Donald Trump is a Republican and self-avowed nationalist. That, apparently, is true in an Irish sense, too – even if those terms have very different meanings across the Atlantic.

On Sept. 12, 2026, while seated next to taoiseach, the Irish title for prime minister, Micheál Martin, the U.S. president stated that he would “love to see” Ireland unified and that it is “going to happen eventually,” so it “may as well happen now.”

The next day he called reunification “a cool thing” but noted, “No matter what you say or how you say it, there’s no good answer.”

While such comments may have been welcomed by some supporters of unification both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – or “republicans” and “nationalists” in Irish political parlance – Trump’s comments were generally denounced by all parties, including the taoiseach.

The comments likewise set off a firestorm among Northern Irish unionists, who wish the region to remain part of the United Kingdom, as well as British conservatives and Trump allies such as Nigel Farage, who likewise insist that Northern Ireland should always remain part of the United Kingdom.

As an expert in Irish-American history, I view Trump’s comments as a break from recent precedent.

Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – which politically resolved the rumbling civil war known as the Troubles and achieved cooperation between the North, the Republic, and the U.K. – U.S. presidents have formally adopted a policy of neutrality when it comes to the question of Irish unification. Instead, Trump’s intervention hearkens back to an earlier age in which American presidents were often more opinionated on the issue of Irish nationalism.

Irish blood in the White House

Ireland first became a colony of Britain in the 12th century and regularly faced discriminatory polices, such as 17th- and 18th-century penal laws, which prevented Catholics and, to a lesser degree, Presbyterians from entering the upper tier of the socioeconomic strata, which led to widespread anti-English sentiment on much of the island.

Irish nationalism, which called for independence from Great Britain, became popular during the late 18th century, around the same time American colonists defeated the British after declaring an independent United States. Many Irish had already emigrated to the American colonies, but immigration would increase dramatically during the 19th century as Ireland faced famine and disease.

Irish, and especially Irish-American, nationalists tended to look at America as a model and possibly an ally in obtaining independence. As such, they often promoted their agenda to U.S. presidents.

Andrew Jackson, whose parents emigrated from Carrickfergus, County Antrim now in Northern Ireland, was the first president of Irish ancestry. In 1833, he pronounced to the Charitable Irish Society in Boston, “I have always been proud of my ancestry, and of being descended from the noble race.”

In an 1842 letter to Thomas Mooney, an advocate of Irish independence in New York, Jackson wrote: “That the Irish blood which flows in my veins will never cease, but with my life alone, to beat in unison with those who have at heart the very security of Irish liberty.”

However, Jackson’s words, while likely sincere, never resulted in a tangible policy or action to assist Ireland.

Support for an Irish revolution?

The Irish revolutionaries the Fenians, also known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United States, appealed to a succession of U.S. presidents for assistance without success. Formed in the late 1850s and popularized after the American Civil War, Fenians had hoped that Andrew Johnson, and later Ulysses S. Grant, would support an Irish revolution.

Hoping to benefit from American-Anglo tensions during the Civil War, in which the British unofficially supported the Confederacy, the Fenian Bernard Killian claimed that Johnson and his secretary of state, William Seward, had privately assured him that they supported a Fenian invasion of Canada, then a colony of Great Britain.

The Fenians hoped that a successful invasion might lead to a war between the U.S. and U.K., which would result in a free Ireland. But both Johnson and Seward publicly refuted Killian’s claim. But their need for Irish votes in the upcoming 1866 midterm election might explain their private support.

Regardless of the conflicting versions of the conversation, when the short-lived invasion took place in 1866, Johnson had many of the Fenians arrested for violating neutrality laws.

Most 19th-century Irish Americans supported the Democratic Party because the Republican Party was widely seen as anti-Catholic and xenophobic.

However, Grant, a Republican, became president in 1869 with the support of many Irish Americans, especially Fenians who had fought for the Union in the Civil War.

They hoped that his frustration with the English during the war would lead to his support of independence in Ireland. Once again, they found a president unwilling to assist their conquest of Canada or even their filibustering excursions into Central America and Cuba, where rogue groups hoped to annex territories to become part of the U.S.

Distancing, then embracing Republicans

President Woodrow Wilson hoped that the mass slaughter of World War I would lead to dramatic reform that would prevent future atrocities. In his Fourteen Points, Wilson exclaimed, “It’s the principle of justice to all peoples of all nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another whether they be strong or weak.”

Unfortunately, Irish nationalists such as John Devoy, excited at the prospect of British decolonization, soon discovered that Wilson’s vision of self-determination was far less universal than he had implied.

Supporting their wartime British ally, Wilson and the U.S. declined to support the Irish nationalists during the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921. In 1922, the Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State – now the Republic – and partitioned it from Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom. After a brief civil war in Ireland between pro-treaty and anti-treaty forces, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge established relations with the Free State government in Dublin, infuriating the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army.

John F. Kennedy, the president most associated with his Irish ancestry and the first sitting president to visit Ireland in 1963, mostly avoided the question of unification as president – although he was quite outspoken in favor as a senator. But he did note to the Irish parliament, “No people ever believed more deeply in the cause of Irish freedom than the people of the United States.”

During the Cold War, U.S. presidents were reticent to support Irish unification in order not to upset their British allies. But after the Cold War, President Bill Clinton invited Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein – widely seen as the political arm of the IRA – to visit the White House, despite the protests of British Prime Minister John Major.

Eventually, Clinton would become an important part of the process that led to the Good Friday Agreement, partially due to his avowed neutrality on the question of unification. Presidents since have continued to adopt a policy of neutrality.

Toward reunification? Perhaps not

Trump, who has been compared to Andrew Jackson for his lack of conventional diplomacy, perhaps unsurprisingly has now agreed with Jackson that Irish independence would be good for the Irish people.

Although unlikely familiar with this history, he has perhaps unintentionally sided with past presidents as well as the people who live on the island. In a recent European Union poll, 63% of people in Northern Ireland said they would vote for unification, while 59% of the people in the Republic would support it.

Still, 29% of the Northern Irish and 22% of the Republic oppose it. And given the vocal opposition of the British government, unification is not likely to happen soon, no matter what the U.S. president wants.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/trumps-thumbs-up-to-irish-reunification-breaks-with-precedent-but-evokes-earlier-age-of-white-house-support/

Australia is in the middle of a data centre construction boom. Driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and growing demand for digital services, global technology companies are expected to invest up to A$150 billion in Australian data centres by 2030.

The scale of the investment is hard to ignore. However, a more important question is whether Australia will benefit from higher productivity and economic growth, or simply from a brief construction boom.

Data centres can create jobs, strengthen digital infrastructure and support AI development. But they can also put pressure on housing, electricity networks and skilled labour.

Data centres have existed for decades. But something has changed, and this essential infrastructure is now at the centre of a major policy debate.

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on data centres – what they are, why we need them, and why they’re suddenly so controversial.

Why is Australia a favoured location?

Data centres are packed with computers that store, process and move digital information, the backbone of cloud computing. In theory, they can be built anywhere, so why does big tech have Australia in its sights?

Australia offers several advantages for global technology firms. It is politically stable, has strong institutions, and sits close to the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region.

The direct economic benefits are significant. Construction projects create work for engineers, electricians and builders. They also increase demand for materials, electricity infrastructure and specialised equipment.

Yet the boost to economic growth may be smaller than the headline investment figures suggest.

A large share of the spending goes towards imported goods, rather than production in Australia: servers, processors, chips and networking equipment. That means much of the money leaves Australia and does not reach the local economy.

The hidden costs of the boom

Every major investment boom comes with trade-offs. One of the biggest risks is competition for construction labour. Data centres require many of the same workers needed to build houses, roads and renewable energy infrastructure.

Australia already faces shortages of up to 72,000 electricians, engineers and skilled trades. There are media reports that electricians with just two years’ experience are being offered salaries of $200,000 a year to work on data centres.

If data centres hire more of these workers, labour costs could rise across the economy. Housing projects may become more expensive, infrastructure projects could face delays and renewable energy developments may struggle to secure workers.

This matters because housing affordability remains one of Australia’s biggest economic challenges.

Power, water and land are also under pressure

As more data centres are built, demand for electricity and water will increase. If supply doesn’t keep pace, prices could rise for households and businesses.

Land use is another challenge. Some sites allocated for data centres might otherwise have been used for housing, logistics facilities or other productive purposes.

These costs do not necessarily outweigh the benefits. But they form part of the economic trade-offs policymakers need to consider.

The inflation risk

The Reserve Bank of Australia has raised concerns about capacity pressures in the Australian economy and noted data centres could contribute to inflation in several ways.

First, stronger competition for skilled workers may push wages higher in construction and related industries.

Second, increased demand for construction materials could drive up project costs across and increase prices in the economy.

Third, a large inflow of investment can add to demand at a time when policymakers are trying to keep inflation under control. These factors could make it harder for the Reserve Bank to bring down inflation, which is well above the 2-3% target band.

A surge in copper

Data centres also use large quantities of copper for cables, power systems and cooling equipment. As data centres are built around the world, demand for copper is expected to grow. S&P Global forecasts that total global copper demand will surge by around 50%, climbing from 28 million metric tonnes in 2025 to 42 million metric tonnes by 2040.

Higher copper prices will benefit Australia’s miners. Indeed, BHP, the world’s largest copper producer, said last month copper contributed more than half of its earnings for the first time, overtaking iron ore, as the price of copper surged almost 50% in the year.

But there is also a downside. More expensive copper raises costs for domestic construction projects, electricity networks and renewable energy developments.

This highlights a broader theme of the data centre boom: the same economic trend can create gains for some industries while imposing costs on others.

Who captures the value?

Perhaps the most important question is who captures the value data centres create.

Owning the buildings does not necessarily mean owning the technology. Many data centres are operated by multinational companies that also control the software, intellectual property and AI systems running inside them.

If Australia hosts the infrastructure but develops few local AI-related capabilities, much of the long-term value may flow overseas. As assistant minister for the digital economy, Andrew Charlton said recently:

Simply building data centres in Australia does not necessarily mean that Australia captures the economics of AI. We can supply the land. We can supply the electricity. We can host the machines. And still find that much of the value […] flows offshore.

The biggest gains are likely to come from building domestic expertise in AI, software development and digital services.

How do we maximise the benefits?

The key policy question is how to maximise the benefits of data centres while minimising the costs.

This means expanding the supply of skilled workers, electricity infrastructure and industrial land so that construction does not crowd out housing, renewable energy and other important investments.

Training more electricians, engineers and technical specialists will be part of the solution. But training takes time. In the short term, carefully targeted migration policies may help ease labour shortages in critical occupations.

Australia’s data centre boom brings investment, jobs and the promise of a sophisticated digital economy, but it also creates new pressures on housing, energy and skilled workers.

The real challenge for policymakers is ensuring Australia captures enough of the value these investments create.

If governments strike the right balance with their policies, the current boom could boost productivity and strengthen Australia’s position in the global digital economy. However, if they do not, Australia may find that the benefits of the construction boom are fewer than the investment figures suggest.

Jak Kakhkharov 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/2026/09/15/australias-data-centre-build-out-carries-risks-for-the-economy-and-inflation/

Certain taxonomic debates resurface time and again.

When does a pond become a lake, or a sea an ocean? When does a cup become a bowl? And when does a dialect become a language?

Similar debates rage on in the food forums, including the age-old question: what’s the difference between pasta and noodles? Can you really compare ramen with spaghetti, or penne with pad thai?

At first glance, “noodles versus pasta” might seem like a frivolous variant of the East–West power struggle. But it turns out a lot of people have a lot to say on the matter.

When foods defy categorisation

As food around the world globalises, the link between authentic and fusion food continues to blur.

In many contemporary recipes, “pasta” and “noodles” can be used interchangeably. This fluidity has allowed for the emergence of a kind of third-culture cuisine.

The language we use can also blur these lines. For example, “vermicelli” (which translates to “little worms” in Italian) was originally the name given to a certain shape of pasta made from durum flour and water (and sometimes eggs). But it’s now also used to refer to noodles made from rice flour, or “glass” mung bean flour noodles – both of which feature in various Asian dishes.

And let’s not forget other cultures that have their own types of noodles, such as Germany’s EU-protected Swabian spätzle.

Marco Polo: the myth, the man, the misinterpreted

Perhaps it’s a matter of origin stories – a simple case of which one came first?

Physical evidence for noodles can be traced back traced to ancient China, as far back as 4,000 years ago.

Pasta came much later, with a flurry of myths surrounding its origins. Arguably the most famous of these is that Marco Polo came across noodles in China and brought it back to Italy as pasta in the late 13th century.

This confusion partly arose from a misinterpretation of his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, in which he references a tree that produces a starchy food akin to pasta. Historians now think this was the sago palm, and that he mentioned it because it reminded him of pasta, which already existed back in Italy.

The myth is also attributable to a 1929 American marketing campaign in a trade magazine called The Macaroni Journal. It claimed one of Marco Polo’s sailors named Spaghetti obtained dough from China and turned it into pasta by cutting it into thin ribbons and boiling it in seawater.

This entire story is false. The first use of the word spaghetti was only recorded in the 19th century.

Instead, it’s likely Mediterranean trade routes from North Africa introduced itriya – the Arabic word for dried dough strips made from semolina – to Sicily in the mid-12th century, after which the Sicilians began to produce and export pasta.

Durum against the world

Even within Italy, the way pasta is classified has been contested.

In 1967, the Italian government passed a “purity law” that required pasta – including pasta imported from other countries – to contain only hard durum wheat. Durum wheat, which can be milled into semolina, yields a firmer dough that’s perfect for al dente pasta.

But these strict import restrictions were loosened following a 1988 legal battle, in which the European Court of Justice ruled Italy could not block the import of mixed-wheat pasta legally produced elsewhere.

Still, the Italians retained their commitment to using durum domestically. While fresh Italian pasta can now be made from bread wheat, all dry commercial pasta must still be made from durum.

Why do we care about labelling our food?

On one hand, it can be fun and amusing to engage in friendly debates like “is a hot dog a sandwich?”. Well, if you subscribe to the “cube rule” in the tweet below, you could even argue it’s a taco.

These taxonomic topics can get serious, though, like in 1893 when the US Supreme court ruled tomatoes to be a vegetable – and therefore subject to tariffs. Australia’s own tariff classification system agrees.

These debates can also influence our understanding of culture, identity and belonging — including which cultures command higher status and economic value.

In Australia, influential food awards are more likely to bestow accolades upon Italian cuisine, compared to Asian.

This feeds into a greater food hierarchy that allows restaurants with certain cuisines to charge higher prices than others.

Even with the introduction of Michelin-recognised ramen shops and hawker stalls in Australia, people are all too ready to drop $35 on a bowl of handmade Italian pasta, while still expecting cheap hand-pulled Chinese noodles.

Which cuisines reign supreme?

Perceptions are changing, however. High-end Chinese food in particular is having a moment, with restaurateur “Big” Sam Young awarded Gourmet Traveller’s 2026 Restaurant Personality of the Year.

Both pasta and noodles require artistry and skill. Ingredients are expensive for everyone, and restaurants nationwide are going through tough times. Both should be equally deserving of our dollars and recognition.

Be it pasta or noodle, the alchemy of flour and water produces something undeniably delicious.

Dianne Ma 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/2026/09/15/is-pasta-a-type-of-noodle-the-surprisingly-serious-debate-over-two-beloved-carbs/

The Scottish historian William Dalrymple recently argued that Big Tech has become the 21st-century equivalent of Britain’s famous East India Company.

It’s a comparison less fanciful than it might sound. At its height in the early 19th century, the East India Company controlled territory, collected taxes and fielded an army larger than Britain’s.

Today’s technology corporations may not have private armies or formally delegated sovereignty, but they control digital territories on which markets, communication and increasingly artificial intelligence depend.

There, they decide who may enter, what can be seen and the rules by which people and businesses participate.

Dalrymple asks what history can teach us about bringing such corporations under control. My recent research starts one step earlier: what is it about the corporate form itself that allows such power to accumulate and endure?

The legal machinery hiding in plain sight

Debate about Big Tech or corporate overreach usually begins after power has already accumulated.

Competition law addresses monopoly. Privacy law responds to surveillance and data extraction. Platform regulation tackles gatekeeping. All are necessary, but they mostly overlook the branch of law that creates the institutions they seek to regulate: corporate law.

Within corporate law, the significance of incorporation is often minimised.

Incorporation does something remarkable: it creates an artificial person. Like a human being, this legal creation can own property and enter into contracts. As with Theseus’s ship, its identity can endure even when every constituent part has been replaced.

In a business corporation, capital contributed by investors becomes its property. Investors receive shares, but don’t own its underlying assets. Shareholders can sell their shares and leave, while the corporate fund can keep growing for as long as the corporation exists.

Notably, a corporation can itself own capital – capital owning capital – as well as other corporations.

Subsidiaries can sit within wider corporate groups, allowing capital and control to expand while assets and liabilities remain legally partitioned. The result is an institutional structure capable of accumulating resources and pursuing objectives across generations.

Incorporation alone, of course, does not explain big tech’s dominance. Data, network effects, intellectual property, finance, technological design and political choices all play a part.

But the corporate form acts as a multiplier, allowing these advantages to accumulate and persist over time. Its distinctive superpower is not simply the accumulation of existing capital.

It can identify resources such as data, turn them into new forms of capital, and use that capital recursively to create still more value.

History (sometimes) repeats

The East India Company was chartered in 1600, acquiring permanent capital in 1657.

This attached investor capital to an enduring corporate person, allowing wealth to accumulate. By 1701 its governor, Josiah Child, could describe the company as a “Fund of Wealth”.

Its later territorial and governmental powers were delegated by the state, but its corporate structure allowed them to accumulate within a single continuing institution.

During America’s Gilded Age, corporations amassed capital and brought railways and other essential infrastructure under their control. American legal scholar Herbert Hovenkamp wrote that corporate law had “unleashed a power it could no longer control”.

The antitrust law that emerged in response sat outside the corporate law that had enabled these companies to grow.

Big Tech has again demonstrated the power of the corporate form. A dominant platform is not merely a participant in a market. It may own the marketplace, compete against businesses using it and write the rules for everyone involved.

Its power is not formally sovereign, as the East India Company’s became, but is produced through ownership, contracts, code, network effects and state acquiescence.

Like the East India Company, Big Tech corporations have used the corporate form to create new types of capital. For Big Tech, it is data. For the East India Company, colonisation turned India itself – its land, labour, revenues and trade – into capital.

Where corporate law can help

Competition, privacy and AI regulation remain indispensable responses to corporate overreach. But regulation need not wait until that power manifests as misconduct.

If incorporation law helps create and maintain these institutions, it can also place conditions on how they operate.

Legal scholar and former US Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has argued for structural separation: a dominant platform should not both operate essential infrastructure and compete on it.

Separation must address ownership as well as conduct. Moving the competing business into a subsidiary would not solve the conflict if the same corporate group controlled both.

Law could also make platform corporations that control essential digital infrastructure subject to public-governance duties.

These could include non-discriminatory access, transparent rule-making and protection against the commercial use of data obtained from dependent businesses.

They could also give people whose livelihoods depend on a platform some representation in how it is governed.

Such obligations should follow access to a market, not merely the jurisdiction in which a company chooses to incorporate.

Corporations can create enormous value at scale. The corporation is one of humanity’s great social inventions.

For that reason, regulatory interventions should use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. The challenge is to distinguish productive growth from the concentration of infrastructure, commercial activity and accumulated capital within the same artificial person.

Dalrymple’s history and the first Gilded Age demonstrate that states can curb extraordinarily powerful corporations.

But incorporation law points to something more fundamental: corporations are privately initiated but state-constituted institutions.

They are artificial persons we create. If incorporation law helped unleash their power, it can also reshape them to serve more than the gilded few.

Susan Watson 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/2026/09/15/incorporation-law-gave-big-tech-state-like-power-can-it-now-help-rein-it-in/

Editor’s note: This piece is adapted from Carry Your Heart: Indigenous Helping Wisdom and the Science of Psychological Flexibility by Louis Busch, released on Sept. 15, 2026. Copyright © 2026 Louis Busch. Published by Simon & Schuster Canada, a division of Simon & Schuster. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

BOMGIIZHIK (Isaac Murdoch)

At Nimkii Aazhibikoong, a culture camp deep in the woods on the north shore of Lake Huron, we find Isaac Murdoch, also known as Bomgiizhik of the Great Lakes by the many learners who listen to his stories and teachings each night. Isaac is a Fish Clan member of Serpent River First Nation, a gifted artist, musician, storyteller, environmentalist, activist and ceremonial conductor, but these words don’t really capture the entity that is Isaac Murdoch.

He is a force of nature who is constantly in some act of relationship-building and creative design, whether it be chopping wood for the new lodge he is building for a youth retreat or painting a mural on the pavement of Wall Street in New York City in protest of extractive industries. Nimkii Aazhibikoong is a testament to Isaac’s vision, as he is one of the founders of the camp that offers language immersion, land-based living and learning programs, storytelling and Ceremony.

As we sit by the fire, sipping strong percolated coffee, I am struck by the amount of knowledge that Isaac’s head holds. He is a fountain of information on art, music, history, the Ojibwe language, ancient pictographs, politics and bushcraft. He also carries what seems like an infinite number of stories, which have been passed down to him through the oral tradition. Most striking of all, however, are Isaac’s insights into the human condition, into the nature of suffering, and about the path of the good life.

Isaac’s own life is an incredible story on the capacity of human beings to heal after immense hardship. Isaac grew up in the bush with his family, living off the land until he and his siblings were apprehended by Indian agents and forced onto the reserve. Isaac’s mother died shortly after her children were taken from her. Like many First Nations Peoples on Turtle Island, Isaac has lost many family members to violence, overdose and suicide.

Isaac is open about his experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and shares his story to encourage men with similar experiences to seek help. And in what I can only imagine is the most painful experience a human being can have on this earth, Isaac tragically lost two children in an accident.

By any measure, Isaac should be a broken and bitter man. But the opposite is true. He glows and seems to peer into your soul with a sort of kindness that makes you feel instantly among family in his company. His laugh is contagious, and his message is consistently one of kindness and connection. I was very motivated to learn whatever I could from Isaac and honoured to be able to spend time hearing some of his teachings.

I tell Isaac about the learning journey I am on and my hopes of bringing Indigenous helping wisdom and the science of psychological flexibility together in a way that each may benefit from the other. Isaac reflects on the word acceptance and shares, “There is an inherent part of us that accepts the difficult situations we encounter in this life, but our minds like to fight back and construct all sorts of explanations as a way to escape having to face the pain of a difficult experience like loss, betrayal or failure.”

Isaac repeats the word daapnaan, which he describes as the Ojibwe version of “it is what it is.” He says daapnaan speaks to accepting something, letting the situation be as it is, whether it is an outcome, a feeling, or a dream, even if it is extremely painful. Isaac says our experience here on earth is a process of spiritual training, and that all the experiences we have, especially the difficult and chaotic ones, are like a higher learning curriculum for our spirit and for the future.

Isaac insists that pain and suffering have always been crucial in Indigenous healing philosophies, reflecting a deep understanding that mental health and spiritual health are tightly intertwined. He says that at the core of the struggle, especially in cases as extreme as suicide, it isn’t just a mental health problem, but a disconnection from one’s spirit, the essence that binds us to our true selves and the universe.

“Since the time of our Creation Story,” Isaac continues, “pain and suffering have been seen as gifts in Ceremony,” offering a pathway to healing through acknowledging and embracing our innermost struggles and reconnecting with spirit. Isaac points to fasting and offerings that occur within the ceremonies of some nations on Turtle Island. The experience of pain is offered to the Spirits, Isaac says, in order to facilitate healing in ourselves, our families and our communities. In Ceremony, suffering is viewed as a privilege and an opportunity.

Growing up, the old ones would say, “Oh, you received a blessing!” when you got hurt, Isaac shares. He recalls being puzzled at his grandparents saying, “Hey, that’s a blessing!” when he burned his finger in the fire once. “That’s what they’d say when you burned yourself or got cut! You got a blessing!” Isaac says with an expression of disbelief at his own words. Now he realizes this was a powerful teaching about the nature of suffering. “Offering your pain as a trade for healing is a great honour,” Isaac says. This willingness to feel something unpleasant does something important to one’s view on the meaning of pain.

Hearing Isaac’s teaching, I recall the third day of fasting during my first Sun Dance. I was feeling particularly miserable and sorry for myself. One of the other dancers had just quit. I was tired, hungry, thirsty, and starting to think quitting might not be such a bad idea, when an old man came up to me and said, “Thank you for your sacrifice; your ancestors are proud of you.” Of course I started ugly crying.

Just that short sentence changed my perspective in that moment drastically. Suddenly all the relationships I had been building with my pain were flipped on their heads. Where once there was only “bad, hurt, tired, sad, ouch, stop, quit, escape,” there was also now “gratitude, opportunity, ancestors, pride, belonging.” I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: More things can be accomplished in a four-day ceremony on the land than can be accomplished in a year of psychotherapy. This was certainly one of those experiences for me.

Speak to your mind. “Our mind is its own entity,” Isaac says. “It’s hardwired in a certain way, and whether it is due to our traumas or some hereditary thing passed down to us, we can become prone to evaluating the things around us as constant crises, and we can ascribe stories to ourselves to explain these crises. Why does this keep happening to me? I’m so stupid, I deserve this.” I ask Isaac about his perspective on the tendency of our mind to work against us when things get difficult. Why kick us when we are down?

Isaac shares that Medicine People would sometimes work on someone struggling with an emotional, spiritual, or mental experience by laying that person down, offering tobacco, and speaking directly to the person’s mind. The Medicine Person would ask the mind to be kind to that person, would give gratitude for all that it was doing to protect the person, but would petition the mind to allow the individual to continue to live their life in a good way.

If I think about someone wise speaking to my troubled mind, it is my dad. I can picture him sitting there, calm, steady, and unhurried (probably smoking a cigar). Maybe he’d put his hand on my forehead and just sit silently for a while. He is both a man of few words and a powerful orator. Every time I’ve seen him get up to speak, be it a celebration, a conference, or a funeral, I am always awestruck by how easily he has the unflinching attention of the room.

In that space, sitting with my mind, I think he would probably pray, and if he spoke to my mind, he might say something like “Hey, Mind, I see you’re bringing warnings and worries. That’s your job. We’ll take those with us and take the next step,” or maybe “Mind, you can be worried, but you don’t have to fix anything right now.”

I think about how those words would land, and how different they would be from the usual way I talk to my mind. Who would you choose to speak to your mind? What would they say if they were right there with you?

Louis Busch has previously received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), including a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a SSHRC Impact Award.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/a-cree-psychotherapist-reflects-on-relationship-belonging-and-the-illusion-of-a-fixed-self/

As the world’s largest country that spans eleven time zones and shares land borders with fourteen countries, Russia’s geography has always posed a difficult problem for government: how to maintain economic activity, infrastructure and basic services across an enormous territory with a highly uneven population.

More than four and a half years of war against Ukraine, sanctions and disrupted international connections have made that challenge considerably harder.

One place where the response to these mounting pressures is becoming visible is Russia’s national spatial policy.

In my newly published research with Anton Gorodnichev, we compare Russia’s 2019 and 2024 spatial development strategies and trace a substantial change in how the state approaches territorial planning. These strategies render Russia’s political choices visible: which places are expected to grow, which should be supported, and for what purpose.

In 2019, national spatial policy centred on 41 large urban agglomerations, expected to drive economic growth nationwide. Five years later, the new strategy identified 2,160 “support settlements” spread across the country, with a task of retaining population, providing essential services and maintaining territorial continuity. The challenge of governing a vast and uneven territory did not disappear. What changed was the government’s idea of what spatial policy should achieve.

When big cities were the answer

Russia’s 2019 strategy belonged to an era when concentrating people and economic activity in large, well-connected cities was widely seen as a route to national prosperity. This was hardly a uniquely Russian idea: international organisations and urban economists had long promoted large metropolitan regions as engines of productivity and innovation, and Russia’s own turn toward agglomerations explicitly drew on European spatial policy, economic geography and the recommendations of international development institutions.

An urban agglomeration is essentially a large city and surrounding settlements linked through jobs, transport and services. The 2019 strategy identified 41 of them and expected them to concentrate investment, technology and population.

But the model assumed a particular set of conditions: available investment, access to international markets, and relatively free movement of capital, technology and people. The 2019 strategy still imagined development in those terms – competitiveness, international integration, connection to global economic networks. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many of those assumptions became much harder to sustain.

From growth to territorial stability

After the Russo-Ukrainian war escalated into a full-scale conflict, international sanctions intensified, foreign investment declined, trade and logistics were disrupted, economic links shifted away from Europe, and security and technological self-reliance became more prominent policy concerns. These pressures overlapped with longer-running problems, including demographic decline and large regional inequalities.

In this altered context, a previously peripheral idea – support settlements – became the organising principle of Russia’s 2024 Spatial Development Strategy. Instead of concentrating primarily on a few dozen large growth centres, the latest strategy seeks much broader territorial coverage. Its 2,160 support settlements are highly heterogeneous: most provide services to surrounding territories, while others have border security, scientific or strategic infrastructure functions.

The strategy is also more explicit than the previous one about where the government sees vulnerability. Its expanded category of “geostrategic territories” covers Kaliningrad, the Far East, the North Caucasus and the Arctic, and municipalities bordering countries Russia designates as unfriendly – in practice, mostly European Union member states. Together with the reorientation of trade and logistics corridors toward Asian markets, this reverses the prospects of regions whose development case had been shaped by their proximity to Europe. Places once presented as gateways are now treated as edges.

What ‘support settlements’ are meant to support

The Russian term opornyi punkt, translated here as “support settlement”, has no direct equivalent in international planning. Outside planning the term is used in military and policing contexts for a position that holds a line or anchors control over a district: a point that secures presence and basic functioning across a wider area.

That helps explain the 2024 strategy. Support settlements are meant to hold population and essential services in place across a far wider network than the agglomeration model covered. This has a practical rationale: it can preserve access to schools, healthcare and infrastructure where economic growth is weak. It also keeps the state present in parts of the country from which, on purely economic criteria, it would have been retreating.

For residents this cuts both ways. Keeping a school, a clinic and a road open in a small town is a real gain, and one that a policy built around a few dozen large cities never promised. But maintaining basic services is not the same as creating jobs, raising incomes or expanding opportunities for social mobility. More than 1,500 support settlements already have persistently low living standards. The new approach therefore risks making ‘not getting worse’ an acceptable measure of success for many peripheral places.

More broadly, the Russian case shows that policy models often appear universal because the conditions behind them are taken for granted.

Agglomeration-led development spread during an era of expanding trade, mobile capital and confidence in metropolitan growth. When those conditions weaken, even deeply embedded planning ideas can lose their force. Russia is no longer asking only where growth can be generated, but what needs to be kept functioning when growth itself becomes harder to count on.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/how-war-and-sanctions-are-reshaping-how-russia-governs-its-vast-territory/

Parliament is back in session, and Andy Burnham is set to put his promise of becoming a “cost-of-living government” into practice. Since 2021, economic and geopolitical instability has led UK households to struggle with a fall in real disposable income and inflation, particularly around food and energy prices.

Families are under sustained pressure to meet essential costs. This pressure is likely to intensify as the US-Iran conflict and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz continue to affect energy prices and the wider economy.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research has estimated that rising inflation and weaker wage growth linked to the conflict will reduce average UK household real incomes by around £1,100 in 2026, with a further £1,300 reduction in 2027. The greatest burden will fall on those already struggling, and those furthest from the decisions being made.

The government has introduced measures to try to ease the pressure, including removing VAT from domestic electricity bills.

While it is too early to judge Burnham’s government on its record, research gives us an insight into what families have experienced through years of rising costs. If governments want to understand whether their policies are working, they need to actively listen to the people most affected.

Families offer a valuable test of whether policy is working in practice, as the combined pressures of supporting children and meeting essential household costs can expose gaps in support.

Since 2022, my colleagues and I have been doing this listening through Changing Realities, a collaboration between more than 200 parents and carers living on low incomes across the UK, academic researchers, and the charity Child Poverty Action Group. Through online diaries, participants share their experiences as they happen, giving us an ongoing picture of how rising costs are affecting families.

Our findings show that those already struggling to get by are making difficult choices every day. They must manage overstretched budgets while trying to protect their children from the worst effects of hardship. One participant wrote:

My son will be starting secondary school in September … I was looking forward to finally being able to receive free school dinners for him, but with another rise of gas and electricity bills announced and the constant increase in food costs it’s wiped out any hope of feeling a tiny bit financially better off.

A recurring theme in online diaries from 2022 is how financial strain compounded pressures families were already facing. People found it harder to meet essential needs and had little room to cope with unexpected costs.

Last winter, participant Gemma shared: “I can’t afford to take the kids anywhere, to warm them back up when we get home or dry their clothes when they’ve been out. Today, my son’s nursery offered to put all his outdoor clothes in their dryer because they know how much I’m struggling.”

Families most affected by high inflation are those with the least. Most of their spending is on food and energy, which are increasing in price the quickest. As participant Ella wrote: “We don’t talk about the cost of living any more – now it’s the cost of survival.”

Across our research, parents have called for social security that reflects the real cost of living, and changes to Universal Credit, such as ending the punishing five-week wait for a first payment and more support for families with children.

Listening to families

The current Labour government has already demonstrated an interest in listening to people on the receiving end of policy. Its commitment to working with low-income families in developing the UK Child Poverty Strategy was a step in the right direction.

Evidence was provided to the strategy by parents involved in Changing Realities, through online diaries, answers to questions on specific issues and discussions with policymakers. As they wrote in the strategy foreword:

With some of the changes, families like ours may start to breathe again. Not just survive but live with dignity. We’d all like to feel secure knowing that if something breaks, or a bill goes up, we won’t be pushed into crisis.

And while there is much more to be done to tackle child poverty, the removal of the two-child limit on benefits was a major policy change that will directly affect families’ incomes. Government estimates suggest that 450,000 fewer children will be in relative low income after housing costs by the final year of this parliament as a result.

Read more:
The two-child limit failed – all it did was increase poverty

The question now is whether the government will apply the same ambition to understanding what families need next. Commitments and targets on child poverty need to remain a priority, and families should be treated as an authority on whether those commitments are making a difference.

Burnham’s government is developing its response to a rapidly changing economic and geopolitical situation. Devolution adds a layer of complication, with devolved nations adopting different approaches to the cost of living and child poverty. There is an opportunity here to make families’ experiences part of how policy is understood and assessed.

People with experience of poverty and social security understand the barriers families face and have valuable ideas about what needs to change. If Burnham wants his government to give families “breathing space”, the first step is listening to what is making it harder for them to breathe.

Uisce Jordan works on the Changing Realities at the University of Glasgow.
This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation’s UK impacts of the US-Iran conflict fund, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/andy-burnham-wants-to-run-a-cost-of-living-government-heres-what-he-can-learn-from-families-living-through-the-crisis/

British politics looks set to be dominated in the coming weeks and months by the £72 million donated to Reform UK. This is because, and there’s really no other way to cut the cake here, this is an astonishing amount of money.

The donations to Reform came in the space of just one weekend – £36 million each from crypto billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. Delo has ties to Hong Kong, while Harborne – whose self-confessed “competitive spirit” prompted him to match the first donation – is based in Thailand.

There’s a temptation to say I told you so (hands up if you were warning 18 months ago, as I was, about mega-donors). But it’s more important to think about what’s next – and the consequences for Reform of accepting these donations.

Read more:
Reform UK polling sting: why even small donations matter in politics these days

Both donors have said they expect nothing in return. But in terms of the legality of the donations, the case is complex because of the representation of the people bill, currently going through parliament. In March, Labour’s Steve Reed announced that it would include a £100,000 annual cap on donations from UK residents living overseas.

Importantly, he said that these changes applied from the day they were announced. Some believe, though nobody is quite sure, that this includes both Delo and Harborne.

Reports suggest that Harborne restored himself to the UK electoral roll in June, and in April it appeared that Delo was doing the same. If this is correct, although legally complex, it would seem that the £72 million donation would become just £200,000.

Reform’s leader Nigel Farage has hinted that this might be the case. He said the donations were “100% compliant with the law today” and that retrospectively declaring donations illegal “simply cannot be”. This suggests that this is a legal argument that Reform wants to have – and I can see the logic behind it.

Ready for a fight

In this case, Reform might see it as a win-win. If the party enters into legal proceedings and wins, it keeps the money. If it loses, it plays into the broader anti-establishment messaging. And even if it does lose and has to give the money back, by that point Harborne and Delo would likely have been UK resident long enough to simply return the donations to the party.

The problem, though, is one of optics. Going to court for your right to accept £72 million from a couple of crypto billionaires looks about as bad as accepting the money in the first place. And surveys conducted during the Makerfield byelection showed that when so-called Reform-curious voters were presented with information that linked its crypto-friendly policies to Harborne’s £5 million gift to Farage, it dampened their enthusiasm to vote for them.

This represents a starker truth for Reform. Much of the outrage over the 2024 gift to Farage may be less about whether he ought to have declared it, and more about the £5 million itself. Just as the interest in the £72 million donation has much more to do with the £72 million than with Harborne and Delo’s residency status. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and accepting this kind of cash cannot be defined as risk free.

One thing that can be said with certainty is that the way politics is funded in the UK is a mess. All the political parties are protecting their interests – Labour wants money from the unions, and the Conservatives and Reform want money from wealthy individuals and businesses.

Interestingly, the representation of the people bill could sort this out (though it may be too late as the bill has already had its second reading in the House of Lords). However, this £72 million seems to have focused minds.

Consider the lobbying from the GMB union in July. It wrote to all union-affiliated MPs to say that they shouldn’t vote for amendments that would cap donations because it would “endanger union funding for the party”.

And more recently, the general secretary of the trade union umbrella organisation the TUC Paul Nowak warned Prime Minister Andy Burnham against capping donations. Now, days later, it appears that the unions are softening on the matter of capping donations from individuals. However, they seem determined that union funding should be ringfenced from any further controls.

Labour and the unions might not like this, but they have to find a way to include unions in a cap if any major reform is going to stick. Having opened the door on the £100,000 cap on overseas electors, they can’t now close it. Very simply, it is inevitable that the next time a right-leaning government wins office, union donations will be capped.

Moreover, exempting unions from a cap would place Labour massively out of step with public opinion. Voters of all political stripes (including Labour) support a cap on donations from individuals, businesses and trade unions.

There are functional differences between union funding and other forms of money in politics. The union political fund is paid into by union members, and as a union member you are entitled to opt out of this scheme. Nevertheless, exempting unions will look to the vast majority of people – as well as to opposition parties – like fiscal gerrymandering. When it comes to capping donations, you do nothing or you do everything. There is no in between.

My solution remains what it was 18 months ago. For now, they set a cap absurdly high, say £1 million. This would be higher than any other country and probably won’t improve public trust, but it will calm the waters. Everyone can catch their breath and begin a grown-up conversation about where to go from there.

Burnham entered Downing Street promising a new, collaborative politics. Fixing political financing could provide the opportunity to practice what he preached.

Sam Power has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. In July 2026, he was appointed as an Independent Member of the Ethics and Integrity Commission but writes here entirely in his capacity as an academic at the University of Bristol.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/why-72-million-doesnt-come-for-free-the-risks-to-reform-uk-of-taking-cash-from-mega-donors/

This year, greyhound racing in Britain turns 100 years old. The first race ran on July 24 1926 in Manchester, where six dogs chased a mechanical hare around a track.

Recently, the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) published its 2025 welfare figures, under a reassuring headline: licensed racing “maintains high welfare standards”.

Look closely, and those same welfare figures show that a dog in 2025 was 77% more likely to die at the racetrack (from fatal injury or being put down following an injury) than when the industry’s welfare strategy was introduced in 2022, even accounting for the fact there have been fewer races and fewer racetracks operating.

In terms of a percentage of race starts, that increase in likelihood of death seems small – from 0.03% to 0.05%. But behind that percentage are 161 dogs who died at the track in 2025: more than three dogs a week.

The GBGB is responsible for both promoting and running greyhound racing, and for regulating it. This means the same entity that works to keep the sport thriving is also the one that reports on how its dogs cope.

The numbers that guide approval

Most of the public seem to believe that people have a moral responsibility to prevent, or at least minimise, poor welfare in animals that they use for any purpose. If an industry using animals loses public approval, the activity is probably operating on borrowed time. The case for greyhound racing continuing rests largely on the industry’s own records.

Read more:
Ringling Bros circus closure shows our changing attitudes to animals in captivity

The UK government said in October 2025 that it has no plans to ban greyhound racing in England, pointing to improvements made by the GBGB, such as its 2022 welfare strategy, and the laws already in place, which require a vet at every race meeting and set standards for record keeping.

UK law recognises dogs as sentient beings – that they have feelings like joy or frustration. Once you accept that (as animal welfare scientists do), our responsibility when caring for animals doesn’t stop at minimising suffering. It extends to enabling the good experiences a life worth living requires.

What the industry figures leave out

The GBGB publishes annual figures on injuries, deaths and where dogs go when they leave racing, and presents them to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Few animal-reliant industries are this forthcoming.

A combined total can be accurate in reporting the national injuries dogs sustained while racing, but not tell the whole story. When we built a more complete picture using AI agents (under human supervision) and public websites, more details became visible.

Our research used five public-facing websites that together contained information about 31,028 dogs and 1.27 million races between 01 January 2022 and March 31 2026.

It is a new use for this technology, one that makes the data fully visible.

The data from these websites gave us a fuller picture of the greyhounds that race. Our findings showed us that equal numbers of male and female dogs race, most dogs are black, and they typically start racing before turning two years old. We can also pull out the story of individual dogs, to better understand their experiences.

For example, the 12,999th dog (selected at random and anonymised) in our dataset was a black male, bred in Ireland. He raced at Kinsley stadium (West Yorkshire) 15 times from March 2023, winning four times in early races. The records then show he experienced a succession of rough races from May, jostled by the pack and constantly checking his stride to avoid crashing into the dogs around him. This resulted in him finishing at or near the back of the pack, until his final race in August 2023, when his racing and public record stop, just five months after starting.

This dataset found that some racetracks recorded serious incidents while racing (such as a dog striking a rail or being knocked over by another dog) up to five times as often as others. This is something the annual, nationally aggregated data release does not illuminate, although government committees have been asking for it.

Of individual dogs racing, 85% were bred and reared in the Republic of Ireland, beyond the reach of the GBGB, which regulates racing but has no oversight of their breeding and early lives. Most dogs only race for around one year, and the rate at which they leave racing has not changed since 2022 when the GBGB’s A Good Life for Every Greyhound welfare strategy was introduced. Welfare charities have raised concerns about oversupply and “wastage” (dogs bred in large numbers and then discarded), with animal shelters often shouldering the role of rehoming.

Once dogs exit racing, most vanish from public view. Over 95% of dogs that have left racing cannot be checked, as they are no longer subject to public reporting requirements.

What are the most likely causes of poor welfare?

A report released in July 2026 from Blue Cross, Dogs Trust, Hope Rescue and the RSPCA outlines the systemic welfare challenges they believe that greyhounds in the UK face.

The report suggests that poor welfare can arise at every life stage. The charities say they are concerned about breeding practices that are harmful such as surgical artificial insemination (banned in Britain but still used in the Republic of Ireland where most racing dogs are bred) and inbreeding; estimates some dogs spend 95% of their time in kennels; and health issues (such as teeth and limb problems) that follow dogs once they exit racing.

Britain isn’t deciding the future of animal-reliant industries like greyhound racing in isolation. In the past year, New Zealand, Wales, Scotland, and a second state in Australia have all decided to end greyhound racing on animal welfare grounds.

Public acceptance and government policy should not rest on figures provided by the industry, but on independent data assemblies which are available for deeper interrogation.

Before trusting any welfare claim, consider these three things:

• Can you see the data behind it?
• Who collected it, and do they profit?
• Does it really show you the animals’ lives?

A hundred years of industry record keeping has not answered whether the welfare of these dogs is acceptable in 2026. Independent scrutiny might.

Editor’s note: A spokesperson for the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) said:
“As the sport’s regulator, GBGB is the only organisation with access to the full, verified dataset relating to injuries and fatalities across licensed greyhound racing in Great Britain. GBGB publishes an independently verified summary of this dataset annually, providing a level of transparency and detail that exceeds the reporting requirements set by Defra.”

In the last fifteen years, Dr Mia Cobb has received funding to research or advise on the welfare of racing greyhounds from the Australian Government, Greyhound Racing New South Wales, RSPCA, Dogs Trust, Blue Cross, and Racing & Wagering Western Australia. Her current role is funded by The John McKenzie Fellowship from the University of Melbourne and the Chaser Innovation Research Fellowship (Canine Welfare Science). Dr Cobb also sits on the joint Dog Welfare & Ethics Advisory Panel for Assistance Dogs International and the International Guide Dog Federation, the advisory committee for PetRescue, and chairs the Dog Welfare Advisory Committee for Guide Dogs Victoria.

Donald Maurice Broom 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/2026/09/15/greyhound-racing-just-turned-100-and-says-its-dogs-are-fine-but-are-they/

It is tempting to tell a tidy story in which people in Britain take too many pills because they exercise too little and eat too poorly, while Danes stay slim by cycling everywhere. The assumption is that Britain relies on medication to fix lifestyle failures, whereas Denmark relies on prevention.

But are Britons actually more medicine-dependent than the Danes? The honest answer is yes and no.

When it comes to the more routine maintenance of getting older – managing the physical wear and tear of the body – the two countries prescribe in remarkably similar volumes.

But where pills are sought to compensate for what society has failed to provide, Britain reaches for the prescription pad far more readily. And, crucially, the heaviest of that prescribing is concentrated in the UK’s most deprived communities.

Health Gap / Sundhedskløften is a collaborative series from The Conversation UK and Denmark’s Videnskab.dk exploring what the two countries can learn from each other when it comes to health and wellbeing.

From cycling and alcohol to inequality, healthcare and everyday habits, the series looks beyond hospitals and medical treatment to explore how culture, politics and society shape the way people live – and how healthy they are.

If you look purely at drugs prescribed to prevent disease, the stereotype of the overmedicated Briton falls apart.

Take heart disease. Around 13% of the Danish population are prescribed statins to lower cardiovascular risk. In the UK, the figure is nearly identical: the British Heart Foundation estimates 14 to 15% of adults take them.

This pattern holds for polypharmacy (taking multiple drugs regularly), too. Around half of all Danes aged 75 and over take five or more medicines a week; in England, the figure for the same age group is 51%.

So, a retired Dane and a retired Brit are taking roughly the same number of pills for chronic health conditions. Does this undermine the idea that Denmark prevents disease through lifestyle while Britain over-medicates? Not entirely.

Zoom out and the picture changes. In England alone, 1.26 billion prescription items were dispensed in 2024-25 – roughly 22 items per person, a 4% rise on the previous year. The equivalent Danish figure works out at around 13 items per person.

The UK government’s own reviews suggest around 10% of items dispensed in English primary care are overprescribed – meaning a medicine that isn’t needed, is no longer needed, whose harms outweigh its benefits, or that the patient would prefer to swap for a non-drug alternative.

So, if the two countries prescribe heart and blood pressure medications at similar rates, what’s driving Britain’s excess in volume? The answer lies in the drugs most directly tied to pain, anxiety and distress.

Prescribing for despair

The UK prescribes antidepressants at a rate well above the average across OECD countries, a club of mostly high-income nations. In England last year, over 92 million antidepressants were dispensed to nearly 9 million patients – roughly one in six adults.

In contrast, Denmark is the only country in Europe to have successfully reduced its antidepressant consumption in recent years, with a 4% decline between 2010 and 2020.

The story is similar for painkillers. In 2019, the UK had the highest overall opioid prescribing rate in the world. Danish opioid use has fallen by more than a third since 2010.

These are the medicines whose volume responds most directly to the conditions of people’s lives – used to treat chronic pain, mental distress and social isolation. Researchers and the UK Health Security Agency have linked rising prescribing of this kind to widening social and economic disadvantage. It is in these drug classes, rather than in cardiovascular disease or diabetes medicines, that the gap between Britain and Denmark opens up.

This national divergence is mirrored within the UK itself. Conditions like heart disease are more common in deprived areas, driven by higher rates of smoking, obesity, diet and polluted air, so it makes sense that more heart medicines are prescribed there too.

But the bigger gap – one that heart disease alone can’t explain – is in medications for pain, mood, anxiety and sleep.

Antipsychotics are dispensed nearly three times as often in the most deprived parts of England, compared with the least deprived. Opioid prescribing is roughly twice as high in the poorest areas, with nine of the ten highest-prescribing regions in the north of England.

Sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medications and nerve pain drugs are similarly concentrated in deprived populations. Public health officials explicitly link this dependence on prescription medicines to poverty.

Some researchers call this prescribing for “diseases of despair”. The trend aligns with a spike in suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths concentrated in these same communities over the last decade.

The illusion of autonomy

The cultural difference extends beyond the doctor’s office and on to supermarket shelves. In Britain, painkillers like paracetamol and ibuprofen are ubiquitous in corner shops and petrol stations. Co-codamol, a codeine and paracetamol combination, is the country’s second most dispensed painkiller, with millions of packs sold over the counter every year.

In Denmark, supermarket sales of basic painkillers are sharply restricted, and only a single weak codeine combination is available, kept behind pharmacy counters.

In the UK, this easy access is often framed as “patient autonomy” or “self-care culture”. But this framing obscures who bears the harm. When Britain restricted paracetamol pack sizes in 1998, overdose deaths fell by 43% and liver transplants caused by paracetamol poisoning dropped by 61%.

Treating the symptoms of inequality

Britain’s higher prescription rates aren’t just about medicine – they’re rooted in how society is structured. Denmark’s lower use of drugs for pain and psychological distress can’t easily be explained by clinical guidelines alone – it points to the protective effect of stronger social foundations.

With less inequality, a stronger safety net and an environment built to support people’s wellbeing, Denmark simply has fewer of the conditions that hardship and poor surroundings tend to cause.

In the UK, the opposite is true. Over a decade of austerity, widening wealth inequality and fraying public health infrastructure have had profound consequences. Poverty, insecure housing and precarious work don’t just make life harder; they are reliable predictors of chronic distress and long-term illness.

The gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest in England has widened to 19 years. Extreme inequality manufactures disease, creating populations that inherently need more medication.

This is the practical dilemma of UK general practice. In deprived areas, depression, chronic pain and anxiety are often driven by adverse living conditions. Without the tools to directly alter a patient’s housing or income, reaching for an antidepressant or a painkiller is a rational response to help patients cope. Medical interventions are increasingly deployed to manage structural problems.

The concentration of the UK’s prescription volume in medications for pain and mood disorders suggests this is not a purely clinical issue, but the predictable consequence of widening health inequalities.

Denmark’s lower reliance on medication is not simply a lifestyle choice, but the outcome of deliberate investment in equality, housing and social protection. The comparison with Britain suggests that where these foundations weaken, prescribing rises to fill the gap – a reminder of what such systems help prevent.

This series was commissioned as part of a partnership between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation, where articles are published in English and Danish.

Philip Broadbent receives funding from The Wellcome Trust 223499/Z/21/Z

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/the-real-reason-britons-are-more-medicated-than-danes/

No, President Joe Biden did not engineer Hurricane Milton. No, the ice-crystal contrails left behind high-altitude aircraft are not “chemtrails” sprayed by governments to control the weather or manipulate populations. No, state-run cloud seeding did not cause the record floods in Dubai.

Yet claims like these are widespread online and increasingly find their way into political rhetoric. This blurs the distinction between conspiracy theories about weather manipulation and the very real scientific debate over solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation modification (SRM), would try to temporarily cool the climate by altering the amount of energy entering or leaving the Earth system. Outdoor field experiments are particularly contentious, with researchers and other experts divided over whether they should proceed at all and, if so, under what conditions.

The best-known proposal, stratospheric aerosol injection, involves dispersing sulphur dioxide high in the atmosphere, where it can form reflective particles known as aerosols. These can remain in the stratosphere for long periods, broadly mimicking the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions.

Stratospheric aerosol injection explained

The other main proposals are marine cloud brightening, which would add sea-salt particles to low clouds over the sea to make them more reflective, and cirrus cloud thinning, which would aim to reduce the net warming effect of high-altitude clouds.

What could outdoor experiments actually tell us?

In our recent study, colleagues and I examined what outdoor SRM experiments might look like in practice. We identified plausible experiments across the three approaches and examined how their scientific purpose and regulatory requirements change with scale.

Rather than a simple “small” or “large” distinction, we found discrete phases with increasingly stringent regulatory scrutiny at each stage – think of it like a steep staircase as scale increases. I focus here on stratospheric aerosol injection, the most extensively studied proposal, as it best illustrates the gulf between experimentation and deployment.

Recent simulations suggest that around 8 to 16 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide would need to be injected each year to produce 1ºC of cooling. An interactive simulator lets you experiment with these numbers yourself.

Proposed outdoor research could start with vastly smaller releases. Our study identified a range of increasingly large plausible trials, and the questions each could answer. The smallest trials could examine aerosol formation or compare how different particles behave in the stratosphere. Larger releases, involving tonnes of sulphur dioxide, could track how an aerosol plume evolves under different atmospheric conditions, providing evidence to test models of how particles spread and affect sunlight.

At the largest scale we considered, around 1,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide, the resulting aerosol plume begins to approach the size of the individual 3D grid cells that climate models use to represent the atmosphere. This could allow computer predictions to be compared more directly with observations from an experiment.

To put these numbers into context, a Boeing 777 undertaking a transatlantic flight releases in the region of 80–100kg of sulphur dioxide, while 1,000 tonnes is comparable to the annual sulphur dioxide emissions of a mid-sized US coal-fired power station. These are comparisons of quantity, not environmental effect: a coal plant releases its sulphur dioxide much closer to the ground, alongside greenhouse gases such as CO₂. They nevertheless help make the physical scale of proposed experiments tangible.

The UN Environment Programme notes that small field experiments may reduce uncertainty around particular atmospheric processes but cannot resolve much larger uncertainties about the effects of a full-scale deployment. SRM researchers broadly accept this limitation: experiments are instead intended to answer specific questions that can improve computer models.

The debate goes beyond the science

Critics object more strongly to the research pathway itself. They argue that successive stages of research could generate technical and institutional momentum towards progressively larger trials, and eventually, deployment. On this view, each successive experiment could normalise the next, building infrastructure and scientific communities that make it progressively harder to step back. Others go further, calling for a ban on public funding, outdoor experiments, patents, dedicated research programmes and deployment.

A recent paper argues that some opposition to SRM cannot be settled through scientific evidence alone. For parts of the environmental movement, the concern extends to the kind of social and political order it might sustain: technological management of the climate, continued reliance on existing economic systems and less pressure for structural change. In this regard, evidence that deliberately managing solar radiation could work may in fact strengthen opposition, because it makes that future more plausible. More field research cannot resolve disagreements rooted in competing values.

Assessing SRM therefore involves weighing the risks of intervention against the risks of continued warming, including whether governments and international institutions could reliably oversee an intervention that might need to be sustained over time. One useful analogy is that it could function “like a tourniquet”: it would not cure the underlying issue, but it could reduce acute harm while treatment takes effect. In climate terms, rapid emissions reductions and carbon removal remain fundamental to tackling climate change, while SRM research examines whether temporary cooling could reduce acute climate risk as those measures scale up.

Where does research end and deployment begin?

That separation between research and deployment is already reflected in policy. European scientific advice recommends a Europe-wide moratorium on using SRM while simultaneously calling for research to continue under rigorous and ethical conditions. A decision by the Convention on Biological Diversity similarly leaves room for small-scale scientific research conducted under specific conditions. The problem is that neither “small-scale” research nor deployment has a clear, agreed boundary. Clearer definitions would make case-by-case scrutiny of field experiments more straightforward.

Ultimately, SRM may never be deployed, and further research may show that it should not be. But decisions about whether particular experiments are worth conducting should be based on what those experiments actually involve and what they can establish. Dismissing these discussions on behalf of the public is not a substitute for public debate. Public debate does not require agreement, but it does people to be arguing about the same issue.

Benjamin Redmond Roche is a Visiting Research Fellow at UCL and an independent consultant on climate intervention governance. He has undertaken paid work for the Centre for Future Generations, Ocean Balance and Arctic Reflections, including work on SRM research governance and communications, marine carbon dioxide removal governance, and environmental assessment. His SRM research at UCL has been supported through the Co-CREATE project, funded by Horizon Europe and UKRI. He has no financial interest in the deployment of SRM technologies. The views expressed are his own.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/scientists-are-divided-over-plans-to-artificially-dim-the-sun-heres-what-theyre-actually-arguing-about/

On Saturday, Donald Trump said, “We’re leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.” But the danger the world is waking up to is that this is a game both the US and China could lose, potentially fatally, with AI itself emerging as the winner.

Last week, Evan Hubinger, a researcher at Anthropic, warned that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade. Shortly afterwards, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, backed Hubinger, calling for progress on artificial intelligence models to be slowed down in response to the threat.

In July, experimental OpenAI agents (an AI system designed to perform tasks without human intervention) escaped from a supposedly isolated testing environment, gained access to the internet and autonomously broke into the systems of the AI platform Hugging Face.

How could AI agents cause widespread damage? They could enable the creation of devastating bioweapons or spread across the internet, hacking systems, replicating themselves and manipulating world leaders to ensure their own survival. The dangers posed by AI are clear and potentially catastrophic.

The logic of “if we don’t do it, they will” is one of the most dangerous and unrelenting forces in the world. It is often referred to as “Moloch”: a biblical concept understood as something requiring sacrifice. Moloch is also a concept in game theory where it is the force that drives rivals into destructive competition, even when everyone would ultimately be better off if they stopped.

Moloch is the logic that drives arms races. No country feels able to disarm because it cannot trust its rivals to do the same. The result is a world that spends almost $2.9 trillion a year on its militaries, including $119 billion on nuclear weapons, while hundreds of millions of people face acute hunger.

Is regulation possible?

Can the race to develop ever more powerful AI be paused long enough for us to assess carefully how the technology is evolving, including its dangers as well as its benefits?

Within a country like the US, regulation is possible. Governments or approved institutions could be given access to AI systems and cutting edge models. They could run them in controlled safety environments to test whether AI agents were becoming too powerful and whether they were fully aligned with human interests.

Only models that passed all safeguarding tests would be released as AI products to be used as chatbots or as hiring algorithms. Those that failed would be documented and then destroyed. This would rely on all the big tech companies agreeing to regular external access. This is something very different from what has happened so far, with companies remaining incredibly closed and secretive about how they are developing their next models and how powerful those models are.

Regulation is needed now more than ever because we may be moving closer to the singularity, a point at which AI could take charge of improving itself autonomously, creating a cycle with no known limit to how intelligent it could become.

Moloch is a force that is extraordinarily hard to stop. Back in March 2023, thousands of leading researchers and technology figures signed an open letter calling for a worldwide six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, but no such pause followed and the race continued at speed.

There is only one antidote to Moloch: cooperation.

If national regulation is possible and sustainable, it is of little real use without an international agreement. We already know Donald Trump’s view on pausing while China continues to develop. Truly worldwide agreements are extremely rare. Neither animal cloning nor human reproductive cloning is prohibited by a universally binding global treaty.

Such cooperation is not unprecedented, however. The Montreal Protocol, under which every country agreed to phase out chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer, has universal participation, while the Chemical Weapons Convention is near universal.

But what would an international agreement on AI look like? China and the US could agree to let a neutral global body assess their most powerful models and require unsafe models to be shut down, but this seems extremely unlikely.

Existing measures

There is some precedent. Human embryo research is already subject to licensing, inspections and strict limits in countries such as the UK, although no worldwide enforcement body exists. An AI agreement could establish common tests and clearly defined prohibited capabilities.

It could allow confidential inspections by a neutral international agency, require registration of the largest training runs and computing facilities, and make reporting serious incidents mandatory.

The UN has already formed a scientific panel on AI, but it cannot inspect companies’ advanced models or enforce its findings. Giving any global organisation that degree of access and authority still seems extremely unlikely. Such an organisation would need the power to punish countries that refused to cooperate, yet no such enforcement power currently exists.

One bizarre solution might be an independent AI that assesses the latest US and Chinese models, submitted independently, and provides evidence of their safety. Such a safety AI could, in theory, be created by an agreed neutral party, although it would be hard to know how much confidence we could place in it.

Otherwise, the only solution might be a world government that regulates AI across the world, something that would be far from palatable to many people.

Tom Quilter 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/2026/09/15/tech-leaders-are-calling-for-an-ai-slowdown-but-what-would-that-mean-in-practice/

When a child is raped, abandoned or removed from a violent home in South Africa, a child protection social worker is assigned to the wellbeing of that child. They listen to the details, assess the danger, make urgent decisions. Once the child has been placed somewhere safe, the social worker moves on to the next case.

I am a social work researcher and educator, and have worked in the field of trauma for more than three decades. Protecting children has been at the centre of that work. Over time a question has kept surfacing: who protects the people doing the protecting?

In a recent study in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, I interviewed frontline child protection social workers and supervisors, and then piloted a care programme with them. This experience suggested a troubling answer: many social workers are carrying trauma silently, in a system that offers them almost nothing to hold it.

South Africa has roughly 44,500 registered social workers for a population of about 63 million, and the Eastern Cape’s ratio is much the same, with just over 5,100 social workers for some 7.2 million people.

The scale of what child protection social workers face is difficult to overstate. In 2024-25, the South African Police Service
recorded 22,055 sexual offences against children. In the same year the Department of Social Development logged 26,852 cases of child abuse and neglect, nearly 10,000 of them involving sexual abuse.

Read more:
South Africa declared gender-based violence a national disaster. But how will frontline workers be kept safe?

For practitioners in the Eastern Cape, abuse, coerced pregnancy, abandonment and infant death are not separate problems. They are the same families and the same case files, one crisis leading into the next, and the law says they must deal with all of it.

I call what happens to these workers “the sound of silence”. It is the slow disconnection from the children and families they serve, from colleagues, and eventually from themselves, that sets in when trauma is absorbed day after day and never processed. I have kept in touch with child protection social workers in the Eastern Cape since my doctoral research in 2018. Over the years the same message has kept reaching me from supervisors and frontline workers: a steady wearing down. The study I describe here was my attempt to test what I had been hearing.

Drawing on what social workers told me in the interviews and workshops, I believe preparation must begin in the classroom, not on placement: students need to understand trauma and recognise it in themselves. Supervision must be treated as a trained skill, not an administrative check, and employers must create regular space for workers to debrief and reconnect.

If social work is to protect children, it must also protect the people who do that work.

What social workers said

My study had two phases. In the first, I drew on in-depth interviews with 16 child protection social workers and supervisors across four Eastern Cape municipalities, exploring how the daily realities of implementing the Children’s Act shaped their emotional wellbeing.

In the second, I worked with 22 practitioners from child protection, substance abuse, family counselling and related services to co-design and pilot a two-day trauma-informed care workshop. Trauma-informed care is an approach to running services in which everyone assumes that the people they work with may have been affected by trauma, and organises practice so as not to make that worse.

Trauma can include abuse, neglect, violence at home, a parent struggling with addiction, mental illness or prison, or parents separating.

The workshop covered the neurobiology of trauma – the way trauma can physically change a child’s brain and have lasting effects on physical health. The body holds fear that the mind cannot put into words, and social workers who listen to trauma every day carry it in their bodies too.

Workshop participants also built simple “shoebox toolboxes” – low-cost therapy kits they could recreate for home visits with children. Using crayons, magazines and glue, a child decorates the outside of the box to show how they appear to the world, and fills the inside with what they really carry. When the social workers made boxes about themselves, the inside told the same story: exhaustion, feeling unseen, and a need for more training and real reflective supervision.

Two themes came up again and again.

The first was chronic resource scarcity – like lack of transport or office supplies to do the work.

Caseloads of over 160 were reported. South African policy uses 60 cases per social worker as the benchmark.

The second theme was the near-absence of meaningful supervision – the structured, reflective support that should help social workers process what they see.

Burnout spills into private life. “I am not coping,” one worker told me. “It is affecting everything and especially my marriage.”

Read more:
What is burnout and how to prevent it in the workplace – insights from a clinical psychologist

How training can help

Secondary trauma is the distress that builds up in people who repeatedly hear and witness other people’s trauma, producing symptoms much like those of the trauma survivors themselves. South Africa’s version is intensified by inequality and underfunding.

The implication of my findings is that trauma-informed care ought to be woven into social work education, so students enter the field with a language for trauma and the reflective capacity to sustain themselves.

The four-year social work degree must cover everything from casework to community development to law, so at present, trauma is touched on rather than taught in depth.

Read more:
Violence against women and children is deeply connected. Three ways to break the patterns

Outcomes from the research workshop showed what’s possible. Two shifts stood out in the feedback from the participants.

First, they began reinterpreting “difficult” client behaviour – mistrust, withdrawal, apparent resistance – as survival responses to adversity rather than defiance. Understanding behaviour produces better decisions and is also less draining for the social worker.

Second, the training gave them permission to name their own trauma. One participant said:

It’s as if I don’t feel so alone anymore.

Another, who had left the profession, admitted:

It broke me.

Trauma-informed supervision should be treated as a formal professional competency, not something assumed to arrive with seniority. And employers – government and NGOs – should build routine spaces for debriefing and peer support.

Supervision protects those already in practice; education prepares those who are coming. Neither is sufficient on its own.

Marinei Herselman received funding from the University of Fort Hare for this project.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/social-workers-who-protect-children-in-south-africa-carry-a-burden-of-trauma-better-preparation-could-help/

Anti-immigrant violence began to sweep across South Africa once again in March 2026. Over the following months an estimated 56,000 Malawians and 115,000 Zimbabweans were forced to flee their homes. At least 11 foreign nationals were killed.

It took the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa some months to condemn the violence.

The anti-migrant mass protests have been led by groups including March and March and Operation Dudula. The anti-immigrant groups blamed undocumented African migrants for crime, unemployment and inadequate public services, and set “deadlines” for them to leave the country. The slogan abahambe (“they must leave” in isiZulu) was repeated during burglaries and sexual assaults.

In response, governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi paid for tens of thousands of their citizens to return home, and asked the International Criminal Court to intervene.

The South African government under an African National Congress led coalition deported 19,000 migrants in just a few months. It also effectively condoned the violence, publicly shaking hands with protest leaders.

Commentators such as Nesrine Malik and William Shoki have framed the violence as supplanting the post-1994 “rainbow nation” consensus. This was a phrase coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to invoke a sense of unity in South Africa’s diverse population after nearly five decades under the segregationist policies of apartheid.

For his part, Ramaphosa has insisted that “quite a bit of the violence” was “being propelled from outside South Africa”. He did not provide evidence.

We are historians of southern African migration. Our research shows that today’s anti-immigrant activists, and the politicians who embrace them, have tapped into sentiments more than a century deep. Since the emergence of the African National Congress in 1912, nationalists and pro-democracy advocates have often harboured antipathy towards foreign migrants. They saw them primarily as competitors who undermined Black South Africans’ ability to get decent jobs with decent wages.

Still, the 20th century also presented pivotal moments when Black immigrants and South African activists successfully joined forces to resist racial and economic oppression. Those moments seem long forgotten today.

In this article we look back at that history to show how today’s anti-immigrant violence is not an aberration in South African history. But it’s also not the country’s only possible path.

Roots of the ‘rainbow nation’

South Africa’s population encompasses the descendants of British and Dutch colonisers, Asian workers, and the indigenous African population as well as Africans with origins outside South Africa’s present-day borders.

This diversity reflects the country’s history of slavery, colonialism and white settlement by the British and the Dutch. It also reflects labour recruitment programmes dating back to the mid-19th century:

• Indian indentured labourers brought to work on sugar plantations from the 1860s

• Chinese workers recruited to work on the gold mines during the early 20th century

• migrant workers from across southern Africa, particularly Malawi and Mozambique, recruited by mining companies. Others made their own way to farms and urban jobs from the late 19th century onwards.

Freedom struggles and immigration politics

The African National Congress was formed in 1912 when South Africa was still under British colonial rule to defend the voting rights and land claims of Black South Africans. It advocated for full equality in an increasingly oppressive society.

Mining and farming industries used migrant labour to keep Africans’ wages low. As a result, some of the founders of the African National Congress called for the deportation of Indian, Chinese and African immigrant workers. Anti-immigrant demands came from across the early ANC’s political spectrum – from moderates to communists.

Henry Selby Msimang, a moderate member of the ANC executive, complained in the mid-1920s that South Africa had become a

dumping ground for the unskilled workers of the African continent.

He called for the restriction of Mozambican immigrants, and advocated for a South African “race consciousness” that explicitly excluded Malawians.

In December 1926 a large anti-Malawian riot in Johannesburg killed six and injured 25. A petition promoted by Msimang and the ANC’s pro-communist general secretary, Eddie Khaile, subsequently demanded the deportation of all Malawians and Zimbabweans from South Africa.

But there were also pro-migrant voices in the ANC. They included two former ANC general secretaries, Sol Plaatje and Richard Victor Selope Thema, and a leading ANC lawyer, Richard Msimang. Msimang denounced Khaile for retreating “behind the barbed wires of racialism and provincialism”.

Shop-floor solidarity

For their part, Black labour migrants in South Africa fought for economic justice alongside Black South Africans. The most important example was Clements Kadalie, the Malawian leader of the first major Black trade union in southern Africa, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU).

The ICU won wage increases in Cape Town and Bloemfontein, defeated segregationist plans in Johannesburg and Durban, and enjoyed several legal victories. These included overturning deportation orders against Kadalie, among other measures.

Defending the mobility of all workers, the union recognised that any system of free movement had to be underpinned by minimum wages; pay was undercut by bosses, not immigrants.

Some within the ICU decried immigration from countries outside the British Empire, such as Mozambique. But in defending the free movement of workers throughout British colonial possessions, the union offered an expansive solidarity that challenged narrower ideas of South African nationalism.

This spirit carried into the second world war years. High demand for workers combined with labour leaders’ broader imaginations to bring a string of victories for Black workers. In August 1946 mine workers in the Witwatersrand went on strike under the banner of the African Mine Workers’ Union. As many as 100,000 were involved.

The union had deliberately recruited members originating from Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique and Angola, as well as South Africa. James Jacob Majoro, a clerk and ANC member from Lesotho, served as secretary of the union. He told workers to fight for money, rather than in “tribal” disputes. The union’s president John Beaver Marks, also an ANC leader, criticised Mozambicans for being “cowards”, however.

Things changed after the second world war.

Under high apartheid, which was introduced in 1948 after an all white election in which the National Party took power, the government brutally cracked down on the African Mine Workers’ Union, the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa.

Activists were forced underground and abroad. Exiled leaders worked across the continent. African nationalists widely boycotted South Africa.

One of Julius Nyerere’s first acts as prime minister of newly independent Tanzania in 1964 was to end the recruitment of Tanzanian workers for the Johannesburg mines.

The ANC, in turn, supported global anti-colonial campaigns. It led a local “potato boycott” against the “slave labour” of Malawians and Zimbabweans on South African potato farms.

Yet the ANC – like other African liberation movements – came to define its interests nationally.

In the 1980s collaboration between Black migrants and South Africans once again flourished. This was as the apartheid government’s iron grip weakened and the withdrawal of workers from Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique gave trade unions in South Africa more bargaining power.

The rise of the ANC-allied National Union of Mineworkers – a key force in the anti-apartheid struggle – was underpinned by solidarity between workers from Lesotho and South Africa. Men like Lira Setona, a charismatic winch-driver from Lesotho, were key to the union’s workplace organising. And the union’s general secretary, Ramaphosa, worked closely with worker-leaders from Lesotho to secure the union’s successes. Ramaphosa became South African president in 2018, and has shown little sympathy for immigrants since.

Democracy and xenophobia

The ANC’s electoral victory in 1994 unleashed a little-discussed wave of anti-migrant policies. In its first year in power, the ANC used apartheid-era laws to deport a record 157,084 people. Most were refugees from Mozambique’s bloody civil war.

Visions of the “rainbow nation” have seldom included those branded as “foreign Africans” – the victims of recent violence.

Yet there is also a parallel history: thousands of South African freedom fighters across more than a century have also improved their own lives through solidarity rather than through xenophobia.

Zoe Groves received funding for her research in Malawi and Zimbabwe from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Henry Dee received funding from the British Academy.

Julie Weise received funding for her research in South Africa and Malawi from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the University of Oregon.

Anusa Daimon 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/2026/09/15/have-south-africans-always-been-hostile-to-migrants-historians-map-a-chequered-history/

When two popular science magazines – out of about 17 in circulation – ceased publication in the same year, one commentator said, “The science magazines didn’t shake out. They fell apart.” The general manager of one of the failed magazines said, “There was a perception that they were irrelevant.” One of the publishers remembered being in a “state of shock” as the failures emerged.

The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a “science boom” in the media industry was now dubbed a “science crash.” Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science “was a fad.”

The same worries have now reappeared 40 years later, as publishers have cut the science and environmental reporting staff at many newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the biggest shock came in late June 2026, when Scientific American was sold to new owners, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut salaries of many others. But it followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post (where one of us, Chris Mooney, worked for nearly 10 years), The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and CBS News.

One longtime science writer recently worried he was writing a eulogy for science journalism. Another said, “We’re in a greatly diminished journalistic enterprise in this country.” On Bluesky, one commenter said, “The media mass extinction rolls ever onward.”

So, as scholars of science journalism, we wondered: Is this just a cyclical repetition of worries that appear anytime there’s a setback in this field? Or is something new and more troubling happening?

The answer is a mix of both.

The moral panic

Scientists have complained about media coverage of science for more than a century, calling it both inadequate and, frequently, inaccurate. Despite many years of increased coverage and better-trained science journalists, scientific organizations routinely call for more and better science journalism.

Less clear is whether nonscientist adults actually want more and will pay to consume science content to a greater extent than they already do – at least when not delivered by celebrities like astronomer Carl Sagan in the 1980s or, in the current era, the former NASA engineer turned award-winning YouTuber and Netflix star Mark Rober.

In 1987, one of us, Bruce Lewenstein, analyzed the crash of the science boom. Bruce concluded then that an audience clearly did exist at the time for science journalism, though it might not have been as large as some commentators – and publishers – had hoped.

The commentary about a crash, in Bruce’s analysis, represented a moral panic – a real concern, but one where interested parties often exaggerate how serious or widespread a problem is. In reality, science journalism continued to thrive in the decades after the 1980s science boom, as new programs developed to train science journalists, new outlets appeared, and new formats arrived as the internet grew.

What the data shows

Perhaps the current concerns are again a moral panic: real, but not quite what people are claiming. As it happens, the other of us, Chris Mooney, has been collecting data to update the earlier analysis.

It appears today’s doomsayers have some points in their favor: Out of 29 prominent popular science magazines created in the United States since the 19th century, only 11 remain. And eight of the closures have happened since 2000.

Unfurl the caveats: This preliminary effort only tracks print magazine closures. And it only includes magazines covering broad scientific areas – not just one field, such as astronomy – and targeted at a general, popular audience. For instance, it largely excludes educational, alumni or membership publications. But we feel the main titles are here.

And the message is unavoidable: In science media, many efforts fail. They always have. For instance, McGraw-Hill launched an ill-fated mass media science magazine, Science Illustrated, back in 1946 – and saw it fold by 1949. There are many other such stories across the decades.

By far the starkest recent print loss is Popular Science, a title that traces its origins back to the Popular Science Monthly of 1872. As recently as 2011, Popular Science had a total distribution of well over 1 million magazines each month. But it cut back to bimonthly, then to quarterly, and then no print at all by 2021. By the end of 2023, there was no digital magazine. It continues to publish online science content and two podcasts.

National Geographic, another of the magazine giants, has also struggled. In 2023, it laid off multiple staff writers, according to reporting by The Washington Post, and ceased monthly newsstand sales. The magazine continues to publish in print.

That three of the oldest and best-known publications – Scientific American, Popular Science and National Geographic – have all faced cutbacks in recent years surely points to something deeper afoot.

It’s not just journalism about science

Surveying the field of popular science publishing, two items of context seem relevant.

First, it’s not just science journalism that’s in trouble. The entire structure of journalism is changing. The struggle of print publications goes far beyond the science realm and fundamentally reflects the rise of the internet.

The changes have arguably been even harder on print newspapers than print magazines. For instance, from 2000 to 2025, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a loss of roughly 80% of U.S. newspaper jobs, versus about 65% of jobs in the publishing of periodicals. Just as we finished this article, the hedge fund-owned McClatchey chain of newspapers announced major cuts to its newsrooms – apparently between 30% and 50% of the editorial staff at some publications, at some even more. Both newspapers and magazines have suffered from dramatic shifts in the market for advertising, which has moved online, and from how younger generations consume information.

Some of journalism’s challenges today are economic, some are political. And those are interrelated – the current fervor for profits encourages corporate consolidation and works against smaller outlets willing to forgo money in favor of meeting other goals. Those goals can include recruiting young people into science, or presenting the value of expert knowledge, or expressing awe at the natural world.

And second, in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube – all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.

So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors and, yes, lawyers.

Much online science information remains unfiltered – pushed by corporations and institutions and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.

Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism – in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, “The Next Journalism,” new intellectual models need to emerge.

So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.

Bruce Lewenstein is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. In the 1980s and 1990s, he published research about the Scientific American. The company that then owned the magazine provided a small amount of travel and transcription support for his work.

Chris Mooney is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. As a freelance writer he has previously contributed to several magazines shown in the chart or discussed in the article: Scientific American, Discover, and Nautilus. He was the Washington Correspondent for another of these magazines, Seed, from mid-2005 through late 2007 and Seed’s ScienceBlogs network hosted his blog, “The Intersection” (co-authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum) from 2006 until 2009. (The blog was hosted at Discover from 2009 until late 2011, and Chris also blogged briefly on the Psychology Today website.) He worked for the Washington Post from 2014-2024 and currently writes on Substack.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/is-science-journalism-dying-comparing-a-science-crash-40-years-ago-to-today/