For decades, cancer has been thought of as a purely human disease – rogue cells multiplying out of control, with no room for anything else in the picture. But a growing body of research suggests that isn’t quite right. Some tumours, it turns out, come with company: communities of bacteria, viruses and fungi living on, between and even inside the cancer cells themselves.

The trouble is that nobody has been entirely sure which cancers actually have this so-called microbiome, and which don’t. The field has been dogged by contradictory claims, competing methods and – in one particularly damaging case – a retraction, after results from a high-profile study could not be replicated.

Since then, the field has been left without a clear way forward. Every research group has used its own methods and level of rigour, and there has been no agreed-upon benchmark to check new findings against. That matters because the stakes are high.

If microbes really are helping some cancers grow, resist treatment or spread, they could become new targets for screening and drug development. But chasing signals that turn out to be false wastes time, money and precious patient samples.

Our team set out to settle the question properly, using the largest collection of cancer genetic data in the world – Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project, which includes DNA from more than 16,000 tumours. We built what we believe is the most rigorous analysis pipeline yet developed for this kind of work, designed to strip out every source of error we could identify, then applied it to the entire dataset.

Our latest research found that most cancers – including those of the brain, breast and kidneys – lack a microbiome that is distinguishable from background. This suggests that earlier studies that had picked up microbial signals in these tumours may have been affected by contamination: stray DNA from laboratory equipment or even the scientists handling the samples.

But some cancers were different. Tumours of the mouth, oesophagus, stomach and bowel showed clear, consistent evidence of microbial life. And it wasn’t just bacteria. We found viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms similar to bacteria but genetically distinct) living within these tumours.

In some cases, we detected trichomonas, a single-celled protozoan parasite. The particular mix of species varied depending on where in the digestive tract the cancer was and was linked to features such as the cancer’s subtype and how many genetic mutations it carried.

Telling real microbes from contamination

Working out which of these microbial signals were genuine and which were laboratory contamination was the hardest part of the project. Sequencing a tumour means reading every strand of DNA in the sample, human and non-human alike.

Most cancer researchers simply ignore the non-human portion. We did the opposite. We discarded the human DNA and matched everything left over against known microbial genomes to see what was hiding there.

However, this approach can run into problems fast. There’s no single, definitive human genome to measure against – everyone’s DNA differs slightly, and even the best reference genomes have gaps. Any leftover human sequence that happens to resemble microbial DNA can be wrongly flagged as a hit.

Then there are errors in the microbial reference libraries themselves – occasionally the wrong species ends up catalogued, or DNA from a lab technician’s skin ends up mixed in with a sample. And however carefully a lab operates, some contamination during tumour preparation is almost unavoidable.

We tackled each of these problems in turn. We filtered aggressively against multiple versions of the human genome, stripping out anything ambiguous or repetitive. We used the most up-to-date DNA-matching software against carefully curated microbial databases.

To catch contamination, we compared which microbes turned up across different cancer types: species that appeared everywhere were almost certainly picked up in the lab, while species confined to just one or two cancer types were more likely to be real.

Sure enough, several of the culprits we filtered out were common skin bacteria found in every cancer type – probably from the researchers who had handled the samples.

This kind of large-scale, painstaking filtering was only possible because of the sheer size and quality of the Genomics England dataset. Smaller studies simply don’t have enough samples or resolution to distinguish a genuine biological pattern from a one-off contamination event.

We’ve now made our data freely available as downloadable software, along with a list of the microbial species we’re confident are genuinely present in these tumours, so other researchers can apply the same rigorous approach to their own data.

The hope is that this draws a line under years of conflicting claims. Scientists can then focus their efforts where the evidence is strongest. That means tracking how these microbial communities in mouth, throat, stomach and bowel cancers might influence how tumours develop and how well they respond to treatment. Ultimately, it could help these cancers be diagnosed and treated earlier.

Henry Wood receives funding from Cancer Research UK, National Institute of Health Research.

Anders Dohlman receives funding from The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and from Cancer Research UK.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/largest-study-yet-reveals-which-cancers-have-their-own-microbiomes/

“We have decided that we do need to change your sentence.” With those words, Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr delivered the Court of Appeal’s ruling on two teenagers convicted of multiple rapes, overturning the non-custodial sentences the trial court had originally imposed. After hearing arguments from the crown and the defence advocates, the court concluded the original sentences were unduly lenient, and increased them to four years’ detention in a young offender institution.

Courts of all levels can err when determining sentence. The appeal process exists to prevent excessively harsh or lenient sentences from being imposed. All common law jurisdictions (where law is derived from the English system of judge-made law, such as the US and Canada) allow defendants and the prosecution to appeal a sentence.

Trial courts, also known as “first instance” courts, can make mistakes – even when they follow detailed sentencing guidelines as is the case in England and Wales and Scotland. Miscarriages of justice can arise from excessively severe or excessively lenient sentences.

The Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme in England and Wales accords the attorney general the opportunity to appeal sentences on the grounds that they were manifestly too lenient.

Originally enacted in 1989, the scheme is restricted to certain serious offences, including murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and some child sex and child cruelty offences. Certain serious fraud, drug and terrorism-related offences are also included. If a sentence is imposed for a crime included in the scheme, the attorney general may ask the Court of Appeal for a sentence review. The court must first give leave to appeal. If leave is granted, the court will hear submissions on behalf of the attorney general, and also the offenders on whom the sentence was imposed.

In considering whether to amend the sentence, the court applies a high standard. If the court simply has the view that the sentence was somewhat lenient, this is insufficient to interfere with the trial court’s decision. The court must distinguish between a sentence that is less than the appeal court would have imposed, and one which is likely to be “unduly lenient”.

In referring the Fordingbridge case, Attorney General Richard Hermer said: “There has understandably been a huge amount of public interest, and concern, at this horrific case.”

Involving the public

The ULS scheme in England and Wales has a unique aspect not found in other countries. Crime victims or many members of the public can ask the attorney general’s office to examine sentences handed down by crown courts within six months of sentencing under the scheme (recently increased from 28 days), as long as the offence falls within the remit of the scheme. No other common law country allows members of the public to request a sentence review.

If a victim or other member of public requests a review, this does not guarantee the court of appeal will conduct a review. The decision to refer a sentence rests wholly with the attorney general – few referrals from victims or the public ultimately result in a review by the court of appeal.

Legal scholars are divided on the merits of allowing members of the public to request a sentence review.

Critics argue that the public seldom has sufficient knowledge of the case to reach an informed decision as to whether a given sentence is too lenient. News accounts of a sentence are often inaccurate, omitting important details of the case that may justify what appears to be a very lenient sentence.

There is also the risk of raising expectations that may not be fulfilled. How do victims feel when they seek a review of a sentence, only to learn that the attorney general has declined to refer the case to the Court of Appeal?

Defenders of public input argue that this feature permits greater democratic engagement with the sentencing process and encourages victim participation in the court system. As such, it may enhance public and victim satisfaction with sentencing overall. Advocates note that the decision to refer a sentence lies ultimately with the attorney general, so there is no danger of “victim-driven” justice.

Every year, several thousand defendants appeal their sentence. The number of attorney general references under the ULS is, by comparison, still relatively low – only a few hundred applications. But of these, almost all are granted leave (proceed to a review) – suggesting the court usually agrees that a review was appropriate.

In terms of outcomes, the court of appeal increased the sentence in approximately two-thirds of all cases referred by the attorney general that it agrees to review.

The ULS scheme has yet to be the subject of any formal review, and there is very little research on the issue. Many questions remain. For example, should the range of offences covered by the scheme be expanded? And most importantly, are victims – or the sentencing process more generally – better off by allowing this engagement with the appeal process?

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/fordingbridge-rape-sentences-increased-how-does-unduly-lenient-sentence-review-work/

Consider the following scenario. Suzy is 63, recently retired, and trying to decide when to start receiving Social Security and how to manage her retirement savings to minimize the tax hit.

She opens an AI chatbot, types in the details and gets a calm, well-organized and confident answer: Claim now, convert this much, here is the reasoning.

The chatbot sounds authoritative and even shows its work. So Suzy follows its guidance and never calls a financial planner. Maybe the advice was fine. But maybe it quietly ignored the fact that Suzy’s spouse is younger and in poor health, which can flip the Social Security math. It also may have overlooked that the retirement savings plan conversion it suggested would push Suzy into paying higher Medicare premiums two years later.

Suzy won’t find out for a long time, if ever, whether this guidance was right for her. And the AI will never call back to say it was unsure.

Suzy isn’t an exception. AI chatbots have entered everyday life with remarkable speed: A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 34% of U.S. adults and 58% of those under 30 have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share two years earlier.

A growing number are asking AI about money, and some are getting burned. According to a 2025 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults by Pearl.com, a professional services platform, 19% said they lost more than $100 by following financial advice from an AI chatbot. Among Gen Z investors, that figure rose to 27%.

These aren’t hypothetical risks. People are already paying for answers about their money that are confident – and wrong.

As a finance professor who has been closely watching the spread of AI into personal finance, this is the part of the AI story that worries me most. And it’s not the part you usually hear about.

We argue about AI the wrong way

There are two seemingly opposite complaints about AI. One is that people trust it too much, treating a chatbot like an oracle, a tendency researchers call algorithm appreciation. The other is that people don’t trust it enough and dismiss its useful tools, a tendency known as algorithm aversion.

I argue these are actually two sides of the same coin, and what decides which side you see is whether you can tell when the AI is wrong.

When an AI fails in an obvious way, you notice and lose confidence. So you’re more likely to seek a professional or another human you trust sooner than you otherwise would. That is the safe failure.

The dangerous failure is the opposite. The answer is fluent, confident – and wrong. You have no way to catch it, so you keep managing the problem yourself long past when you should have asked for help.

The trouble is that with money, the second kind of failure is the common kind.

When you mistake fluency for accuracy

Three things make financial advice especially treacherous for AI.

First, fluency is not accuracy. People naturally read a confident and well-articulated answer as competent. But how polished an answer sounds tells you almost nothing about whether it fits your situation or the accuracy of the proposed solution. A chatbot can be word-perfect and still be wrong about your taxes, because your taxes depend on details it never asked about.

Second, AI is least reliable exactly where the stakes are highest. AI tools are good at routine and general topics: what a Roth IRA is, how compound interest works, the difference between a stock and a bond.

But financial life is full of rare, complicated, one-time decisions: exercising stock options, understanding the alternative minimum tax, making required, minimum 401(k) distributions, deciding on a Social Security strategy as a couple, drawing up a divorce settlement.

I made a similar argument three years ago about AI trading on Wall Street. Because market crashes are rare, there’s little data for AI to learn from, so it can be most confident exactly where it is least informed.

That worry hasn’t faded. Market watchers now caution that AI trading bots are creating fresh financial risks, and that same blind spot applies to your personal finances. Researchers call this uneven competence a “jagged frontier” – reliable with common cases but unreliable for unusual ones. And in finance, the unusual cases tend to be the expensive ones.

Third, you often can’t check the work. Financial advice is what economists call a “credence good,” like a mechanic’s diagnosis or a doctor’s recommendation. You often can’t tell whether the advice was good, sometimes for years. A mistaken tax move may not surface until an audit. A bad 401(k) drawdown plan may not bite until the stock market slumps. Without quick feedback, the wrong-but-confident answer never gets corrected.

This is why the Pearl numbers above are probably an undercount, since they capture only losses people noticed.

The quiet failure is the one to watch

Notice that the real harm in Suzy’s story isn’t a single dramatic mistake. It’s that a confident answer made Suzy feel no need to call a professional, so the call never happened.

The danger is not so much that you act on bad advice but that you never seek good advice. The smoother and more reassuring the tool, the easier it is to stay in do-it-yourself mode past the point when you need outside help.

Who’s most at risk? In a study of a large robo-advising platform in India, co-author Vishaal Baulkaran and I found that its users skew young, are predominantly male and tend to be smaller retail investors and professionals. And new account sign-ups rise during periods of high market volatility.

In other words, the people leaning hardest on automated advice match that 27% figure among those Gen Zers who lost more than $100 while using a chatbot for financial advice. They reach for it just when markets turn turbulent and a wrong move is most costly.

There’s also an incentive worth naming. In my new analysis, I argue that a tool that earns its revenue by holding your attention has a reason to sound confident and helpful: Confidence keeps you on the platform. The catch is that the user it retains that way is sometimes the one who should have been handed off to a human.

A system tuned to keep you engaged isn’t the same as one tuned to protect your financial future, and the two can point in different directions. The disruption is already underway, as wealth managers face what Bloomberg has called a chatbot reckoning. A single, new AI tax tool recently sent wealth management stocks sliding as investors bet that automated advice will eat into the business.

How to be smart about using AI

These findings don’t mean that people should avoid AI for money advice. Used well, these tools are a valuable and free financial educator.

This is also not to say that a financial adviser always has the right answers. As with finding any kind of specialist, it’s important to do research first and make sure they meet the kind of criteria laid out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fee transparency is also crucial.

But if you do turn to AI, the skill is knowing where to draw the line.

Treat AI as a starting point, not a verdict. It’s excellent for learning concepts, drafting questions and getting oriented before a meeting. It can teach people the vocabulary to have a smarter conversation with an expert.

But watch out for the signals that you have left its comfort zone and entered the territory where AI is weakest and a confident answer is least trustworthy. The red flags are large dollar amounts, tax consequences, anything irreversible and anything that turns on the specifics of your situation rather than a general rule.

Estate questions, the drawdown of retirement savings, strategies for claiming Social Security benefits, business structure and major one-time transactions all belong in this category. Those are the decisions that call for bringing in a human, such as a certified financial planner.

And remember, confidence isn’t competence. When the answer about your money sounds most polished and most certain, that’s not a reason to relax. On the hardest questions, that smooth confidence is exactly the signal that you should pick up the phone and talk to an expert.

Pawan Jain 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/2026/07/07/when-managing-your-money-take-a-chatbots-confidence-with-a-grain-of-salt/

The DNA in a single cup of water can track wildlife, monitor pollution and survey pathogens in waterways and their surroundings, all at the same time.

DNA is contained in each cell of every plant, animal, fungus and microbe. It carries the genetic instructions needed for an organism’s survival, growth and function, and the DNA of each species is unique.

Organisms shed DNA into their environments. This environmental DNA, or eDNA, can come from cells shed from skin, spores and pollen blowing on the wind, or even just a cough or sneeze. It can provide huge amounts of information. Researchers can use it to assess biodiversity, monitor the spread of invasive species and detect pathogens.

Traditional monitoring methods, such as field observation or trapping, can be difficult, intrusive and time-consuming. Tracking an elusive species in the wild can mean hours or days without a sighting, perhaps in difficult terrain or remote locations. Trapping wildlife can be stressful for the animals and relies on expert knowledge to properly handle wildlife and position traps.

With eDNA, researchers can collect information about a species without ever needing to see or interact with it. Moreover, a cup of water, a few ounces of sand or even air sucked through a filter can hold enough information to determine what has been in the area, including people, wildlife and infectious pathogens.

Cracking the DNA code

Researchers sequence DNA fragments collected from sand, water or air to decode the order of the chemical building blocks that make up DNA. These sequences can be used to not only identify the species that the fragments of DNA came from, but also to narrow down the area where the organism originated.

Until recently, researchers typically used an approach called metabarcoding to sequence eDNA. This method creates many copies of specific, short genetic markers that researchers can use to identify particular species.

Although powerful, metabarcoding is selective by design. It finds only what it is designed to find – typically small but informative regions of DNA called barcodes – and ignores everything else. Because the DNA fragments are so short, it’s difficult to link these bits of information. A single barcode cannot cover all species in an area, and it cannot provide information about the genetic traits of species in the area.

My team at the Duffy Lab at the University of Florida took a different approach. Rather than focusing on one short region of DNA in a sample, we used a technique researchers call long-read shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing, which reads each fragment of DNA in long, continuous sections. All the DNA and traits in one long fragment clearly come from the same individual. As a result, we can sequence all of the DNA from every species, from viruses to vertebrates and everything in between.

Compared to metabarcoding, shotgun sequencing is faster and requires less lab manipulation and processing. The “shotgun” portion of the name refers to how the DNA is fragmented, read in short stretches and then reassembled. This random, explosive fragmentation resembles the firing of a shotgun.

By comparing the results of shotgun DNA sequencing to large reference genome databases, researchers can figure out which species the DNA came from. This process provides an all-in-one DNA readout of everything in a single sample.

Rather than identifying the presence of particular target species, like the barcoding technique, shotgun sequencing is a broad snapshot of the ecological communities in a specific area. In a single assessment, researchers can detect microbes, fungi, plants and animals in as little as 24 hours.

River rich in species

To test our new method, my team and I collected water samples from the Avoca River in Ireland, starting from near its source in the Wicklow Mountains all the way down to where it enters the Irish Sea in Arklow town. We also collected sand samples from beaches near the river mouth.

These samples revealed a wealth of genetic information drifting through the river system.

The DNA we filtered from the water samples came from many organisms living in or near the water, including otters and oysters, foxes and fish, badgers and bacteria. Some of the species we detected were common and easily visible along the river (cows, sheep, dogs and humans), while some were more difficult to see (leatherback turtles and octopi). Some required a magnifying glass (biting midges, microscopic worms and viruses).

Researchers can also use environmental DNA to evaluate whether biodiversity restoration is working as expected. From our samples of the Avoca River, we detected DNA from organisms with major economic and ecological consequences: a fungus called Leptosphaeria maculans that affects crops and a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis that has caused catastrophic declines in frog populations around the world. This is the first time researchers have detected B. dendrobatidis in Ireland.

Not only can eDNA show which species are present, it can also reveal their origins and help researchers understand how they migrate and disperse. For example, the blue mussel eDNA we recovered near the mouth of the Avoca River most closely matches the DNA of mussels found off the coast of Wales (84%) and France (16%).

Pollution mitigation

Human impact on the river was clearly reflected in the eDNA we collected.

The samples we collected upstream in a sparsely populated area had very little human DNA. By contrast, the samples we took near the town of Arklow in 2022 contained high levels of human DNA, consistent with untreated wastewater entering the river at that time.

Additionally, we found DNA from human-associated pathogens in river water and beach sand. These included bacteria such as streptococcus, parasites such as entamoeba, and sexually transmitted pathogens such as chlamydia, herpes and gonorrhea.

When we returned to collect samples in 2024, the human DNA signal had practically disappeared. This coincided with the construction of pipework leading to the new Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant, diverting human waste from the river.

The ability to identify wildlife, human activity and pathogens all from one water sample highlights the potential for a wide-ranging One Health approach to environmental health surveillance. In principle, it is possible to use eDNA to simultaneously identify pollution sources and emerging pathogens, track invasive species and monitor environmental reservoirs of disease, nearly in real time.

All of nature in a nutshell

Environmental DNA offers a new form of ecosystem monitoring. Rather than carrying out environmental surveillance through the separate lenses of zoology, botany, microbiology and epidemiology, eDNA acts as a continuous genomic observatory.

This “all-in-one” approach to ecosystem monitoring is becoming ever easier as DNA sequencing costs continue to fall, technology advances allow longer DNA fragments to be sequenced, and computational power improves.

A single cup of water can unlock the incredible secrets flowing beneath the surface of the river. Biodiversity in and around the water, the effects of pollution and recovery, and the beautiful complexities of entire ecosystems are just waiting to be revealed.

Jenny Whilde 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/2026/07/07/fishing-for-dna-how-a-cup-of-river-water-can-reveal-secrets-about-human-health-pollution-and-biodiversity/

About 1 in 5 women will experience depression and anxiety during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. If untreated, a mother who has these conditions has a higher risk of birth complications, overall poorer health, impaired bonding and nurturing of her infant, and a higher risk of death by suicide.

But a new treatment moving through the Food and Drug Administration clinical trials process may be key to treating, or even curing, depression and anxiety in postpartum people. It is a newly named psychedelic, luvesilocin. It functions like psilocin, the psychoactive chemical within psilocybin mushrooms. It may be able to positively affect the unique hormonal shifts, brain changes and disconnection that can lead to these conditions like no existing treatments.

In prior studies of psilocybin, researchers have observed rapid improvement in symptoms – and sometimes a cure after a single dose – of conditions such as major depression and PTSD. In a recent FDA Phase 2 study of luvesilocin, we found similar improvements in postpartum depression.

I was the site investigator for the University of Colorado, one of 35 participating sites across the U.S. The study enrolled 84 postpartum women who were within a year of giving birth and ended in May 2025.

I have spent my career as a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist contemplating how the prenatal experience shapes lifetime health. I have also followed the psychedelic data closely. I’ve been eager to find evidence-based pregnancy and postpartum applications of psychedelics, given these drugs’ promise in treating other mental health conditions.

Depression and anxiety’s impact on moms and babies

One drug that has been studied and enhanced our understanding of the way psychedelics work is MDMA, which is commonly known as ecstasy and causes a euphoric high.

According to peer-reviewed research published by Bessel van der Kolk in 2024, MDMA can lead to improvements in individuals being able to identify, describe and feel their feelings. Other improvements resulting from MDMA assisted therapy include more self-compassion and a broader desire and capacity for connection with others.

Connection, especially the earliest one between a mother and infant, plays one of the most significant roles in providing the foundation for humans to grow and flourish. Postpartum depression is often defined by disconnection and impaired bonding.

Children born to mothers with untreated depression and anxiety have a higher risk of falling behind on early developmental milestones. They may also have behavioral concerns, such as hyperactivity or ADHD, and are more likely to withdraw from social activities. They tend to report somatic complaints, such as body aches and pains in early childhood.

Children of mothers who had depression or anxiety during pregnancy are also at risk of these same conditions as they enter their teenage years. They have nearly twice the risk of these conditions compared to teenagers whose mothers did not have untreated depression and anxiety. This pattern means depression and anxiety can become a multigenerational cycle. But this cycle can be interrupted with adequate treatment and support.

Increased levels of the hormone oxytocin were found by researchers in the blood of depression study participants who were given MDMA, LSD and mescaline, which are all psychedelic drugs. The increase in oxytocin led to more feelings of trust, empathy and connection.

Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus and is released from the pituitary gland into the bloodstream. It plays a critical role in birth and infant feeding. It also aids in the wiring and formation of human social brains.

Oxytocin is important in maternal bonding with an infant. Conversely, early childhood stressors, such as a mother suffering from mental illness, reduces oxytocin levels in children. This may be a contributor to adverse mental and physical health outcomes later in life.

In depression studies that involved men, psilocybin did not have as great of an impact as other psychedelic medications on oxytocin production. But there is reason to believe that oxytocin may play a greater role in postpartum patients because it’s levels are higher during birth and lactation than in other phases of life.

FDA study of psilocybin-like medication

In February 2026, the FDA granted luvesilocin breakthrough therapy status. This status is used to speed up the development of promising new medications for serious or life-threatening conditions. The drug received this status because our research found meaningful and rapid reductions in depression scores in those who received the treatment.

In the Phase 2 study, 77% of postpartum women who received a psychedelic dose, 30mg of luvesilocin, had significant improvement in their postpartum depression. Overall, 71% had no symptoms of postpartum depression seven days after the psychedelic session.

The purpose of an FDA Phase 2 study is to determine the effectiveness of an experimental medication on a particular disease or condition. In this case, the study is evaluating luvesilocin’s effect on postpartum depression scores and symptoms. In the group that received the placebo, a microdose of the drug, more than half experienced an improvement in their symptoms, but most still had some symptoms after seven days.

These are much higher response and remission rates than trials of the existing medications used for postpartum depression treatment. Existing treatments include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, and a medication called zuranolone. The latter is the only medication to have specific FDA approval for postpartum depression.

Access to psychedelic treatments

In 2023, the Colorado legislature passed the Natural Medicine Health Act. It offers a legal pathway for people to receive natural psychedelics, such as psilocybin mushrooms, in therapeutic settings. The first natural medicine healing centers opened in early 2026. Some locations advertise treatments for everything from postpartum depression to birth trauma.

Oregon has a similar state-regulated program. Numerous other states have different pathways toward legal psychedelic-assisted therapies and decriminalization of psilocybin-assisted therapy. Nationally, there was a recent federal executive order to accelerate action on treating serious mental illnesses. The order included mention of the use of psychedelic therapies.

Looking forward

By the end of 2026, Phase 3 of the luvesilocin trial for postpartum depression is slated to begin. Phase 3 trials are conducted to confirm the effectiveness and further evaluate the overall risks and benefits of a new medication. Each phase is an important regulatory step before a medication can be approved and available in clinical settings.

In Phase 3, 200 participants with postpartum depression will be recruited across participating sites. While I’m optimistic about the potential of this research, I believe its value can be established only through rigorous blinded clinical trials, objective data analysis, and conclusions and approval that are fully supported by the evidence.

Phase 3 will also include participants who are still breastfeeding. A study of luvesilocin during lactation in healthy volunteers demonstrated very low levels passed from the mother into breast milk. Thus, this medication would be considered safe for breastfeeding.

Luvesilocin may become a game-changing postpartum depression treatment medication in just a couple more years. On a much larger scale, psychedelic medicine could elevate our collective well-being and happiness, replacing systemic cycles of depression, anxiety, trauma and isolation with connectedness and compassion. These drugs could literally rewire our approach to trauma, addiction and how we relate to one another.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Camille Hoffman was a site co-investigator for the Reunion Neuroscience study of luvesilocin for postpartum depression. She has also done talks and webinars on postpartum depression for the company who makes the medication zuranolone, Sage/Biogen. Dr. Hoffman’s research on choline and fetal brain development is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/nearly-20-of-new-moms-have-anxiety-or-depression-but-a-promising-psychedelic-treatment-is-on-the-horizon/

A severe winter snow drought has left snowpack levels far below normal across the American West in 2026. Without a slow-melting blanket of snow to keep the soil and forests moist, alpine vegetation is drying into a tinderbox earlier than normal and ramping up the fire risk.

The historic dryness means electric utilities are facing a dilemma: how to deliver power through dry, windy regions without accidentally starting a catastrophic fire.

To cope, many utilities are turning to a controversial method pioneered in California: the public safety power shut-off – better known as a preemptive blackout. Imagine your power provider deliberately cutting electricity to your entire neighborhood for hours to days, not because a storm hit or a wire broke, but because the weather forecast is hot, dry and windy. This preventive darkness is fast becoming the new normal for millions of residents in the West.

As an energy systems researcher living in the West, I study how our electric grid interacts with these escalating climate risks. I believe utilities have better options that boost fire safety quickly while avoiding the drastic move of shutting off the power or investing in expensive alternatives, such as underground power lines or microgrids.

Billion-dollar spark: Why the West is going dark

To understand why a utility would willingly turn off its own product, you have to look at how the Western grid was built.

Most rural power lines consist of bare, uninsulated aluminum wires strung across thousands of miles of wooden poles, often through rugged forests. If those wires accidentally touch one another or trees or the ground, they can short-circuit, sending off sparks that can start fires.

This system, once considered the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, has been responsible for some of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history.

In California, electricity infrastructure has ignited eight of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires. The legal and financial fallout can be devastating. In 2019, Pacific Gas & Electric was forced into bankruptcy due to an estimated US$30 billion in wildfire liabilities stemming from equipment-caused blazes, including the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Because utilities are regulated monopolies, they can pass these massive liability costs to their customers over time.

California utilities have been using preemptive outages for several years to avoid causing more fires on hot, dry, windy days. Today, that strategy has spread beyond the state. According to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the independent grid reliability authority for the West, 24 western power entities had used preemptive shut-offs by 2026.

Colorado’s Xcel Energy implemented its first major preemptive blackout in 2025. Some of these outages have left communities without power for up to five days.

Fortunately, keeping communities safe does not have to mean leaving them in the dark. There are ways utilities can modernize electric system infrastructure quickly that lower the fire risk and keep the power flowing.

Solution 1: Covered conductors

The quickest, most cost-effective physical fix is to use covered conductors. Think of the electrical cords in your house. If you touched the bare copper wire inside, it would spark. But you don’t get shocked by household cords because they are wrapped in plastic insulation.

Utilities like Southern California Edison are actively wrapping their high-risk mountain wires in heavy, weather-resistant polymer insulation. By the end of 2025, SCE had installed over 700 circuit miles (1,126 kilometers) of this insulated “tree wire” in high-fire districts over the span of about a year and committed to modify an additional 1,481 miles (2,383 kilometers) by 2028.

If a severe windstorm blows a heavy pine branch directly onto an insulated line, it simply rests against the wire without sparking. It is a highly effective middle-ground fix that’s significantly less expensive than burying transmission lines in mountain forests, and it can be deployed rapidly across thousands of miles.

2. ‘Fast-trip’ settings and topology optimization

Another option is to change how the electricity behaves inside the power line using automated technology.

Traditionally, if a tree branch touched a power line, the system would try to push electricity through the line anyway, causing repeated sparking. Today, utilities are deploying “fast-trip” settings on their circuit breakers.

Think of these like the ultra-sensitive circuit breakers in your home. The microsecond a branch bumps an outdoor line, these smart systems detect the disruption and cut the power to that specific wire before a spark can even form. This allows operators to isolate a single high-risk area rather than shutting down power to an entire county.

Topology optimization is another promising operations technique. It acts like Google Maps for the electric grid. Instead of shutting power down when one line is facing high risks, advanced software attempts to safely route electricity around the danger zone using neighboring, lower-risk lines.

By dynamically changing the pathway of the power, utilities can drastically reduce the electrical load and heat on vulnerable lines without cutting power.

Solution 3: AI and real-time smart sensors

Advanced computer software and artificial intelligence are also helping utilities act with surgical precision.

In the past, if a utility feared a windstorm could spark a fire, it had to shut off power to a large region because it lacked localized data. Today, utilities are deploying smart sensors called dynamic line rating that are installed directly onto power lines. These sensors act like digital stethoscopes, measuring real-time wire temperature, wind speed and line sag.

When combined with panoramic, AI-powered camera networks, the grid gains eyes. Xcel Energy in Colorado has deployed 81 of these cameras. Instead of executing a sweeping blackout, operators can use these cameras and automated smart switches to isolate the high-risk span in a windy canyon while keeping the lights safely on for the surrounding town.

The era of risk-aware grid design

The future of Western energy relies on moving away from static, 20th-century safety manuals and toward a practice called risk-aware dispatching.

In simple terms, this means treating the power grid like a living, breathing weather map. On a calm day, electricity is routed along the cheapest path. But when fire conditions spike, AI algorithms will automatically recalculate the region’s electricity flow, diverting power away from fragile forest lines and routing it through safer plains or underground urban corridors.

The era of cheap, unmonitored overhead power lines is over. To adapt to a changing climate, I believe the grid must evolve from a passive network of copper, aluminum and wood into a smart, dynamic machine. By combining insulated wires, targeted undergrounding of power lines, and real-time sensor data, utilities can avoid sparking devastating fires without resorting to frequent blackouts.

Jasmine Garland receives funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Energy.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/electric-companies-dont-need-to-black-out-customers-to-prevent-wildfires-here-are-3-relatively-fast-affordable-solutions/

Reading allows children to live in a vibrant world, surrounded by fairies, elves and talking animals, transporting them to places where the impossible becomes real. But reading for pleasure also helps children learn more effectively and broadens how they view, interpret and interact with the world. It gives them a form of expression that fuels their imagination and empathy for themselves and others.

But the percentage of children who read for fun is declining.

Just 37% of 9-year-olds and 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By middle school, just 1 in 7 kids say they read for pleasure each day.

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has also tracked declines in kids and teens who read for fun, finding that in 2023, 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun each day, down from 27% who said they did so in 2012.

Slightly younger kids tend to read for pleasure a bit more. Approximately 39% of 9-year-olds said they read for fun in 2022, down from 53% of 9-year-olds who said they did so in 2012, according to the Department of Education.

This trend is showing up alongside another concern: stagnant reading scores, especially among teenagers. It’s tempting to treat those as separate problems. But as scholars of literacy, we don’t think they are.

Reading for fun isn’t just about fun

Outside of schoolwork, a child can read anywhere from as few as 100,000 words per year to 10 million or more for the most voracious readers.

This gap can help explain why some children’s vocabularies grow so much faster than others.

Kids absorb words from context, over and over, across thousands of pages. One of us, for example, has a son named Andrew, who, at the age of 2, once absorbed and correctly used the word “viaduct,” without anyone defining it for him, after he encountered it in a book about trains.

Older kids and teenagers who describe themselves as committed readers tend to have families that read to them since they were young, kept books around as their interests changed and made reading together a genuine priority.

A well-selected book, in particular, has the ability to enhance a child’s reading pleasure and reading ability, allowing them to see and feel the world with fresh insight.

Research shows a connection between teenagers who read for pleasure as young children: They tend to score higher on cognitive tests that measure verbal learning, memory and speech development.

Reading for pleasure can also help build vocabulary and reading fluency while enhancing focus.

Reading to develop empathy

There are other benefits to reading that won’t show up on a reading assessment.

We believe that reading is empathy operating in its simplest form: imagining your way into someone else’s experience and understanding the ripple effects of their actions.

Reading for pleasure, especially the kind that starts on a parent’s or caregiver’s lap, is one of the earliest and most reliable places kids get repeated practice doing that complex work.

Reading with a caregiver often progresses into children reading on their own, whether with a flashlight in bed or in the middle of the day on the couch.

When children become immersed in a book series on their own, in particular, it can help them develop connections with characters they grow to know, love or scorn. They inhabit a character who isn’t them. They sit with an idea long enough to understand why someone acts the way they do.

Feeling emotionally invested in a character’s decisions can also influence how young readers decide how to engage with others and treat people with civility and kindness in real life.

This skill doesn’t arrive automatically with age. It is built through practice, and recreational reading in childhood is the main training ground for it.

Implications for school and home

Within the past 10 years, many schools have invested in evidence-based reading instruction, with a renewed emphasis in phonics instruction to improve students’ reading proficiency.

This shift has been an important and necessary step in helping students develop the foundational skills they need to become successful readers. At the same time, some classrooms have had fewer opportunities for independent reading and reading simply for enjoyment.

In 2024, literacy researcher Chase Young recalled asking a second grader whether a classroom reading activity had made him a better reader. The child responded, “No, because it’s fun.”

Already, that young student senses that fun and learning have been filed into separate categories at school. This highlights the real cost of letting effective instruction and engaging instruction drift apart, as though a teacher must choose between them.

This doesn’t mean abandoning structured reading instruction, which matters enormously for students who are learning to decode written language by connecting sounds and symbols. It means reading a book that a child actually chose, rereading an old favorite, and allotting time for a teacher to read aloud purely because it brings joy to the class.

This effort extends outside of a classroom. When children live in homes where they see books around, where their parents and siblings read together, and where their caregivers also read for fun, they are likely to see reading as enjoyable and not an item on a to-do list.

People who enjoyed reading as children are more likely to read books every day as an adult.

We each read to our children from when they were young and watched as they grew and developed their own love of books, ranging from the “Fantastic Four” comic series to the “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” series.

Another one of us, Dee, has a daughter named Addie who remains an avid reader in her early 20s. She is currently reading the “Court of Thorns and Roses” fantasy series, among others.

And Andrew, the 2-year-old who once learned the word “viaduct” from a book, is still an avid reader. At 18, his shelves are now filled with manga and comic books, including a special section for “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.” His choice of genre and formats has evolved over the years, but his joy of getting lost in a story has not.

That’s the version of reading we’d like more kids to fall in love with – before school, however well meaning, might convince them that fun and learning have to live in different places.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/reading-for-pleasure-builds-empathy-in-children-but-fewer-kids-are-picking-up-books-just-for-the-fun-of-it/

Shareholder activists are investors who leverage their ownership in a company to push for change.

When those activists target a company, they usually want managers to change strategy, cut costs, improve performance or address issues such as climate change and worker rights. If managers resist, activists may seek board seats, call for leadership changes or criticize the company.

When one company is under fire, its competitors may fear that they’re next. Their managers may respond by cutting costs, changing strategies or making public promises even before an activist investor shows up at their door.

In other words, shareholder activism can create what our team of business school professors calls “collateral impact”: a domino effect in which pressure on one company changes what its competitors are doing.

Larger pattern

Consider what happened after a small activist investor, which owned only a 0.02% stake in Exxon Mobil, successfully pushed the company in 2021 to take its climate commitments more seriously. Many of its oil industry rivals, including Chevron, set more ambitious goals for lowering their carbon emissions soon after.

Something similar happened in tech.

In 2022, activist investor Altimeter Capital targeted Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming it was hiring too many employees and investing too heavily in the metaverse, an immersive online technology. Meta responded by cutting thousands of jobs and investing less in the metaverse.

Shortly after, Amazon announced its own big round of cost-cutting and layoffs – although no investor activists had targeted it on similar issues.

While these moves may appear to be separate decisions made by some of the biggest publicly traded corporations in response to different issues, our study in the Journal of Business Research, published in May 2026, suggests they are part of a larger pattern. We found that when one company changes course in response to activist pressure, its competitors frequently follow suit – even when activists have not targeted them directly.

Shareholder activists

Activist investors use an array of tactics.

They may meet privately with executives, submit proposals for a vote, publish open letters or try to replace board members. This pressure can damage a company’s reputation, restrict its decision-making freedom, restrain executive pay or even threaten senior leaders’ jobs.

Financially motivated activists may push a company to cut costs, sell parts of its business, return more money to shareholders or avoid risky investments.

Socially motivated activists primarily call for stronger action on climate change or other environmental issues, the protection of workers’ rights or other similar demands.

When one company makes changes after an activist campaign, competitors might try to avoid becoming the next target by cutting spending, slowing expansion or changing their social and environmental actions, what’s known as corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Such moves might signal to investors that the company is well governed.

Managers may make these changes because they worry about their jobs or the company’s reputation if activist investors turn their attention to them.

Collateral impact

To see whether an activist campaign against one company could also change what its competitors do, we followed companies in the S&P 1500, a group of large, publicly traded U.S. businesses, from 2006 to 2013.

We followed a sample of 1,435 U.S. companies over multiple years, creating 16,334 company-year records. Each record represents one company in one year. Of these companies, 215 received at least one type of shareholder proposal during those years.

We paid close attention to cases in which activist investors targeted a company and the company tried to meet those demands. Then we tracked close competitors to see whether they made similar changes.

We found that competitors do often respond, but not always in the same way.

When financial activists pushed one company toward greater financial discipline to boost short-term returns, competing companies tended to launch fewer products and announce fewer market expansions. They also scaled back their corporate social responsibility efforts.

We think one explanation is that such campaigns clearly warn managers across the industry: focus on the bottom line, or you may be targeted next. Managers may worry that ambitious growth plans or CSR efforts will be portrayed as expensive, risky or wasteful, so they cut them back before facing direct pressure themselves.

Interestingly, when activists pressured one company on social or environmental issues, such as climate change or labor rights, its competitors generally reacted differently. They still became more cautious about growth, since aggressive expansion could be seen as diverting resources away from social and environmental commitments, but they increased their CSR efforts instead.

Social and environmental campaigns send a different warning: Protect your company’s reputation and respond to public expectations, or you may become the next target.

In short, different kinds of shareholder activist campaigns can move competitors in opposite directions.

Closer rivalry

The collateral impact was strongest when the targeted company was a close rival. But greater rivalry did not affect every decision in the same way.

Its clearest effect was to constrain initiatives, such as launching new products or entering new markets. These decisions are often costly and uncertain. The closer the competitor that faced activist pressure and pulled back from growth, the more managers appeared to take the warning seriously and were likely to reduce their own growth plans.

Closer rivalry, however, did not make companies more likely to change their corporate social responsibility efforts. One reason may be that those decisions are shaped less by rivalry and more by broader concerns about legitimacy, reputation and public expectations.

Stock ownership patterns also played a role.

Companies with more long-term institutional investors were less likely to make quick cuts to growth after financial activism changed a rival’s behavior. We believe that’s because patient investors may give managers more freedom to continue long-term plans.

We also found that company reputation mattered. Well-known companies seemed more sensitive when activists targeted one of their rivals and reacted most strongly.

Following a rival’s brush with financial activism, more reputable businesses were more likely to reduce their CSR initiatives. However, they were more likely to increase their CSR efforts if their rival was targeted by socially motivated activism campaigns.

We think that because reputable companies face greater scrutiny, they may be more sensitive to activism against a rival.

Fear of being targeted

Although our findings suggest that shareholder activists can influence many companies with a successful campaign that took aim at just one corporation, those activists also need to be wary of unintended consequences.

A financially motivated campaign may push a targeted company’s rivals to cut not only growth but also their corporate social responsibility efforts. A socially motivated campaign may have a different effect. It may encourage the company’s rivals to respect labor rights or do more on issues such as worker rights, community support or the environment, but also make that targeted company’s rivals more cautious about growth.

The lesson here for CEOs and managers is not to change course simply because they fear becoming the next target of shareholder activists. Instead, they can talk more openly with their shareholders, understand the concerns that some of them may express, and explain their short- and long-term strategies before outside pressure drives a rushed response.

In business, the fear of being targeted next may be enough to change a company’s behavior before activists ever take aim at it.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/when-shareholder-activists-attack-a-company-its-rivals-may-feel-the-heat-too-and-change-their-ways/

A number of recent high-profile congressional primaries in the Democratic Party have resulted in the nomination of unexpected candidates. Many of these winning candidates have unseated entrenched incumbents, as 29-year-old Colorado attorney Melat Kiros did to U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, who has been serving in the House for three decades.

Some of these candidates are explicitly running under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, known as the “DSA,” a far-left organization known for standard-bearers such as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. New York City’s charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani, won his election as a DSA member in 2025 and has since marshaled political support for fellow progressives running for other offices in the city he runs.

Mamdani loaned his star power to three New York progressives, two of them DSA members, in an ad featuring promises to “abolish ICE” and “end corporate greed.” All three went on win their congressional primaries in June 2026.

There is no doubt that the DSA is having a moment within the Democratic Party. And since their candidates in the midterm races are all but guaranteed to win their safely Democratic districts, I believe their influence is likely to be a major factor on Capitol Hill in the next Congress.

That’s especially the case if the Democrats win the House with a narrow margin. The cooperation and votes of a handful of DSA members could be crucial to Democrats’ ability to act effectively as a majority – or not.

That’s because the DSA’s far-left positions on issues such as healthcare in the form of Medicare for All, defunding the police and taxing the ultrawealthy are likely to divide the Democrats, many of whom are more moderate and/or represent conservative districts.

But as a political scientist who studies the many methods politicians have available to represent their constituents, I’m seeing a story that’s more complex than many inside or outside the Democratic Party convey.

Affiliation with the DSA, or even just a far-left ideology, explains only some of the insurgent wins seen in the primaries. In reality, the Democrats’ reckoning is more complicated.

Who is – and isn’t – a democratic socialist?

Ascertaining the influence of the DSA in the Democratic Party, or in American politics as a whole, means understanding its membership among both elites and its voters.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are all well known, charismatic and proficient fundraisers on the left, as is Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a second DSA member of the House. And come January 2027, when a new Congress is seated, at least three more – the aforementioned Kiros of Colorado, along with Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who won primaries in two heavily Democratic seats in New York in June – will almost certainly be added to their ranks. These figures have all won their nomination contests within the Democratic Party but describe themselves as, and received official endorsements from, the DSA.

Meanwhile, the number of voters who officially affiliate as dues-paying members of the DSA is also on the upswing, nearly doubling since Mamdani began his viral mayoral campaign in 2025. Like their candidates, these voters largely participate in Democratic primaries rather than hold their own third-party contests.

But the DSA’s total official membership remains at around 100,000: formidable, but a minuscule percentage of the population compared to the two major parties. And even among this year’s crop of insurgent Democratic candidates, most do not affiliate with the DSA, including a number of ideological progressives.

For example, Graham Platner, the Democrats’ embattled U.S. Senate nominee in Maine, is an economic progressive who boasts an early endorsement from Sanders. But in an interview late last year, Platner declined to be identified as a democratic socialist, saying, “It’s not my politics.”

Brad Lander, New York City’s former comptroller and city councilman who recently won the Democratic primary against incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, is also widely recognized as a progressive – and was backed by Mamdani – but does not currently affiliate with the DSA.

Not all insurgent candidates are alike

Even among this cycle’s insurgent progressives, political ideology is not the only differentiating element that seems to matter to Democratic primary voters.

And the democratic socialists’ far-right 2010s counterpart, the tea party, can help shed light on these nonideological factors.

The tea party emerged during Barack Obama’s presidency as a far-right ideological movement with an ostensible focus on fiscal conservatism. And in my own research with Stella Rouse and Kristen Essel, we found that tea party-affiliated state legislators were more ideologically conservative in their voting records.

These legislators were also more likely to be white, to have served in the military and to be religiously observant. Other research has identified the tea party movement driven just as much by Obama-era racial backlash as it was by the movement’s stated fiscal concerns.

Most importantly, we found that tea party-affiliated lawmakers in state legislatures shared a number of anti-establishment tendencies and characteristics. They were less likely to have held previous elected office, to have sought party leadership positions or to have worked with the party before holding office.

Many of these same differentiating elements, such as racial and ethnic identity or a distaste for the established way of conducting politics, are clearly factors among insurgent Democrats this cycle, DSA or not.

Race, age, Israel and Palestine

Many, for example, would add to the ranks of nonwhite members of Congress if elected in November; and nearly all have either questioned or explicitly dismissed the idea of retaining Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries – both New York Democrats – as the party’s congressional leaders.

Age is a related emerging factor in Democratic primaries, which are producing many young nominees.

Kiros, Chevalier and Valdez are 29, 32 and 36, respectively. In the Democratic primary, Platner, 41, beat back Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, who is 78.

And in New York’s 12th District, two comparatively young Democrats, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, were the top two vote-getters in the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, 79, who finally relented to calls for his retirement due to his advanced age. Lasher won the primary and is nearly assured of a win in the heavily Democratic district.

In still other cases, insurgent candidates – DSA or not – have adopted positions on specific issues that mark them as a new generation of Democrats. Most prominent, and controversial, among these is their backlash against Israel, which has propelled an increasing number of pro-Palestine candidates to nomination, often over long-serving incumbents.

For example, the recently defeated Goldman in New York had continued to stake out pro-Israel positions, even as the Democratic Party has increasingly soured on that nation’s actions in Gaza. Goldman’s victorious opponent, Lander, made these positions a relentless focus of his campaign.

What does the DSA mean for Democrats?

It is all but guaranteed that next year’s Congress will feature more democratic socialists than this one. But it is also clear that not all of this cycle’s insurgent Democrats share that label, and that they differ from longer-serving Democrats in more ways than one.

In our research, we found that the tea party was best understood as a “factional group” rather than a separate party, and that its goal was to transform the Republican Party “in ways that go beyond ideology.” Given the U.S.’s entrenched two-party system, this may be the most accurate way to understand the new roster of insurgent Democrats, whether they identify as democratic socialists or not.

Regardless of these candidates’ motivations or DSA affiliations, the Democratic Party will need to reckon with their divergent ways of representing their constituents, particularly if the party retakes one or both chambers of Congress next year. If the factionalism tearing through the current Republican majority is any indication, the Democrats should probably prepare for some new and sharper divisions in their own ranks.

Charlie Hunt 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/2026/07/07/democratic-socialists-arent-the-only-young-progressive-democrats-dividing-the-party/

Paul Birdsong leads the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity, an armed, Black Panthers-inspired mutual aid group in Philadelphia.

Until February, the 39-year-old carried a firearm during the group’s neighborhood patrols to increase neighborhood safety. Then the police revoked his carry license. Four other Black Lion members lost their licenses the same week.

The city’s revocation letters, by published accounts, explained little. They cited “good cause” and Birdsong’s “character and reputation.”

They also pointed to a tense January 2026 encounter between a group of Black Lion members carrying rifles and a group of officers. The argument at a snowy intersection at 23rd and Diamond streets in North Philadelphia ended in hard words – but no arrests, citations or violence.

On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into the Philadelphia Police Department’s licensing practices.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote to Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker that her office would examine whether the Philadelphia police can use a “vague ‘good cause’ standard” to cancel permits.

The Justice Department’s press release stated the rule directly: “It is a violation of the Second Amendment for government officials to use vague, personal discretion when determining whether to issue or revoke permits to carry firearms.”

Philadelphia’s unique gun laws

The prevalence of guns in Philadelphia has real public safety stakes. Gun violence in Philadelphia has fallen from its COVID-19 pandemic-era peak, when there were 562 gun homicides in 2021, but the problem remains serious.

As of late June 2026, city data shows 330 people were shot in Philadelphia so far this year, 71 of them fatally. Parker has made violence reduction central to her agenda. That context helps explain why officials may seek aggressive tools, even as the U.S. Constitution limits their discretion.

We are scholars of gun laws and the Second Amendment. One of us is a law professor at the University of Wyoming, co-author of “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy” and an unpaid trustee of the National Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund. The other is a law lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania who has taught firearms law across the state and country and is a board member of the National Rifle Association, and who has also represented the organization on a variety of matters prior to becoming a board member.

Philadelphia has long been the outlier in Pennsylvania when it comes to public carry. Public carry refers to legally carrying a firearm in public places, whether openly, where the gun is visible, or concealed, where the gun is hidden from public view. Pennsylvania adults may lawfully carry firearms openly without a license everywhere but in the city of Philadelphia. Statewide, a license is always required to carry concealed.

In Philadelphia, however, gun owners need a license to carry openly too. This exception is rooted in the Pennsylvania legislature’s public policy choices made decades ago.

But this Philadelphia-only firearms rule is under constitutional pressure. In 2025, in Commonwealth v. Sumpter, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held it unconstitutional as applied. The state Supreme Court is now weighing the question.

Yet, for now, the statute remains on the books and still lets a license be revoked for “good cause” or because an official deems the holder’s “character and reputation” dangerous.

The Department of Justice says that’s a problem.

Supreme Court ruling on gun licenses

To understand the Department of Justice’s case against Philadelphia, it’s helpful to look back to 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

In its 6-3 ruling along what are considered typical conservative-liberal lines, the court struck down a New York law that issued carry licenses only to applicants who showed special “proper cause.”

The court drew a clear line. A government may screen permit holders with “narrow, objective, and definite standards” – a background check, a safety course, fixed criteria an honest applicant can know and meet. What the government may not do, the justices ruled, is hinge the right on “the appraisal of facts, the exercise of judgment, and the formation of an opinion.”

The majority added in its ruling, “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh condemned “open-ended” and “unchanneled discretion for licensing officials.”

The dissent saw it differently. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, argued the court should have considered “the State’s compelling interest in preventing gun violence and protecting the safety of its citizens.” In that view, dense urban risks justify more room for local judgment.

But Bruen rejected that approach and ruled that the government’s interest in preventing violence cannot justify vague or open-ended discretion over who may exercise a constitutional right.

The problem with ‘good cause’ standards

If someone in Philadelphia wants to carry a gun, they must obtain a license to carry through the Philadelphia Police Department’s gun permit unit. But without an objective yardstick, two police officers can review the same file and make opposite decisions about the granting of a license.

With a subjective standard, an applicant who is quiet, polished and familiar to the licensing office may pass this test, while another who is equally law-abiding but perhaps less polished or more socially awkward may fail.

One officer might treat a passionate social media post as proof of instability; another might treat it as protected speech.

A rule-bound system asks whether the applicant is legally disqualified. A discretionary one asks whether the official is comfortable with the applicant.

That is how a constitutional right impermissibly becomes a discretionary privilege.

Suppose you could vote only if a clerk judged an applicant’s “character and reputation” sound. Suppose a parade permit could be revoked whenever the marchers’ conduct “troubled” police. That would be intolerable in any other setting – not because every voter or marcher is admirable, but because constitutional rights are not based on a government employee’s benevolent opinion.

Whether someone supports the Black Lions or finds their armed patrols unsettling is beside the point. When the test for stripping a right is “good cause” – words that mean whatever the person holding the stamp wants them to mean – the test itself violates the Constitution.

Other cities, including New York City and Boston, also administer gun-licensing systems with subjective moral-character or suitability standards. However, Pennsylvania’s “character and reputation” language is among the most open-ended, particularly as it relates to the revocation of licenses.

Whatever happened at 23rd and Diamond streets, the dispute is relevant to every gun permit holder in the city: May one of the largest police forces in the country switch a constitutional right on and off according to its own read of a person’s perceived suitability or reputation?

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Jonathan S. Goldstein, Esq. is a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. He writes here in his individual capacity.

George A. Mocsary receives funding from the U.S. Department of Education to work at the Firearms Research Center at the University of Wyoming. He is also a volunteer Trustee of the Civil Rights Defense Fund.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/why-the-doj-is-investigating-philadelphia-after-police-stripped-gun-permits-from-black-panthers-inspired-group/

Young women are moving away from exclusive heterosexuality faster than young men.

In a recent poll, Gallup found that LGBTQ+ identification has more than doubled since 2012, with especially high rates among Gen Z women, or those born between 1997 and 2012. In 2023, 28.5% of Gen Z women identified as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men.

As researchers who study sexuality, gender and young adulthood, we, along with our former colleague Sarah R. Young, have tracked these patterns in our Human Sexualities Research Lab since 2011. The national trend matches what our interdisciplinary team – spanning psychology, social work and gender studies – has documented over a decade.

Our most recent study asked whether young women and men are changing in similar ways across three measures of sexual orientation: sexual attraction, or who someone sees as a sexual partner; sexual behavior, or who their sexual contacts or partners actually are; and self-identification, or how they label their sexuality. Our findings suggest they are not. In our analysis, this gender gap is not only about who claims an LGBTQ+ identity; it is also about how the boundaries of heterosexuality are changing.

Women are drifting from exclusive heterosexuality

Identity is only one part of sexual orientation. People also differ in who they are attracted to and who they have sex with.

In a study now under review, our team examined 15 years of responses from more than 10,000 public university undergraduates in New York state between 2011 and 2026. We also analyzed more than 700 open-ended responses from 2024 and 2025 in which the same student population explained why they chose their particular sexual identities.

Our research found that, across 15 years, young women have steadily become less likely to report being exclusively attracted to the other sex. In 2011, about 22% of female students reported attraction that was not exclusively to men; by 2026, that had increased to close to 50%. Similar movement appeared across sexual behavior and identity: The share of women who reported not having exclusively male sexual partners increased from 8% to 35%, while the share identifying as something other than exclusively heterosexual increased from 18% to 44%. These trends were broadly consistent across racial groups.

In our survey, students rated sexual attraction on a scale from exclusively other-sex attraction (women attracted only to men; men attracted only to women) to exclusively same-sex attraction (women attracted only to women; men attracted only to men). For young women, the shift was not mainly from exclusive attraction to men to exclusive attraction to women. Instead, women’s responses spread across the scale, from mostly attracted to men to mostly attracted to women. The largest change was a decline in exclusive attraction to men.

Young men have barely budged

Young men showed no comparable long-term shift and instead remained concentrated in exclusive heterosexuality; any movement away from that was limited and less sustained. The share of male students reporting attraction that was not exclusively to women remained nearly unchanged: about 14% in 2011 and 13% in 2026. This lack of movement was also seen in behavior and identity.

Among students who identified as something other than exclusively straight, male students were more likely to report exclusively gay identities than female students were to report exclusively lesbian identities. This is consistent with gender norms that leave men less room for sexual ambiguity and sort male desire into either entirely straight or entirely gay.

The pandemic didn’t start the trend

Researchers and journalists have suggested Covid-era lockdowns changed conditions for exploring sexuality and gender: Social life moved online, dating was interrupted, and some people had more time for reflection, online connection and experimentation away from peer scrutiny.

Our research does show a pandemic-era shift. Around 2020, more women reported being attracted to people other than just men, a change that leveled off somewhat after 2023. But COVID-19 lockdowns did not create the broader trend. Among women, movement away from exclusive heterosexuality was already visible before 2020 and has since continued along the same general path.

In contrast, there was no steady, long-term movement among men away from exclusive heterosexuality. The changes we observed were smaller and more concentrated around the pandemic and the years that immediately followed.

Why the ground shifted for women

To understand why these changes matter, consider what feminist writer Adrienne Rich argued more than four decades ago: Heterosexuality has never simply described who someone desires. As a social expectation, it has helped define women and men as complementary but unequal. It gives men greater authority and social status, encourages women to organize their attention, care and futures around men, and makes that arrangement appear normal, natural and even romantic. As the norm, it also stigmatizes those who do not conform.

Over the past century, feminist movements expanded women’s access to education, paid work, political rights, contraception, divorce and other legal protections. Those changes made adult life outside of heterosexual marriage easier to imagine and, for some, easier to pursue. Although scholars argue this progress has been uneven and, in some areas, has stalled, women today encounter a wider range of possible futures – professional, partnered, child-free, queer, bisexual, activist, caregiver or combinations of these.

At the same time, LGBTQ+ visibility, same-sex marriage, online queer communities, expanding language for sexuality and gender, and the #MeToo movement have challenged the idea that heterosexual partnership should be the unquestioned center of women’s lives.

For men, heterosexuality defines masculinity

Similar efforts to reimagine masculinity have existed for decades, but they have had less cultural reach and have not loosened masculinity’s reliance on heterosexuality to the same extent. For many, masculinity is still tied to heterosexual dominance, sexual confidence with women and distance from anything seen as gay or feminine.

Heterosexuality also still offers men advantages in relationships, including authority, sexual entitlement and unequal freedom from domestic labor.

Feminist progress loosened assumptions that men and women naturally complete one another through heterosexual relationships. As gender becomes less tightly bound to heterosexuality, marriage and family, some people have found room for exploration. Others have responded by trying to restore more traditional views of masculinity, femininity and heterosexual roles.

That may explain why public arguments about what young adults should want – in dating, sex, marriage, family and identity – so often circle back to gender.

Whereas some young adults embrace queer, pansexual, nonbinary or fluid self-descriptions, others turn to ideals that restore traditional roles: “trad wife” femininity, which casts homemaking and deference as aspirational; “feminine energy” dating advice that prizes softness, receptivity and letting one’s partner lead; male dominance promoted across the manosphere; or claims that men and women are naturally suited to opposite roles. These attempts to restore traditional gender roles offer certainty as expectations linking gender, sexuality, relationships and adulthood weaken.

Our findings don’t just tell the story of young people becoming less heterosexual or young women becoming more queer. Instead, we believe they support the idea that heterosexuality may no longer organize gender in quite the same way for women and men. For young women, its boundaries appear more permeable. For young men, heterosexuality remains bound to masculinity, status and social recognition.

Our research examined young adults at a pivotal life stage, as they begin figuring out who they are and what they want. But those identities form within a changing social world, shaped by rising LGBTQ+ identification, political backlash over LGBTQ+ rights and shifting expectations for dating and family life.

The larger question is what happens as these young adults carry different relationships with gender and heterosexuality beyond college. Those relationships will shape, and be shaped by, dating, families, workplaces, politics and law. They will also face expectations about what women and men should want, with all the pressures, backlash, policing and resistance that come with them.

In our analysis, the gap between women and men may persist unless masculinity itself becomes less dependent on dominance, control and compulsory heterosexuality.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/young-women-are-identifying-as-less-straight-young-men-not-so-much/

From June 24-July 31, dozens of countries will be taking part in the latest edition of the massive RIMPAC military exercises that take place every two years — including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam. The carbon emissions alone are staggering. Eugene Doyle outlines the high stakes involved in the second of three articles.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

This is a story about what has been taken and what can be saved.  I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing Dr Emalani Case, a Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) academic and activist about the cultural, political and environmental impact of RIMPAC 2026 on Hawai’i.

We also discussed the wider implication of the surge in US-led militarism in the Pacific, its dangers for all Pacific nations, and what a better vision of our future might look like.

Dr Emalani Case is a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. She has written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental impacts, and decolonial movements across Oceania.

I see that you’re named after Queen Emma.

She was the godmother of my great grandmother. She loved her people and cared for their health. She was instrumental in creating the Queen’s Hospital on Oʻahu and worked to create spaces of safety, health and genuine security.If I could make some link between RIMPAC and her —  RIMPAC is not about the health of the people; it’s not about our safety; and it’s not about our future.

RIMPAC is representative of the militarisation of our islands. There’s always this claim that it is for our benefit, for our protection and for the security of Hawai’i and the region, but beginning with the military-backed overthrow of the kingdom, the military has always been there for America’s imperial interests.

The PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an environmentally and culturally sensitive manner.  Is it? What makes you stand up to RIMPAC?  

You can’t say that you are aligned with the interests of the people or even with the environment when you’re based on destruction and violence.

I’ve experienced militarism and really felt it in visceral ways. When you grow up in Hawai’i, the military becomes normalised. It’s in your face all the time. It actually wasn’t until I moved away from Hawai’i that I realised, “Oh, it’s actually odd to see helicopters every day, and it’s an odd thing to see tanks driving through your community.”

Growing up in Waimea, which is about 40 miles from Pōhakuloa, one of the biggest military training facilities in the Hawai’ian archipelago, we could hear and feel when they were doing live target bombing there.

I grew up with parents who were activists in their own right, always fighting for our language, our way.  My mom was part of opening a Hawai’ian language preschool in my town and my dad was always fighting for our rights to continued access to our land, to be able to hunt and harvest, and fish.

So I grew up with that, and I grew up experiencing militarism and observing the violence. That led me to naturally stand against RIMPAC.

Tell us more about the rhetoric that the military are here to protect you — and us.

There’s a myth that the military is here to protect us. I always ask: who’s here to protect us from the military?

They see us as being sacrificeable and dismissible. When you start to confront this notion that we are supposed to be patriotic American citizens, that it’s our duty to give up our land and it’s our duty to sacrifice our places … that can be quite confronting for people.

Militarism shouldn’t be normalised, it is highly destructive. We need to unravel and challenge military rhetoric, because it is so strong.

I had a lot of family members around me who had already started to push back against that. We have a Hawai’ian Renaissance, this huge reawakening of political consciousness that started in the 1970s around the time of the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, one of our islands [for Vietnam war live firing training]. So I was born in the 80s, and I grew up with that reawakening, that renaissance, that revitalisation of language and culture, and dance.

It’s beautiful and it’s strong. We’ve got a really strong nation of people who are still learning, still unraveling, and still dismantling these normalised ideas, this colonial rhetoric.

What else do people need to understand about the negative impact massive events like RIMPAC have on the environment?

If you take Pōhakuloa — as just one example — you have these long stretches of black lava. It might look empty but under that lava is a massive aquifer. If you bomb on top of that and contaminate it with the chemicals that then seep into the soil, there’s major environmental damage.

If you repeatedly bomb a place, the threat to the aquifer is serious.

The logo for RIMPAC looks like a tourist advertisement for a tropical paradise.

That image of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise is strategic. The tourism industry is working as a mask for all of this other violence that’s happening here.

RIMPAC is part of this alliance of nations that ultimately might do crazy things like start a war on China? How worried should we be?

We have to confront these things like RIMPAC that are pulling us together in really dangerous, violent ways. It means confronting how militarism in one place actually shapes and even bolsters militarism in other places across the Pacific.

When these countries do decide to come together and wage war on China, that’s going to impact all of us.

There’s an image of the future that’s a very dark one but there’s also a positive one, that the Pacific can be an ocean of peace. Tell us, how you would like to see things shape up?

I think for anybody who does this work, there has to be a vision of something positive and beautiful. Otherwise, why do we do all of this? My vision for the Pacific is, of course, not just the absence of conflict.

As Pacific peoples, we have responsibilities to engage in some kind of decolonial dreaming and envisioning — as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says: to think beyond the absence of something, and to think about what our futures actually look like, and feels like, and smells like in a future that is demilitarised.

I dream I wake up to silence because I’m too used to waking up to chaos. I want that silence in that moment to breathe and just hear nothing but birds or laughter or all the things that should be there. What peace is to me is waking up in a peaceful environment and having the energy to truly care for people. That brings us back to Queen Emalani.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/rimpac-2026-part-2-militarism-trumps-people-and-the-environment/

Young people in low- and middle-income countries appear generally more optimistic about how AI can enhance their work prospects and social lives than their western peers, according to our new survey of people in ten countries in Africa and South Asia.

While debates in higher-income countries often focus on job losses, misinformation and mental health risks, many of the 1,864 young adults we surveyed (all aged 18-35) placed more emphasis on the opportunities artificial intelligence tools present for them. In particular, nearly 80% of our participants expect AI to deliver improved education and learning for them.

Until now, there has been little evidence of how young people in middle- and low-income countries use AI, and how they feel about this technology – for good and bad. The 2026 youth AI survey – run by global charity Restless Development and academics from the universities of Makerere in Uganda and Cambridge in the UK – seeks to correct this imbalance.

It comes immediately after the UN Independent International Scientific Panel released its preliminary report on AI. Commenting on the need for more science about AI’s use around the world, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, admitted: “The world cannot govern what it cannot understand.”

Our responses were collected in Angola, Kenya, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – with the UK included for comparison. Two-thirds of respondents said they use AI every day, with Meta AI the most common tool, followed by Claude.

The extent of AI use is striking given the obstacles many young people encounter. In every African country surveyed except Nigeria, more than half said high data costs limit their access. Weak internet connections and a lack of digital skills were also raised, with many relying on basic-feature phones. By contrast, UK participants said ethical concerns played a stronger role in limiting their AI usage.

AI work opportunities

While few respondents (14%) said they earn income directly from AI tools yet, half expected AI to improve their employment and economic opportunities within the next five years.

Currently, AI’s main work-related uses among our respondents are learning new skills and job searches. In almost every lower-income country, young people held broadly positive attitudes about AI’s future role in their working lives – although many (32%-50% per country) expressed concerned about its impact on their future income.

How will your income be affected by AI?

Among those from lower-income countries, more than seven in ten thought AI would bring them better education and learning opportunities in the near future. A 28-year-old self-employed man in Nepal commented: “AI has the potential to empower young people in developing countries like Nepal by improving access to knowledge, digital skills, and economic opportunities.”

Our sentiment analysis found respondents to be most positive in Tanzania and Zambia, with young women there even more upbeat than young men. In the UK, young men diverged from their international peers in feeling more negative towards AI and work.

Biggest AI concerns

Some respondents described AI tools as “Americanised”, built around western norms and unable to grasp local nuance. They worried this could lead to their languages being further marginalised.

“These AI tools are fed major languages that are spoken worldwide, unlike Shona,” said a 25-year-old student in urban Zimbabwe. Shona is spoken by around 14 million people mainly in southern Africa, but is severely underserved by AI and other technology tools.

A Ugandan respondent was similarly critical about provision for her native language, Luganda – the country’s most widely spoken Indigenous language. “AI barely knows the spellings, grammar and how to interpret sentences. It’s not even familiar with our culture at all, which increases mistakes when we get to things concerning our own world.”

What most concerns you about AI?

Despite the widespread belief that AI would improve education and training, some held strong reservations. A 21-year-old female student in rural Uganda said: “Slowly by slowly, AI is making us dumb. We can no longer think for ourselves.”

The more often these young people use AI, the more worried they appear to be about it. The biggest concerns highlighted by daily users were around who owns their data and the power of AI companies.

Concern about AI’s environmental impact and the welfare of AI workers followed a similar pattern of higher usage co-existing with higher concern. Mental health is the only domain where non-users worry slightly more than daily users.

Gender differences

Significantly more young men (38%) than women (23%) reported having “a lot” of AI knowledge. This probably reflects a combination of diverging gender self-confidence, which tends to emerge from school age, and different levels of AI use. “AI is scary but helpful too,” said one female homemaker in urban Nepal.

Almost twice as many men than women use AI to search for work (33% vs. 17%). This difference is probably rooted in gendered access to data and technology, as well as differing social roles – such as the tendency for women to do more care work.

What have you used AI for in the past month?

In most of the ten lower-income countries surveyed, young women expressed greater concern about AI than men – with their biggest concern being over who owns their data. In the UK, 68% of young women were strongly concerned about data ownership, compared with 29% of men.

What young people want from AI

Many of our participants stressed the need for cheaper data and internet connections that work well. But they also want AI tools that fit their lives and culture – and speak their language. Until then, most recognise that talk of AI “leapfrogging” traditional stages of economic and social development is just that – talk.

Some efforts to make AI more inclusive and relevant for lower-income countries are underway. These include initiatives for “frugal AI”, as well as regional collaborations such as Masakhane for African languages and QuechuaBase in Peru.

How can AI be made safer?

Most of our participants framed AI safety as much more of a governance problem than a technical one. Many countries are establishing new AI policies, shaped in part by global forums such as the UN-led AI for Good summits. Overwhelmingly, our respondents agreed that governments, not tech companies, should be setting the rules when it comes to AI regulation and privacy protection.

Anna Barford receives funding from UKRI. She has previously been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, the Asian Development Bank, the Mastercard Foundation, and a philanthropic gift to the University from Unilever. She is a co-director of the Business Fights Poverty Institute and does consultancy work for the International Labour Organization.

Anthony Mugeere works as a Research Fellow for the Advocates Coalition for Development, Uganda’s leading thinktank specialising in advocacy and analysis on climate change. He has received funding from the British Academy and the Mastercard Foundation to conduct research on climate change and young people.

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/what-will-ai-do-for-us-young-adults-in-lower-income-countries-feel-more-positive-about-its-potential-new-survey/

COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose

On February 18 of this year, the United States launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 km/h, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 6700 kilometres away, 24 minutes later.

Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On March 3, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.

• READ MORE: NZ accuses China of going against peace and stability of Pacific
• RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Other RIMPAC reports

Searches of The New Zealand Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.

And yet, on Tuesday, both The Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the at least nine ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the US since 2021.

How many missiles has the US fired into the Pacific — did Australia protest those?

Here are the dates that the US test fired nuclear-capable ICBM missiles 7,000kms into the mid-Pacific:

•2026: March 5, June tbc.
•2025: February 19, May 21, November 4.
•2024: June 4,… pic.twitter.com/v6nxkRGA9U

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) July 7, 2026

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters and his Australian counterpart, Penny Wong, were both quoted as saying the Chinese missile test went against the intent of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.

Wong isn’t wrong.

In 2024 Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.

A statement from the President’s Office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.

“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”

It is a thought — almost — echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”

You will search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That is despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.

Without confirmation from China, it is impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance — which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to — is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.

When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.

But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).

Shortly after the announcement, then Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.

The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded more than US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.

A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 percent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 percent who saw the US as one.

The US has more than 5000 nuclear warheads with 1700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.

China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.

When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the US regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they are indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/jeremy-rose-the-nuclear-free-pacific-and-hypersonic-hypocrisy/

Education is compulsory for children in England, but schooling is not. Parents are legally entitled to provide an education for their children at home. This is often known as home schooling, though in policy terms, the Department for Education uses the phrase “elective home education”.

The inclusion of the word “elective” in government terminology implies that home education is a matter of parental preference. Some parents do home educate as a result of their lifestyle, preferences or philosophy. But this only tells part of the story.

The number of home-educated children has risen rapidly in recent years. This has happened against a backdrop of mounting pressure within the education system, including a special educational needs and disabilities system in crisis and record levels of persistent school absence.

Mental health is now the most reported reason for home educating – eclipsing lifestyle and philosophical or preference-based motivations. General dissatisfaction with school, as well as dissatisfaction with school for children with special educational needs and disabilities, also rank among the five most frequently recorded reasons.

Our new research helps to explain how these pressures shape the decisions of families to withdraw from the school system. We worked with 18 home-educated young people and ten home-educating parents, as well as 16 professionals with responsibilities for home education in local authorities and educational settings across England.

For the parents we spoke to, prolonged experiences of bullying, mental ill-health, inadequate support for special educational needs and subsequent attendance struggles preceded their children’s entry into home education. Parents had often spent years trying to resolve these issues and secure help from their children’s schools, to little avail.

One parent, Hazel, told us how despite repeatedly appealing to her son’s school to intervene in the transphobic bullying he was experiencing, “nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened”. Parents commonly described feeling stuck, with no clear route to resolving the problems their children faced.

School policies focused on sanctions rather than support added to parents’ frustrations. Julie described being “in some sort of battle” with her child every day to get him to school, while also being threatened with fines for non-attendance. For parents these messages felt accusatory, as though they were being blamed for circumstances outside their control. This contributed to the distress parents were already experiencing as they tried to help their struggling children.

As Lorna explained: “When you’ve got a child who doesn’t want to go to school and who will try everything and anything [to get out of going], that puts a lot of pressure on a parent as well, to try and do the right thing.”

A last resort

Knowing that school was not working, but unable to find solutions, some parents spent years trying to endure the difficulties they and their children faced. Eventually, however, things came to a head. Gemma described how, after trying to address the bullying her son Joe had been subjected to since primary school, she could stand no more.

“It got to year nine and he’d had mental episodes and I just thought, I were getting to the same point, where I were breaking down because I’d had enough,” she said. Leaving the school system was not a long-held plan for these families. Rather, it happened in response to families’ escalating distress.

In these moments of crisis, the stakes involved in leaving school were high, but the stakes involved in staying felt higher. Many parents worried about how they would balance home education alongside work. Some were already managing chronic health conditions or financial pressures. Others were concerned about the practical implications of taking on responsibility for their child’s education.

As Gemma explained: “Didn’t think I could do it, you know? Because you’re pretty much financially on your own and there’s no free school meals, there’s no support.” Yet despite these concerns, parents felt they had no other choice. The risks of becoming home educated were outweighed by concerns for their children’s wellbeing. “I’m not entirely sure [my son] would still be here if we hadn’t made that decision,” Hazel told us.

Our research shows that home education is not always the result of a freely made decision to educate a child outside the school system. For the parents we spoke to, it was the only option they felt was available. Faced with ongoing difficulties at school and inadequate support, parents felt compelled to remove their children from a system they believed was causing harm.

This distinction in how families come to home educate is important. When home education is understood as simply a parental choice, circumstances that can make that choice feel necessary can disappear from view. Framing home education as “elective” risks obscuring the unmet needs, exclusionary experiences and distress that lead some families away from school.

Unless the underlying problems exposed in our research are acknowledged, attention will remain focused on families’ decisions to leave school rather than on the conditions that made leaving feel so necessary.

Katherine Davey receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

Lisa Russell receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/for-some-families-home-education-isnt-a-choice-its-a-last-resort/