revolutionary thinkers had for some years “been closely tied to questions about corruption, oligarchy and executive tyranny in Britain itself”.

He points to the likes of Thomas Paine, John Wilkes, Granville Sharp and Catharine Macaulay who were writing passionate arguments against British despotism. Macaulay argued that the authority of a monarch rests on a contract between ruler and ruled which, if broken by the monarch, is void.

It’s an idea which is said to have inspired Benjamin Franklin’s contribution to the Declaration of Independence. Cutterham tells the stories of the Britons who supported America’s struggle to throw off its colonial masters.

Read more: America at 250: the Britons who supported the War of Independence This weekend’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday comes at a time of deep division in the US. There are even two separate organisations planning rival events.

One – America250 – was set up in 2016 by the US congress and signed into law by Barack Obama. The other – Freedom250 – was launched in 2025 by the current president, Donald Trump. The former was specifically established as a bipartisan committee, while its hard to see that latter as anything but a partisan expression of the president’s vision of America.

The situation mirrors the debate raging in the US over American history itself, writes Andrea Loux Jarman, an expert in US constitutional law at Bournemouth University. As Jarman notes, early on in Trump’s second presidency, he issued an executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which targeted what the administration likes to call “woke history”.

Part of this has involved removing or rewriting information panels in museums which, the order says: “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)”. Instead educational information should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people”.

Needless to say information in museums and galleries about the horrors of slavery are among the “woke history” on the Trump administration’s target list. It’s a row which is likely to find its way to the Supreme Court before it can be resolved, writes Jarman.

Read more: As the United States turns 250 there is bitter rivalry over who gets to tell the country’s story With this ideological struggle in mind, it’s vital that the celebrations do not overlook the huge contribution that African Americans have made to their country’s history, writes Jenny Woodley, a specialist in American history at Nottingham Trent University.

Even as the founding fathers were honing the ideas that would overthrow British rule, in 1772 an enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley published a poem that compared her enslavement to “the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land”.

Nearly two centuries later, in his I Have a Dream speech, Martin Luther King Jr called the Declaration of Independence a “promissory note” that guaranteed all people their inalienable rights. He said the bank of justice was not bankrupt and it was time for all Americans to “cash this check”.

Martin Luther King: US constitution was a ‘promissory note to which every American was to fall heir’. But as the US celebrates 250 years since this promissory note was issued, “the ‘bank of justice’ is looking increasingly short of funds”, writes Woodley.

She says it’s vital this celebration is one that is shared by all Americans, or – to borrow from the US constitution: “We the people”. Read more: USA at 250: the Black American struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness It’s commonplace to read of American democracy as “an experiment” or a “work in progress”.

For many of us, just how fragile that work remains was illustrated by the events of January 6 2021, when a mob stormed the US capital in an attempt to prevent Congress from ratifying the results of the 2020 election, which Trump still insists was fraudulently stolen by his opponents.

Happily democracy prevailed that day. But over its 250 years there have a number of occasions when the US has been deeply divided and democracy itself was thought to be imperilled. Historian Sarah Trott, of York St John University, recounts five of the most dangerous moments for the American experiment.

Read more: America at 250: five times the US constitution has come under threat Ukraine on the offensive For more than four years Ukraine has endured a war of aggression from its much larger neighbour Russia.

And, despite the Russian expectation that Ukraine would capitulate in less than a week after Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has so far proved resilient in the face of whatever Russia has thrown at it.

And in recent weeks the mood music coming out of both Moscow and Kyiv has changed significantly. Mounting Russian casualties, shortages of food and fuel and an apparent deadlock on the frontlines are taking their toll on Russian morale.

Meanwhile the success of Ukraine’s drone warfare and its ability to strike at targets deep inside Russia have enabled it to chalk up some important successes.

This is especially the case in Crimea, writes Jennifer Mathers, who explains why the peninsula, often referred to as the “jewel in the crown” of Putin’s vision for a pacified Ukraine, is of such significance in this war.

Read more: State of emergency in Crimea as Ukraine focuses pressure on ‘jewel in Putin’s crown’ But four years of war have taken a huge toll on civilian life in Ukraine, especially for those families who have been divided by the conflict.

Irina Kuznetsova, who researches the impacts of displacement for people in Ukraine’s war-torn regions, details the obstacles faced by separated Ukrainian families. Read more: Ukrainian families have been torn apart by the war – reunifying them is no easy task Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK.

Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/03/america-at-250-still-a-democratic-experiment/

Three The compelling new New Zealand comedy-drama Head Girl, based on the debut poetry collection from writer and performer Freya Daly Sadgrove, centres on three 20-something flatmates living in Wellington, each at a moment of personal crisis.

The six-part series is a bold and thought-provoking work that veers between hilarity and dread, while exploring what it means to understand oneself – or not. Uni dropout Flo (Nī Dekkers-Reihana) has gone viral after reading her shocking poem Head Girl online.

Despite debilitating anxiety – she vomits spectacularly after a live poetry event – she is trying to capitalise on her new role as “New Zealand’s own literary Banksy”. Apparently, she’s the next “voice of her generation” – a clear nod to the HBO series Girls, to which this show is indebted.

She’s also entering her villain era, using poetry to build herself up by viciously taking down her perceived “enemies”, all while trying to navigate her fraught relationship with her wealthy, overbearing mother (Michelle Langstone).

Sadie (Tatum Warren-Ngata) is a high achieving PhD student and entrepreneur who is developing a real-time Māori language translation app – the “Māori Alexa” – using the voice of her fluent father.

She’s caught between a Māori way of being that foregrounds connection and whānau – the app is called Te Tūhono, which means to connect or join – and her embrace of a individualistic Western lean-in type feminism that privileges success and money at any cost.

She feels the weight of her people as well as the weight of corporate success, and frustration at her sweet but dim rich kid boyfriend Djared (Lachie Oliver-Kerby). It’s driving her towards self-destruction. Dee (Liv Parker), the flat’s id, is repulsed by “normal” life – job, uni, boyfriend.

When she’s not nursing an injured hedgehog in her bedroom (she’s also livestreaming the little guy) she’s compulsively hooking up with strangers, as many and as quickly as possible. An odd friendship with Mormon Elijah (Arlo Gibson) might offer a more satisfying sort of intimacy.

The three flatmates clearly don’t like each other, or themselves. When they are not getting in each other’s way, they move past one another like ghosts. Flo basks in online admiration. Three There’s something else brewing, though.

At times the women are hounded by whispered overlapping lines of poetry that grow to a scream. There are dream-like images of the house glitching, or being destroyed by a storm. We are watching a spiralling mental health crisis, and things are coming to a head.

Finding your way As each woman implodes, the series questions what it means to “succeed”, or to have a “normal” life. It finds the clash between internal and external pressures, between ambition and social expectation, to be potentially irreconcilable.

The question becomes more about how an individual finds their own meaningful path – but how can you do this when you can’t find your voice, and don’t even know who you are? The show is very well made.

The episodes, all directed by Robyn Grace, are well balanced and the character arcs and conflicts are compelling. It is shot beautifully by cinematographer David Paul, particularly scenes set on the streets of Wellington at night.

The performances are also impressive. These are complex, demanding roles: physical and intense, sometimes hilarious and often laced with pathos. In a time where reboots, sequels and literary adaptations are cornerstones of the entertainment industry, Head Girl is also a fascinating and possibly unique exercise in working with an author’s material.

It draws directly from many poems from Daly Sadgrove’s collection, particularly the title work, the sad and funny I Used To Be Head Girl Of My High School And Now I Am A Massive Cunt, which reflects on ambition, disappointment and depression.

The collection directly informs the work’s characters, and their intense responses to the world. The series taps into the poetry’s combination of dry observation, gallows humour, vulgarity and absurdity, and then finds ways to express these elements creatively through sound and image.

Art is also a form of connection. Three The series also asks many ethical questions about confessional modes of poetry. The collection Head Girl – cover art and all – appears in the show as Flo’s own work.

What is the relationship between the author and their work? What does it mean to adapt your own pain, and the stories and hurt of others? How is extreme self-disclosure encouraged and incentivised online? How can art help us understand and navigate feelings that are too big and complicated for conventional description?

Art is also a form of connection. For these characters, meaningful connection is pretty thin on the ground. The show offers no easy answers to these big questions – a good choice. Daly Sadgrove’s poem You’ve Put Your Eggshell On the Ground Now Walk on It ends “and I’m always winking / but I’m never even telling a joke”.

The same is true with Head Girl. While it starts in a big, chaotic flurry of dirtbag energy, the series eventually settles into something more pensive. It leaves the audience with some thought-provoking ideas about the relationships between internal selfhood, external identity, and connection with others.

It doesn’t romanticise “girls behaving badly” (even though it gets a lot of satisfying laughs out of some sequences), nor mental illness, but it does suggest that compassion, for oneself and others, is a step towards getting better.

Head Girl is now available in New Zealand on Three and ThreeNow.

Erin Harrington 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/2026/07/02/new-nz-series-head-girl-veers-between-hilarity-and-dread/

Mina Rad/Unsplash Two brothers – Paul Issa and Phillip Issa – fronted court in Sydney this week, both facing criminal charges after allegedly accessing the personal banking details of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The younger brother, 21-year-old Paul, was a graduate employee of consulting firm EY and on secondment to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia at the time of the alleged offence.

He has since been sacked by the firm. Neither the Issa brothers nor EY have publicly commented on the case.

Noting that the matter was still before the courts, Albanese told ABC News Breakfast on Wednesday it was “appropriate that charges have been laid” and that: accessing anyone’s privacy, any Australian’s privacy, is alarming.

Regardless of the outcome of this case, these allegations raise some obvious questions. Who – among bank staff, regulators, technology providers and other third parties – can access our private financial data? What protections are in place to stop them misusing it?

And are there any steps we can take to protect ourselves? Who can see my bank details? Within a bank (or other financial institution, such as a superannuation fund), access to your personal information is not a free-for-all.

Authorised access is generally determined by a staff member’s role and responsibilities. It is also limited to what is absolutely necessary for legitimate business purposes, a principle called “least privilege” access control. For example, customer service staff at your bank may be granted access to your information where it is needed to manage your account, answer your queries, or provide basic financial services.

Members of the fraud, risk, compliance or audit teams may also have access to customer information where required to perform their duties. These teams use this data to investigate suspicious transactions, monitor risk and ensure the bank is meeting its legal and regulatory obligations.

Who else can access my data? Bank staff themselves aren’t the only ones who may have access to your financial data. To provide modern banking services, banks also work with a range of third-party providers.

These include technology companies, cloud service and data analytics providers, cybersecurity specialists and consultants.

In similar fashion, these groups may be given access to customer information where necessary to deliver services on behalf of the bank: for example, to improve a bank’s core operating system, or detect cyber threats.

But, as with bank staff, this access is governed by strict contractual arrangements, security standards and relevant laws. In principle, these third parties do not have independent rights to use customer data for their own purposes.

They must handle it with care and protect it from unauthorised use. Does the bank track every click? Importantly, access to customer data is not unrestricted. It is controlled through internal permissions. Banks typically apply “role-based access controls”, which restrict what different staff members can see, depending on their role.

Most banks also maintain detailed monitoring and audit systems. They record when customer information is accessed, who accessed it, and why. These systems are designed to detect unusual or inappropriate access and support internal investigations where needed.

What the law says Banks have these sophisticated systems in place because they are required to comply with a range of internal bank policies, security controls and external regulatory obligations. Most major Australian banks are voluntarily members of the Australian Banking Association and subscribe to the Banking Code of Practice.

This industry-led framework sets standards for dealing with customers. Banks must also comply with a range of Australian laws, including the Australian Privacy Principles under the Commonwealth Privacy Act. This is enforced by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Broader financial services regulation is overseen by key regulators, chiefly: the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC). Where access to customer information is improper or unauthorised, it may result in disciplinary action.

In serious cases, there could be criminal penalties. How can we protect ourselves? Most of the legal responsibility for protecting customer data sits with financial institutions and regulators. But individuals can still play an important role in protecting their own privacy.

Practical steps include: using strong, unique passwords enabling multi-factor authentication where available regularly monitoring account activity being cautious about phishing attempts or unsolicited requests for banking information. Some banks offer customers the ability to opt in to data-sharing arrangements through “open banking” (also known as the “consumer data right”).

This allows customers to give permission for accredited third parties to access their banking data for specific purposes. For example, this could include comparing mortgage products or managing finances. Importantly, this access is consent-based, time-limited, and can be revoked by the customer at any time.

While alarming, incidents involving alleged unauthorised or inappropriate access do not necessarily mean governance systems have failed.

In many cases, they highlight that monitoring and control systems are functioning as intended.

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/2026/07/02/who-has-access-to-my-bank-details-what-protections-are-in-place-to-prevent-misuse/

A John Trumbull painting of the death of Gen. Richard Montgomery in Quebec on Dec. 31, 1775, during the American war of independence. DeAgostini/Getty Images Strange as it is to say, the U.S. Declaration of Independence has deep roots in Canada.

That assertion may come as a surprise to people in the United States ahead of its 250th anniversary. The common narrative is fixated upon 1776, the 13 rebelling Colonies and the bold military actions of Founding Fathers such as George Washington.

But as I document in my new book, “Freedom Around the Globe,” there is a much wider and often forgotten geographical context. Indeed, it is impossible to understand fully the trajectory of the U.S. in 1776 without comprehending a wider imperial world and what happened in 1775.

In fact, the American Revolution ran through Canada.

A broader British North America In 1775, the first year of the American Revolutionary War, Britain possessed double the famous 13 colonies in North America alone, with many in Canada and the Greater Caribbean – including East and West Florida.

At least some of these colonies had become nominally British in the 1760s, thanks to military triumph late in the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763.

In late 1759, the British had vanquished the French at the battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City, thus ensuring that the British gained this province and a string of French forts in the interior.

In 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, Quebec officially became part of the British Empire. It took British bureaucrats and politicians some years and not a little wrangling to figure out how to integrate French and Indigenous Catholics, with their own laws, into the British Empire.

A major milestone in this process was the Quebec Act of 1774, allowing the practice of Catholicism and modified French law in Canada. Colonists down south, especially fierce New England Protestants who took a dim view of Catholicism, viewed this act – and their new fellow imperial subjects – with dismay and considerable suspicion.

Map of the British colonies in North America from 1763 to 1775.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Pushing for a 14th colony Still, by 1775, those in the 13 Colonies who called themselves “Friends of Liberty” hoped that Canada would “complete the union of 14 provinces,” as one man put it.

Accordingly, the First Continental Congress wrote to Quebec’s habitants – residents of French origin – to invite them to join their new nationalist project. The letter explained in patronizing terms how the English government worked. The Congress acknowledged that there were religious differences with French Catholics but expressed confidence that the “transcendent nature of liberty” could overcome such distinctions.

They commissioned its translation into French and ordered a thousand copies for Canadian distribution. By early 1775, Quebec’s governor complained that this letter was stirring up the population by planting dangerous doubts about British imperial authority.

On May 1, 1775, the day the Quebec Act took effect, the life-size marble statue of George III in Montréal – erected in gratitude for his assistance following a fire – was vandalized, indicating disquiet there about this new order.

The Second Continental Congress, which followed the first after its dissolution, continued efforts to win over French Canadians. They sent another letter, again translated and widely distributed. “We yet entertain hopes of your uniting with us in the defence of our common liberty,” they pleaded.

The Continental Congress urged Canadians to reject “the fetters of slavery, however artfully polished.” Signed by “Jean Hancock, le “Président du Congrès,” this missive prompted discussions among people in Canada. The invasion of Canada As 1775 wore on, force came to join careful letters.

One Boston newspaper proclaimed: “From the friendly disposition of the Canadians … joined to the intrepidity of the Continental army, there is a fair prospect of the speedy reduction of the metropolis of Canada to … obedience.” It was a cheering if jumbled message: Canada a metropolis?

Friendly French Catholic enemies? Allies reduced to obedience? Nothing in it quite made sense, but few in those “United Colonies” – not yet states – wanted to think too hard about these claims or their implications. Quebec was “easy Prey,” pronounced George Washington in September 1775.

He put the well-regarded, Irish-born Gen. Richard Montgomery in charge of the conquest of Canada. Montgomery and his troops managed to take Montréal at the end of November. The British monarchy looked to be toppling in Canada.

That marble sculpture of George III, vandalized in 1775, was now beheaded altogether, to the cheers of soldiers. The next step was to join forces at Québec to take that city and thus the province.

December was not a good time to launch a Canadian siege. However, the terms of thousands of soldiers expired on Dec. 31. So Continental Army leadership forged ahead on the last, short, dark day of 1775. A blizzard made conditions horrific.

Even Montgomery fretted that his forces were “half-starved and half-naked.” Still, rank-and-file soldiers did what they could. Pinned to their random assortment of hats were scrawled, handmade signs proclaiming liberty or death. They mostly got the latter.

Montgomery was killed within the first few hours on Dec. 31, 1775. His men were left to fight for themselves, as one private, Jeremiah Greenman, wrote in consternation as he found himself – like one-third of his fellow Continental soldiers – a prisoner of war.

An artist’s engraving of Quebec in the early 1800s. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The move to independence The attack on Quebec was a disaster. The icy cold was fatal.

Supplies were insufficient. Smallpox raged among malnourished troops. The Canadian catastrophe highlighted the inadequacies of the current system of supply and the lack of American credit. Soldiers, starving and frustrated, did not behave especially well, thus turning Canadians against the cause.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, subsequent attempts at diplomacy, led by the ailing diplomat and intellectual Benjamin Franklin, also proved ineffective. As one Continental officer later declared, “We have bro’t about ourselves by Mismanagement” what the British could not: the near-complete loss of Canadian support.

In January 1776, news of the defeat shocked colonists. Montgomery’s death provoked an outpouring of heartfelt support. Marylanders showed their adoration by naming Montgomery County for him.

That same month, in Philadelphia, an English-born printer published a treatise, dedicating partial profits “for mittens for the troops that were going to Quebec.” That would have been a lot of mittens, because the publication was the bestselling pamphlet of 18th-century North America: Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” The death of an Irishman in Canada propelled many Americans to agree with this Englishman Paine that independence was the right course.

As one put it, “Poor Brave Montgomery! But it is not a time to cry but to revenge.” Paine capitalized on the momentum by publishing a dialogue between Montgomery’s ghost and an American in February, debating independence.

In the glum mood of early 1776, Paine’s arguments landed. Grave loss in Canada precipitated the Declaration of Independence, created with an eye to France and Spain as allies. To obtain the help it needed, the newly named United States of America had to become an independent nation.

Few countries would intervene in a colonial rebellion, but they might join a war against the hated British. As Montgomery’s brother-in-law observed, France was a good prospect for “foreign aid” to the fledgling nation.

Indeed, assistance – in terms of finances, arms and, eventually, soldiers – from France and Spain would make all the difference, allowing Washington and others to move from defeat to victory. The momentum that resulted in the Declaration of Independence came in part from Canada.

Sarah M.S.

Pearsall received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Library for the research on which this article was based. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of these organizations.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/02/canadas-little-known-role-in-helping-to-spur-american-independence-in-1776/

As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a tension between those who want to remember an uncomplicated past and those who would remember that freedom is a constant struggle. It’s a right that must be fought for and defended.

And amid all the hoop-la over the celebrations, the nation risks forgetting that since the War of Independence, African Americans have played a crucial role defining and expanding American liberty. The Declaration of Independence promised “all men are created equal”.

And yet when Thomas Jefferson – himself an enslaver – penned those words, there were around half a million enslaved people living in the 13 colonies. Black Americans saw the contradictions at the heart of the Revolutionary era, and they sought to redefine liberty.

During the Revolutionary War, thousands of enslaved Americans sought freedom – sometimes by joining the British, and sometimes by serving the Patriot cause. They often used the pen, as well as the sword, to link the nation’s fight for freedom to their own.

The poet Phillis Wheatley, born in west Africa and enslaved in Boston, published a poem in 1772 comparing her enslavement to tyrannical British rule. A group of Black Bostonians presented petitions to the Massachusetts legislature calling for the abolition of slavery, using the language of natural rights and words and phrases from the Declaration of Independence.

Ultimately, Black patriots were betrayed by a new nation that was founded on competing visions of freedom. For Black Americans, liberty did not just mean self-government and freedom from British rule. It also required emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights.

While there was gradual abolition in northern states, in the south slavery expanded and the institution was seemingly protected by the federal constitution. But African Americans refused to accept an interpretation of freedom which excluded them.

At Colored Conventions across the country, activists asserted they were true defenders of the Revolution’s principles and, as such, their treatment was a betrayal of those ideals. “The Constitution is Anti-Slavery”, one such convention concluded.

The great orator and formerly enslaved abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, on the anniversary of Independence in 1852, asked: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Speaking to his white audience, he explained: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine.

You may rejoice, I must mourn.” To the slave, commemorating independence revealed the limits of America’s vaunted liberty and equality. Frederick Douglass escaped slavery to become of the most important figures in America’s early civil rights movement.

Here Now/Shutterstock After emancipation, African Americans used revolutionary principles to demand full citizenship rights. In 1870, Black men were given the vote by the 15th Amendment, and African Americans were afforded the protections and privileges of citizenship.

But again they were betrayed, and these rights were dismantled through violence and the erosion of those constitutional protections. As the strictures of segregation tightened around them, African Americans continued to use memories of American liberty.

Black people had always defended American democracy, explained civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune in a 1939 speech. “We have given our blood in its defense – from Crispus Attucks on Boston Commons to the battlefields of France,” she said, invoking the spectre of the Black hero of the War of Independence.

And yet, for Bethune, Black people fought not for what America was “but for what we know she can be”. Martin Luther King: cashing the check of justice It was this belief in a better America that drove many in the Black freedom movement.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 100 years after Emancipation, Martin Luther King Jr not only remembered the slain president’s proclamation, but also the founders who preceded him. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were a “promissory note” that guaranteed all people their inalienable rights, he said.

And while the country had defaulted on its promise, King refused to believe “that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” and so he and thousands of others had “come to cash this check”. The cheque was cashed, for at least some of the balance, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later.

Martin Luther King: US constitution was a ‘promissory note to which every American was to fall heir’. But as America marks its 250th anniversary, the “bank of justice” is looking increasingly short of funds. There is a concerted effort to forget the contradictions of American liberty.

The Trump administration is curating a commemoration that emphasises unity and patriotism, with an uncomplicated retelling of the nation’s history, that downplays slavery and racial division. The Freedom Trucks illustrate Trump’s “Freedom 250” initiative, in which, according to journalist Ed Pilkington, America is represented as a “God-given force for freedom led by Judeo-Christian white men”.

The founding fathers are unreservedly celebrated, with no acknowledgement that some were slave owners. While an exhibit highlights Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, it doesn’t discuss his condemnation of the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom while millions were enslaved.

Black rights under threat Now the US is poised for another celebration of American exceptionalism. But it’s one that ignores the complexities and contradictions of the nation’s founding.

And it’s taking place as the hard-won achievements of the Black freedom struggle are being rolled back, as the Voting Rights Act is gutted, and Black political representation in the south comes under attack.

Just as in the antebellum era of the 1800s, at the height of Reconstruction in the late 19th century, and during the nadir of Jim Crow in the 20th, it is essential that America’s founding is remembered as the beginning of an unfinished struggle for liberty.

And it is important to remember that when they fought in the Revolutionary War (and all the wars that followed), wrote petitions, made proclamations and organised protests, African Americans gave meaning to the nation’s founding principles and documents.

As historian, Annette Gordon-Reed argues, what matters is not Jefferson’s intentions when writing the Declaration, but what others have done to give those words purpose and life.

If the founders did not mean to include them in the Constitution’s preamble, then through their tireless labour, activism, and remembering, African Americans have fought to make sure they too are contained in “We the people”.

Jenny Woodley has received funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/02/usa-at-250-the-black-american-struggle-for-life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

When my feature documentary Motherboard was released, I was in my late 50s. I had filmed it over 20 years, on five generations of smartphones, documenting the pain, joy and comedy of raising my son Jim alone.

When I became pregnant at 38, I found myself single and broke. I was working long hours as a freelance TV and film director. Jim’s father made it clear he did not want to be involved.

I didn’t want my son to have two absent parents, so I quit my job overnight. Like many women in the creative industries, I paid a heavy motherhood penalty. It was more than 12 years before I got back to making films.

For five years I tried to raise finance for Motherboard through the usual markets. I eventually raised £60,000 from Arte, the Association for European Television, to begin editing Motherboard, only to lose it when we could not find match funding.

The film that changed everything for me was Tangerine, which was famously shot on an iPhone 5 in 2014. Its energy and immediacy blew me away.

Around the same time, I came across an interview with director Ava DuVernay, the first black woman to win the best director prize for her film Middle of Nowhere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

Her advice to fellow filmmakers was to stop waiting for the right agent, financier or producer to “discover” you. “There’s no one coming … You have to do it yourself.” The trailer for my film, Motherboard.

And so my DIY filmmaking career began. I wanted to make a film about solo parenting in all its messiness, the highs, but also the lows. I began shooting with my smartphone, almost daily, for nearly two decades.

Jim grew up on camera. I filmed his first day at school and his last day at college. I filmed days out, dance-offs and bedtime routines. I filmed the difficult stuff too: the day I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Jim’s reaction to meeting his dad for the first time at 14 and the rollercoaster teen years that followed.

The smartphone made that access possible. Jim liked its spontaneity and low-fi intimacy; sometimes he filmed me on his phone too.

With my smartphone, I was able to embrace director Werner Herzog’s advice to filmmakers: “Ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.” I could film on buses, trains and in hospitals without months of emails trying to secure access.

During chemotherapy and radiotherapy, filming on a phone wasn’t intimidating and no one ever said “no”. Sometimes nurses even helped me shoot, pressing record as I disappeared into another CT scan. Now I’m developing my second feature, an autobiographical documentary about navigating family, friendship and relationships in my 60s.

I recently read that box office hits are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60. I will keep filming with my smartphone and make it anyway. Over the last 15 years, as a filmmaker and professor of digital arts, I have seen extraordinary shorts and features made on smartphones.

Many were created by early career filmmakers who would have struggled to access industry funding without a smartphone and a minimal crew. This matters because film finance still remains hard to raise if you are not from the white, middle-class, male demographic the industry tends to favour.

In the UK and Ireland, only 16% of the 718 films released theatrically in 2025 were directed or co-directed by women or non-binary filmmakers. This July, I’ve co-curated SMART, a one-day Smartphone filmmaking festival at Finsbury Park Picturehouse.

The festival will celebrate filmmakers who have pioneered this way of working and got their films across the finish line despite the odds. I will also be screening Motherboard, followed by an audience Q&A with my son Jim and me.

The programme ranges from no-budget DIY shorts to internationally acclaimed features.

It includes Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl (2025), co-written and edited by Tangerine director Sean Baker – who won an Oscar for his film Anora in 2025 – and shot Tangerine on an iPhone with a small, agile crew.

Tsou has been producing films with Baker for 25 years, but Left-Handed Girl is the first feature she has directed and co-written. When I interviewed her recently, she acknowledged how long it had taken to get the film financed: “I had the idea in, like, early 2000.

So that’s how crazy this whole journey is.” The trailer for Left-Handed Girl. Tsou is drawn to the freedom smartphones give filmmakers, but what really interests her is their access and intimacy. When she first considered setting her film in a Taipei night market, Taiwanese producers told her it would be impossible to shoot there for real.

“They all said you need to build your night market. You have to hire all the extras,” she told me. “I’m like, no, that’s not how I’m going to do it.” Instead, she shot on location with the iPhone 13 she still carries today.

At first the 20 person crew and rig was too large, attracting crowds who stopped to watch. Only after reducing the crew size even further could Tsou successfully capture child actor Nina Ye running through the shops and kiosks of the night market as everyday life continued around her.

Left-Handed Girl beautifully captures a child’s point of view, something Tsou believes came from the smartphone’s agility. “iPhone captures ProRes 4K image, just like any professional camera, but it’s very small. It’s very mobile.

So we can get so close to her. We can stay at her level.” Several of the filmmakers showing shorts at SMART as part of the filmmaker panel discussion, are at the start of their careers.

Tsou’s advice to them was simple, learn more than one skill. “You need to be able to write your own story and try to shoot your own story. And try to edit your own story.

If you have these three basic skills, you don’t need anything. You don’t need money.” No budget, then, is no longer an excuse. Smartphone filmmaking will not fix the inequalities of the film industry.

But it does give more filmmakers a route around them and a chance to make the work the industry has too often failed to support.

Victoria Mapplebeck 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/2026/07/02/smartphones-are-helping-filmmakers-tell-the-stories-the-movie-industry-overlooks/

vectorfusionart/Shutterstock I recently volunteered to teach some lessons in finance to pupils at a primary school. Over six sessions, I spoke to a group of ten and eleven-year-olds about things like value, savings, cost and risk.

The talks were not meant to turn the children into investors, or to teach them to price derivatives or read corporate accounts. They were simply designed to start discussions about everyday financial choices – what it means to spend and borrow money, to compare prices and plan ahead.

I told them that money involves choices and consequences. That if we spend today, we may have less tomorrow. That if we borrow money, there are rules about paying it back. Or that if prices rise, the same amount of money buys less stuff.

These are not advanced financial concepts. They are everyday occurrences. The children were curious and often more financially alert than I expected them to be. They asked practical questions and responded especially strongly to examples involving everyday choices, such as saving for something they wanted or comparing prices when costs rise.

And the experience left me asking whether children should be being taught more about financial literacy at school as a vital life skill. After all, rent, mortgages, loans, tax, pensions, savings, inflation, insurance and debt shape the lives of almost every household.

A better understanding of how it all works can only be a good thing. The issue is not that schools do nothing. Financial education already appears in parts of the curriculum in many countries, particularly through mathematics and citizenship lessons.

But is this enough? And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that improving financial literacy should be part of any education system which hopes to prepare young people for life and work in a changing society.

A study in Brazil for example, shows that school-based financial education can improve economic proficiency. And an experiment in Peru suggests that mandatory school-based financial education is highly effective. By contrast, if financial literacy is left mainly to families, there is evidence that inequality gets passed on.

This concern is consistent with “financial socialisation theory”, which shows that children usually get their financial attitudes and habits from their parents. Financial fix Of course, financially literate children do not always become financially secure adults.

They may still suffer from low wages, high housing costs, insecure work or regional inequality. But financial literacy can reduce vulnerability. Evidence from US high school education policies links exposure to personal finance education with better economic results for young adults, including fewer debt defaults and higher credit scores.

What’s it worth? New Africa/Shutterstock So a focus on financial education makes sense. It can help young people understand credit, compare prices, question online financial advice, recognise scams, plan savings and make more informed decisions when they start work.

Technology adds another dimension. The financial world that young people encounter is no longer limited to a bank branch or a family conversation at the kitchen table. It is embedded in platforms, apps and algorithms.

Children may be using online banking, contactless payments, subscriptions, buy-now-pay-later products and AI-generated content before they fully understand financial risk. Teaching young pupils about finance and accounting reminded me that children are often more capable than adults assume.

They may not know the terminology, but they understand fairness, choices, value and consequence. These are the foundations of financial reasoning.

If we want more financially resilient societies, we should not wait until young people are opening their first bank account, signing their first rental contract or taking on student debt to give them a decent grounding in understanding the financial world.

It should start much earlier, and governments should be ambitious enough to make financial literacy a core part of every child’s education.

Narmin Nahidi 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/2026/07/02/schools-should-teach-children-more-about-how-money-works/

As Labor parliamentarians fled Canberra late this week for their long winter break, they could reassure themselves the bruises sustained in a difficult budget session were fading. Broken promises might inflict some long-term damage on the prime minister, and the jury’s still out on the effect of the controversial tax changes.

But Anthony Albanese is confident his belated embrace of boldness has paid off, as he moves on to the next big thing which, in party terms, is Labor’s national conference in Adelaide on July 23–25.

This was already in Albanese’s mind when he addressed Tuesday’s caucus, declaring the conference would be “a real opportunity to bring the whole Labor movement with us on our direction”. It would be a chance to “showcase ourselves as an inclusive, open, democratic party”, he said, contrasting the “schmozzle” on the other side of politics.

This week the Australian Labor Party (ALP) national secretariat dispatched Labor’s draft platform and conference agenda to the some 400 delegates to what will be the party’s 50th national conference. Held every three years, the modern conference is a dramatically different affair from the so-called “36 faceless men” conclaves of olden days.

In recent decades, national conferences have become increasingly micromanaged and distinctly less gritty, with a little dissent built in as a gesture to a party rank-and-file more radical than a now quiescent parliamentary caucus. Long gone are the days when a Labor national conference could dictate to the parliamentarians, as did the famous special one held in 1963 over the North-West Cape communications facility that services US submarines.

Labor, then in opposition, paid a heavy political price when its leaders, Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam, were photographed waiting outside for the conference (that included one woman among its faceless men) to make its decision.

As Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno write in A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, “what had once been taken for granted as an expression of Labor democracy seemed now to belong to another age”.

Liberal Party 1963 election campaign featuring ‘Mr. Calwell and the Faceless Men’.

National Library of Australia (accessed via the Robert Menzies Institute) Also passé are the days when a Labor government sought permission from a national conference for actions taken or proposed, as did the Hawke government on several key issues, including the entry of foreign banks and privatisation.

“It’s a pantomime,” rails a former senior Labor man from the left, about the coming conference. Behind the scenes, it might be added, the producers and stage hands are hard at work to make sure the performance runs smoothly, with minimum freelancing by the actors.

And that brings us to the vexed matter of AUKUS. At the 2023 conference AUKUS was the major – albeit carefully controlled – debate. The outcome was a predictable win for the government but the process went through the motions of listening.

Three years on, Labor critics of AUKUS are as outspoken as ever.

A current public inquiry into AUKUS, launched by its opponents, features former Labor ministers Peter Garrett (lead commissioner) and Carmen Lawrence, with former foreign minister Gareth Evans making a submission bluntly declaring: My regretful conclusion is that Australia’s no-holds-barred bipartisan embrace of AUKUS Pillar I is more likely than not to prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions our country has made, not only putting at profound risk our sovereign independence, but generating more risk than reward for the very national security it promises to protect.

I cannot imagine this decision being made by any of the Hawke-Keating Governments of which I was part for 13 years. Times have changed.

Those dubbed by some the “doubting elders” of Labor, together with former minister Ed Husic who had the temerity to raise the matter in caucus, can rage about AUKUS, but as far as the government is concerned the issue is settled and that’s that.

The last thing it wants is for an extensive re-airing at the conference (with observers from the US embassy among the onlookers). On present planning, any reference to AUKUS would be folded into the debate on the foreign affairs chapter of the platform.

That debate, incidentally, is scheduled for Saturday, the final day and the deadest media time. Sources say there’s not been pressure coming up through the unions or the factions for a big AUKUS debate.

The traditional blue-collar unions are now focused on the jobs AUKUS can provide, and various unions have other fish they want to fry at conference. The Minister for Defence Industry, Pat Conroy, told the National Press Club on Thursday there was “a vocal minority within the party” with questions about AUKUS.

But, Conroy said, at recent elections for national conference delegates a candidate running against AUKUS “in the very progressive seat of Sydney […] got something like 25% of the vote.

So for anyone saying that there’s this huge discord, disconnect between the elected members of the Labor Party and the rank-and-file, they’re just not reflecting reality.” Marcus Strom, convener of Labor Against War, a grassroots network of more than 500 Labor members opposed to AUKUS, says: the ALP leadership seems more concerned in assuring its partners-in-war at the Pentagon that they have us under control than in permitting democratic debate and inquiry on what all agree is the most consequential military partnership in Australia’s history.

Wrangling is also underway to manage the complicated Middle East issues.

Well before the current conflicts, Palestine for years was a hot button for Labor’s rank-and-file, with strong support for recognition of a Palestinian state, and efforts sometimes to keep the issue from blowing up at party conferences.

Given the events of the last nearly three years, the Middle East is now front and centre, and passions among grassroots members run high over Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere. Large demonstrations outside the conference are likely.

The recognition of a Palestinian state will have placated some in the party, but only partially. The government’s plan is for discussion on the floor of the conference to be kept as low-key as possible, for example by confining it to just a couple of speakers.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard wrote in her memoir, My Story: when it is good, national conference is a place to hothouse ideas and agree new directions. When it is bad, it is a place for screaming matches between factional leaders on things no one in the community cares about.

When it is at its worst, it is a lifeless beast of no debate, no ideas, with everything controversial swept under the carpet.

One prime minister’s “lifeless beast” can, however, be another’s well-schooled support animal.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/02/grattan-on-friday-albanese-wants-labors-national-conference-to-showcase-the-party-but-not-its-aukus-division/

US President Donald Trump once called cryptocurrency a “scam”. It’s now a major moneymaker for him: his just-released annual financial disclosure shows he made more than US billion from cryptocurrency last year. This news has raised the ire of Trump’s critics.

Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor and a Democratic Senate candidate, accused Trump of using his public office “to make billions while American families struggle to afford their basic needs. His infinite greed is disgusting.” The White House denied Trump or his family has engaged in conflicts of interest.

Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people”. But how exactly has Trump earned so much money from cryptocurrency?

How does cryptocurrency work? A cryptocurrency is simply digital money. It differs from traditional money in two ways. First, traditional currencies are issued by central banks of each country, while cryptocurrencies are issued according to rules written in computer code.

The computer code behind crypto may be controlled by a company. Or the code may be predefined ahead of time (for example, in a “white paper” that sets up the algorithm behind crypto) and controlled by no one at all.

Second, transactions in traditional money happen via the banking system, while transactions in cryptocurrency happen on blockchains, which are databases that store information on who owns what. Bitcoin is the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency, with a decentralised structure and no single entity controlling its issuance or making profits off it.

Aside from Bitcoin, there are tens of thousands of privately issued coins, which run on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana. But private coins, unlike Bitcoin, are issued by private companies to make money.

Transactions on a blockchain can involve transferring many different versions of private crypto assets – anything that can be written into a piece of code, regardless of whether that digital asset has any value at all.

What are the Trump’s crypto businesses? Trump and his family are involved in three kinds of digital assets: the $TRUMP memecoin, a governance token called WLFI, and a stablecoin called USD1. Memecoins are coins with no real business behind them.

They derive their value from investor attention – a digital equivalent of buying a kid’s scribble because it’s your kid, not because the scribble has value in the outside world. Stablecoins, by contrast, are a digital equivalent of a fiat currency like USD.

For example, each unit of USD1 is designed to be worth exactly US$1. To maintain this value, stablecoins are typically backed by short-term government bonds and cash. Governance tokens are yet another type of coin, which give holders voting rights over a crypto project, but no ownership over the project itself, and no claim on its profits.

The $TRUMP memecoin launched three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. About 80% of its supply is held by Trump-affiliated companies, which also collect a fee every time the coin changes hands. WLFI and USD1 are issued by World Liberty Financial, cofounded in 2024 by the Trump family and business partners.

A Trump business entity owns about 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of net proceeds from token sales. Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows World Liberty brought him more than $500 million last year, while the memecoin business brought in more than $600 million.

Forbes now estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024. How do you make a billion dollars from tokens? Let’s start with the stablecoin, USD1. As a stablecoin issuer, you take in dollars, hand out coins, and use the dollars to buy US Treasury bonds.

Then, you earn interest on Treasury bonds. The more coins you issue, the greater the amount of money you earn interest on. So the main trick is to convince someone to use your stablecoin and hand in the dollars to you, preferably in large amounts.

For USD1, that someone handing in the dollars was Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which had pleaded guilty to US money-laundering violations in 2023. Binance reportedly wrote the computer code underpinning USD1 and promoted it on its platform.

Then, in May 2025, MGX – an Abu Dhabi state fund chaired by the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – invested billion in Binance and paid in USD1. This instantly created $2 billion of interest-earning reserves for the Trump venture, worth an estimated million a year.

Binance today holds 87% of all USD1. The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against Binance days after the exchange listed USD1, and in October 2025 Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao. A Wall Street Journal investigation later revealed Sheikh Tahnoon had also secretly bought a 49% stake in World Liberty itself for about $500 million, four days before Trump’s inauguration.

The $TRUMP memecoin required even less effort. With memecoin, you simply let speculators buy a digital asset that is effectively pure hype packaged as a currency. You make money on every trade. And because anyone, anywhere can buy the coin anonymously, legal experts warn that it operates as a channel for untraceable gifts to Trump and his family.

Some buyers openly spent 8 million in memecoin for seats at a dinner with Trump. Like most memecoins, $TRUMP collapsed after the initial hype: it now trades at about 98% below its peak.

A Reuters investigation of Trump and his family’s four main crypto ventures – World Liberty, the memecoin business, American Bitcoin and AI Financial Corp – found the family has gained about .3 billion since Trump retook office, almost exactly matching the amount lost by more than a million investors.

Without precedent Some of the crypto regulations issued under Trump are good policy. For example, the GENIUS Act clarifies the rules of the game for all – something the crypto industry had sought for years. But all the useful crypto regulation is at risk of being undermined by stories of special favours and institutionalised corruption in Trump’s crypto ventures.

It’s also likely to undermine the US reputation for the rule of law, as Trump’s crypto dealings are without precedent in US history: anyone seeking presidential favour can simply buy the president’s coin.

Marta Khomyn 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/2026/07/02/trump-has-made-more-than-1-billion-from-crypto-in-a-year-how/

For decades, the west African island nation of Cape Verde was perhaps best known for the music of late singer Cesária Évora. This summer, however, the Atlantic archipelago has gained fame for a different reason: football.

As one of the surprise stories of the 2026 Fifa World Cup, Cape Verde has captured the imagination of fans worldwide. The team has qualified for the knockout stages after a run that included a 0-0 draw with the reigning European champions, Spain.

The Cape Verde goalkeeper, Vozinha, has also become one of the most recognisable faces of the tournament. His follower count on Instagram increased from around 50,000 before the Spain match to over 17.4 million by the end of June.

With a population of just over 500,000 people spread across ten islands (nine inhabited), Cape Verde is used to defying the odds. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 1460s made the archipelago a strategic hub in the making of the Atlantic world.

On Santiago Island, they founded the oldest European settlement south of the Sahara Desert, Ribeira Grande. This city, which is now called Cidade Velha, became a hub linking continents through maritime trade, migration and, tragically, the transatlantic slave trade.

Cape Verde is made up of ten islands off the west coast of Africa, and has a population of around 500,000 people. PorcupenWorks / Shutterstock Resource deprived and plagued by frequent droughts, the end of the slave trade in the mid-19th century marked a period of decline.

This period continued until the archipelago gained independence in 1975 through a joint liberation struggle with Guinea-Bissau. A key figure in this movement was Amilcar Cabral, who was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents and was educated in Cape Verde.

He emerged as one of Africa’s most influential leaders in the anti-colonial struggle and gained widespread support across European countries thanks to his diplomatic skills. After attaining independence, Cape Verde was declared an “unviable” state by the then US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and thereafter by some international financial institutions.

They saw it as too small and resource-poor to survive on its own. Yet 50 years later, the nation has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to an upper-middle-income state. Transition to democracy Political stability enabled Cape Verde to introduce pioneering democratic reforms in the 1990s.

After 15 years of single-party rule, the country’s first election in 1991 saw the incumbent African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde peacefully transfer power to the newly founded opposition Movement for Democracy.

This formed the foundation for what has become one of Africa’s strongest democracies. Cape Verde is routinely praised for its pragmatic politics and overall good governance, ranking third out of 54 countries on the Ibrahim Index of African Governance behind the Seychelles and Mauritius.

It has the second-highest life expectancy in Africa, at between 75 and 77 years, as well as high rates of literacy and human development. Its child mortality rates are also among the lowest in Africa.

In a country where football is deeply woven into everyday life, a broad commitment to human development has been complemented by sustained investment in youth football and talent development by Fifa that has boosted sporting infrastructure.

With one of the highest migration rates in the world, the Cape Verdean diaspora is another key aspect of the archipelago’s success story. Often called Cape Verde’s “11th island”, the emigrant population is estimated to be larger than the resident population.

Migrant remittances constitute much bigger financial flows to the country than foreign aid or foreign direct investment. This was particularly relevant during the COVID pandemic. The World Bank and Cape Verde’s central bank reported a record increase in remittances of over 30% for 2021 as emigrants responded to the socioeconomic shocks caused by pandemic restrictions.

The Cape Verdean football federation has tapped into this diaspora for the national team. From 2002, players developed abroad have been recruited to represent the archipelago. These include players based in Portugal, France, the Netherlands and even Ireland.

In 2019, Ireland-born defender Roberto Lopes (known as Pico) recalled being contacted by the then-coach of Cape Verde, Rui Águas, on LinkedIn and first ignoring the message because it was in Portuguese and he thought it could be spam.

Cape Verde’s story is not one of perfection. The vast majority of the population is aged under 35 and many young people there face unemployment, precarious work and limited opportunities. This is prompting many to seek better futures abroad.

Despite the progress achieved through the passing of the Parity Law in 2019, which requires that neither women or men hold less than 40% or more than 60% of positions in electoral lists, women’s political representation and gender equality also remain a significant challenge for the nation.

As the archipelago’s independence day approaches on July 5, Cape Verdeans all over the world have every reason to celebrate.

And if Cape Verde pulls off another upset in their match against Argentina on July 3, it would be a fitting tribute to a nation that has spent the last 50 years proving that size need never define ambition.

Aleida Borges received funding from the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP), an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Doctoral Training Partnership.

She is affiliated with the Political Studies Association (PSA) UK, where she is chair of the African Politics Specialist Group, and an elected trustee.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/cape-verdes-world-cup-success-reflects-a-nation-that-has-repeatedly-defied-the-odds/

The “big four” audit and consulting firms face a likely crackdown that could even lead to the firms being broken up, following a string of ethical failures. The federal government has released a new consultation paper proposing stricter regulation of the firms, including increased oversight and heavier penalties.

Many of its proposed reforms are welcome – and long overdue. It follows a series of scandals about inappropriate use of confidential information that have hit three of the big four professional services companies: KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte.

But one big question remains: even if tougher rules and penalties are introduced, will Australia’s corporate watchdog have the resources to properly audit the auditors?

Why the government is acting now Just this week, it emerged that two junior EY employees had been sacked over allegedly accessing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s private bank information while working as contractors at Commonwealth Bank.

That followed more serious recent admissions from KPMG that its senior partners had accessed confidential client information to help them bid for other companies’ work. These scandals come just three years after another rival firm, PwC, admitted to using confidential government information about new corporate tax avoidance rules to help other corporate clients dodge the new rules.

That led to a federal inquiry, which made 40 recommendations for action back in 2024.

This new Treasury consultation paper is a follow-up – and it’s unusually blunt, declaring: In recent years, we have seen behaviour from large accounting, auditing, and consulting firms in Australia that is not fair and honest.

Finally cracking down on firms, not individuals One of the most important reforms proposed by the government in this paper is to finally start better regulating accounting and auditing firms – not just individual auditors who work for those firms.

The inability of any Australian regulator to lay a glove on accounting and audit firms over their culture and senior management has been an ongoing sore point in both the PwC and KPMG scandals. This is the first option in the Treasury paper: that all audit firms, including partnerships, be licensed by the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

That licence would impose audit quality management, ethical and governance obligations as a condition of holding an audit licence. The idea of a licence mirrors what’s already in place for financial services businesses. ASIC could then take enforcement action against audit firms for failing to comply with licence conditions.

That could include imposing additional licence conditions, issuing infringement notices or revoking a firm’s licence. The government is also proposing a new penalty for licence breaches aimed at the biggest four firms, capped at 0 million.

What about splitting the firms? Another significant new proposal is to potentially force companies to split up their auditing and consulting work into separate entities. This would limit the audit firms to just doing traditional audit work.

They would no longer be authorised to perform the more profitable work of providing financial, accounting and governance advice to their audit clients. That work would need to be siphoned off to a separate business entity, much in the way PwC did with its government consultancy work a few years ago.

There’s also a precedent from the banking royal commission, which led to the banks separating their financial advice and wealth businesses after misconduct was exposed. Playing devil’s advocate, there could be an argument against a similar break-up.

One of the reasons why accounting or audit firms have often won consulting work is because they have a lot of deep corporate knowledge of how companies operate. If you separate them out, new firms will need to be hired to perform that work.

That could take time. Smaller firms – which haven’t been tainted by recent scandals – would also have to obtain audit licences. Understandably, they would no doubt complain about the cost of these new regulatory obligations.

If not managed carefully, this could have unintended consequences in unwittingly leading to bigger firms – including the big four – finding it easier to comply with those rules, simply because of their scale. Inspections have actually been falling The success of this proposed licensing system would depend on the corporate watchdog, ASIC, actively monitoring how well audit firms are complying with their licence obligations.

And this new Treasury paper revealed a disturbing trend on that front. This table, from the paper, shows that despite the PwC scandal of a few years ago, the number of audit inspections undertaken by ASIC has actually fallen over the past decade.

The paper notes the federal government’s own Financial Reporting Council said back in 2023 that: it considers the number of audit files reviewed by ASIC to be small, given there are over 3,000 registered company auditors (over 500 of whom are audit-listed entities) and 200 authorised audit companies (of which 50 are audit-listed companies).

Tougher penalties aren’t much use without resources to monitor, investigate and enforce compliance. If we want to be confident that audit companies are meeting higher standards, ASIC will need more funding to do more checks.

Just weeks ago, I wrote that rather than focusing on any one audit scandal, there were industry-wide problems that need to be addressed. This Treasury paper is a big step in the right direction. The audit and consulting firms will hate it.

But after repeated, serious breaches of trust at our biggest firms, stronger action is needed to make them more accountable. Public submissions on how to better regulate Australia’s accounting, auditing and consulting firms are open until August 12.

Read more: KPMG lost its clients’ trust, yet kept winning government contracts. Here’s what needs to change

Helen is a former member of the ASIC Corporate Governance Stakeholder Panel (2020-2026). She is a current member of the Australian Law Council Corporations’ Committee and a non-executive director of Market Forces Ltd, a not-for-profit climate activist company.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/not-fair-and-honest-kpmg-and-other-audit-firms-finally-face-a-reckoning-and-a-potential-break-up/