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Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is famous for his forthright statements to other world leaders. In March 1989, Mahathir wrote a letter to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that was blunt even by his standards. Unlike a lot of his angry letters, this one wasn’t published.

Mahathir’s letter was about Salman Rushdie’s controversial book, The Satanic Verses. He wrote:

I do not think I am a Muslim fanatic. Yet I find I cannot condone the writings of Salman Rushdie in his book […] And I find the attitude of the “Western Democracies” most patronising, arrogant and insensitive.

In 2019, the UK government declassified many of its Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) files on the diplomatic upheaval over the novel. Mahathir’s letter to Thatcher is one of hundreds of unpublished diplomatic documents I have seen in visits to the UK National Archives since then.

My full analysis of this letter, and Thatcher’s response to it, has just been published in the Review of International Studies. It is part of a larger project I am working on about The Satanic Verses crisis and what it tells us about the place of religion in international relations.

‘The strangest and rarest crisis in history’

The Satanic Verses, published in late 1988, was met with protests throughout the Muslim world, beginning in South Asian communities in Britain. Many Muslims felt Rushdie had insulted the Prophet Muhammad for the entertainment of Western audiences.

In early 1989, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued an extraordinary fatwa (or religious edict) calling for the death of Rushdie, a British citizen living in London. This led to a diplomatic standoff that the speaker of Iran’s legislature called “the strangest and rarest crisis in history”.

Portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1981.
Wikimedia Commons

Khomeini, who was seeking to strengthen Islamic hardliners in Iran, urged “all zealous Muslims” to carry out his fatwa.

No other leader of a majority Muslim country supported the death sentence, which blatantly violated Britain’s sovereignty and international law. But Mahathir and others felt Western powers should ban The Satanic Verses to maintain good relations with the Muslim world.

The British government saw no reason to ban it. Rushdie and his publishers had broken no British law, as the country’s centuries-old blasphemy laws applied only to the defamation of Christianity.

Defending Rushdie’s life was, as Thatcher put it, “a simple matter”. Her government would not tolerate an Iranian incitement to murder a British citizen on British soil.

Defending his book, however, was more complicated. The British government would not ban it, but also wanted nothing to do with it.

An unusually strong and personal letter

On March 15 1989, Thatcher and Mahathir met in London to discuss matters such as arms deals and airport privatisation. The Satanic Verses issue came up only briefly, when Thatcher thanked Mahathir for his government’s “moderate” stance on the book. She explained that while she could understand the offence the book had caused, the “great religions” could withstand such attacks.

Mahathir reassured Thatcher his government would take no action beyond banning the book. He said he had set out his personal views on the affair in a letter, which he handed to Thatcher.

When her private secretary opened the letter later that day, he found it was “cast in exceptionally strong language that was not reflected in Dr Mahathir’s demeanour at the meeting itself”, according to another archival letter.

Mahathir was having none of the argument that Muslims should behave more like Christians when it came to tolerating insults to their faith. He wrote:

It is well to remember that Islam has been around only 1,400 years. The faith and fervour of the Muslims are as strong as the faith and fanaticism of the Christians of the 15th century.

Of course, our behaviour is also influenced by the mores of the time. We are more tolerant than the 15th century Christians. We do not have inquisitions, we do not burn heretics at the stake, we do not torture those who blaspheme, we do not hound the new Muslim sects as you did the Protestants, and we do not indulge in pogroms. Our behaviour is more civilised than Christians when Christianity was 1,400 years old.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad greeting worshippers at a mosque in 2003.
Ed Wray/AP

Mahathir’s letter was very unusual for a diplomatic correspondence in that it did not mention either Malaysia or Britain. The “we” of his letter referred to Muslims, while the “you” referred to the West.

And the West, for Mahathir, was a Christian world, though he believed Christianity was enfeebled and decaying within it. He did not want Islam to suffer the same fate.

The West controls the world media and denies others access to it. The power is, of course, abused. […] The Muslims are a particular target. They are made out to be cruel brutes given to all kinds of savagery.

While the West claimed to believe in freedom of expression, according to Mahathir, it did not allow Muslims to defend themselves against what they considered “scurrilous misrepresentation”. Rushdie’s book was the final straw.

Your belief in this so-called ‘freedom of expression’ for one disillusioned and misguided man is stronger than your belief in the value of good relations with 1 billion souls.

In that case, he reasoned, the West could hardly blame Muslims for defending their own principles.

“Prime Minister,” he concluded, “I am much saddened.”

A disconnect between two world views

In another archival letter, Thatcher’s private secretary noted that British officials were “rather rocked by the severity” of Mahathir’s letter.

Thatcher instructed FCO officers to draft a “reasoned response” on her behalf. David Gillmore, former high commissioner to Malaysia, warned they must try to address Mahathir’s points or the reply would sound “condescending and supercilious”.

Written in Thatcher’s voice, the letter said she was “well aware of the distress” the book had caused Mahathir and many in the Islamic world. The reply avoided creating a perception the government was responsible for it.

I must emphasise that the British Government do not in any way condone or endorse Mr Rushdie or the content of this book.

Although freedom of speech was a principle of major importance, Thatcher insisted Britain was not seeking to impose its values on the Muslim world. The issue had “nothing to do with relations between Christians and Muslims”. Rather, it was one of national sovereignty and international law.

When it came to the heart of Mahathir’s complaint, Thatcher’s response resorted to language that was polite, firm and vague:

I was especially saddened to hear you suggest that the Western-controlled media made a particular target of the Muslim world. I cannot agree that this is the case. I believe that this century has seen a growing understanding between the nations, cultures and religions of the world. We must continue to work to improve that understanding.

The British government’s view was that states in the modern age could overcome differences once caused by religion. As such, Thatcher’s response would only represent Britain, not Christendom, despite the many symbolic and even legal ways the British state was still tied to Christianity.

This was one of the reasons Thatcher and Mahathir were doomed to talk past each other. For Western leaders, political authority had superseded religious authority in the 17th century. In diplomacy today, the things that mattered were sovereign states.

The leaders of Muslim countries also viewed sovereign states as important –they were the basis of their own legitimacy. And they had to defend the state against religious radicals who wanted to remake the world along classical Islamic lines.

But for leaders like Mahathir, who grew up in a British colony, religion was still a vital force in diplomatic relations. He viewed the Western insistence on a secular world order as a continuation of colonial dominance over the Muslim world.

Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during a press conference in 1989.
Kurt Strumpf/AP

The legacy of The Satanic Verses

We can see from this exchange how the British government wanted to distance itself from The Satanic Verses, even as it sought to protect Rushdie.

While many fellow writers, including Muslims like Naguib Mahfouz, leapt to the defence of Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, the book had few defenders in the British government. (One exception was Rushdie’s local MP, the future Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.)

In his recent memoir, Knife, Rushdie notes that he got a far more sympathetic response when he was nearly murdered in 2022 than when the fatwa was issued in 1989.

Despite the British government’s notable lack of support for Rushdie’s book, Muslims in Britain and around the world felt the political and cultural power of the West was aligned against them.

This continues to be important for understanding controversies around derogatory images of the Prophet Muhammad in the West. They are never just about the images. They are also about a global imbalance of power that goes back to colonialism.

Mahathir and Thatcher were mutual admirers of each other – and both can claim to have been their countries’ most transformative leaders of the past 50 years. Mahathir, now 99, is still active in Malaysian politics despite recurring health issues.

Mahathir’s anger in this letter did not reflect personal animus against Thatcher. It foreshadowed his future emergence as a global advocate of Islamist causes. His modernist brand of Islamism may well outlast Khomeini’s, despite the violent legacy of Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie. Läs mer…

This article is part of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.

Thanks to the decisive victory of US President-elect Donald Trump, we’re now set to hear a whole lot more of his favourite word.

It’s something of a love affair. On the campaign trail in October, he said:

To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.

Previously, he’s matched such rhetoric with real policies. When he was last in office, Trump imposed a range of tariffs.

Now set to return to the White House, he wants tariffs of 10-20% on all imports to the US, and tariffs of 60% or more on those from China.

Most of us understand tariffs are some kind of barrier to trade between countries. But how exactly do they work? Who pays them – and what effects can they have on an economy?

Read more:
What is comparative advantage?

What are tariffs?

An import tariff – sometimes called an import duty – is simply a tax on a good or service that is imported into a country. It’s collected by the government of the country importing the product.

How exactly does that work in practice?

Imagine Australia decided to impose a 10% tariff on all imported washing machines from South Korea.

If an Australian consumer or a business wanted to import a $1,200 washing machine from South Korea, they would have to pay the Australian government $120 when it entered the country.

Tariffs are charged by the government of an importing country, and usually paid by the importer.
Cara Siera/Shutterstock

So, everything else being equal, the final price an Australian consumer would end up paying for this washing machine is $1,320.

If a local industry or another country without the tariff could produce a competing good at a similar price, it would have a cost advantage.

Other trade barriers

Because tariffs make imports more expensive, economists refer to them as a trade barrier. They aren’t the only kind.

One other common non-tariff trade barrier is an import quota – a limit on how much of a particular good can be imported into a country.

Governments can also create other non-tariff barriers to trade.

China suspended imports of beef from many Australian suppliers back in 2020, citing labelling and health certification problems.
William Edge/Shutterstock

These include administrative or regulatory requirements, such as customs forms, labelling requirements or safety standards that differ across countries.

What are the effects?

Tariffs can have two main effects.

First, they generate tax revenue for the government. This is a major reason why many countries have historically had tariff systems in place.

Borders and ports are natural places to record and regulate what flows into and out of a country. That makes them easy places to impose and enforce taxes.

Second, tariffs raise the cost of buying things produced in other countries. As such, they discourage this action and encourage alternatives, such as buying from domestic producers.

Protecting domestic workers and industries from foreign competition underlies the economic concept of “protectionism”.

The argument is that by making imports more expensive, tariffs will increase spending on domestically produced goods and services, leading to greater demand for domestic workers, and helping a country’s local industries grow.

Read more:
What is competition, and why is it so important for prices?

Swapping producers isn’t always easy

Tariffs may increase the employment and wages of workers in import-competing industries. However, they can also impose costs, and create higher prices for consumers.

True, foreign producers trying to sell goods under a tariff may reduce their prices to remain competitive as exporters, but this only goes so far. At least some of the cost of any tariff imposed by a country will likely be passed on to consumers.

Simply switching to domestic manufacturers likely means paying more. After all, without tariffs, buyers were choosing foreign producers for a reason.

Because they make selling their products in the country less profitable, tariffs also cause some foreign producers to exit the market altogether, which reduces the variety of products available to consumers. Less foreign competition can also give domestic businesses the ability to charge even higher prices.

Countries such as China, South Korea and Japan have a comparative advantage in producing electronics.
Darren England/AAP

Lower productivity and risk of retaliation

At an economy-wide level, trade barriers such as tariffs can reduce overall productivity.

That’s because they encourage industries to shift away from producing things for which a country has a comparative advantage into areas where it is relatively inefficient.

They can also artificially keep smaller, less productive producers afloat, while shrinking the size of larger, more productive producers.

Foreign countries may also respond to the tariffs by retaliating and imposing tariffs of their own.

We saw this under Trump’s previous administration, which increased tariffs on about US$350 billion worth of Chinese products between 2018 and 2019.

Several analyses have examined the effects and found it was not foreign producers but domestic consumers – and especially businesses relying on imported goods – that paid the full price of the tariffs.

In addition, the tariffs introduced in 2018 and 2019 failed to increase US employment in the sectors they targeted, while the retaliatory tariffs they attracted reduced employment, mainly in agriculture.

Economists’ verdict

Tariffs can generate tax revenue and may increase employment and wages in some import-competing sectors. But they can also raise prices and may reduce employment and wages in exporting sectors.

Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Economists are nearly unanimous – and have been for centuries – that trade barriers have an overall negative effect on an economy.

But free trade does not benefit everyone, and tariffs are clearly enjoying a moment of political popularity. There are interesting times ahead.

Read more:
Trump’s economic vision is no longer a ’maybe’. Here’s what it might mean for Australia and the world Läs mer…

Three-quarters of Australia’s freshwater fish species are found nowhere else on the planet. This makes us the sole custodians of remarkable creatures such as the ornate rainbowfish, the ancient Australian lungfish and the magnificently named longnose sooty grunter.

So how are these national treasures faring? To find out, we undertook the first comprehensive assessment of Australia’s freshwater fish species. We examined extinction risks and drivers of decline, before reviewing existing conservation measures.

Our results paint an alarming picture. More than one-third (37%) of our freshwater fish species are at risk of extinction, including 35 species not even listed as threatened. Dozens of species could become extinct before children born today even finish high school.

The study also reveals Australia has been putting its eggs in the wrong basket for conservation by taking actions that don’t address immediate threats, such as pest species and changes in stream flows. Our research points to more effective solutions if governments are willing to step up their efforts.

The Angalarri grunter is currently not on Australia’s threatened species list but is recommended for listing as endangered. It is declining due to degraded habitat and water quality caused by livestock and feral animals.
Michael Hammer

Identifying species at risk

Recognising when species are in trouble is the first step in preventing their extinction.

Before this study, the extinction risk of most freshwater fish species had never been assessed. The group had never been looked at overall.

We evaluated the conservation risks of 241 species using globally recognised criteria (the IUCN Red List for Threatened Species).

We began our assessments by gathering a team of 52 Australian freshwater fish experts for a five-day workshop in 2019. These experts came from universities, research organisations, museums, state government agencies, natural resource management, consultancies and non-government groups.

Together, we used information from scientific publications, museum databases, Atlas of Living Australia records, government datasets, citizen science data, and our own knowledge of freshwater fish as it applied to the task.

We identified dozens of freshwater fish species that were in trouble, but had not been recognised as threatened. This brings the proportion of our freshwater fishes at risk of extinction to a third.

Some species have declined to the extent that they could disappear after a single disturbance, such as ash washed into streams after a bushfire or the arrival of an invasive non-native fish such as trout.

We also found one New South Wales species, the Kangaroo River perch, is now extinct.

Native fish enemy #1. A brown trout caught in NSW. Invasive fish such as brown and rainbow trout are the biggest driver of native fish loss.
Lee Georgeson/iNaturalist, CC BY

Get them on the list

At present, 63 freshwater fish species are on Australia’s national list of species declared as threatened under federal environmental law.

We identified 35 more species that should be listed, based on the available evidence. They include:

ornate rainbowfish and longnosed sooty grunter (vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, the global list of threatened species)

salamanderfish (endangered on the IUCN Red List)
the slender carp, Drysdale and Barrow cave gudgeons in Western Australia (critically endangered on the IUCN Red List).

The southwest ‘Vic’ blackfish is currently not on Australia’s threatened species list but is recommended for listing as endangered.
Tarmo Raadik

Maintaining an accurate threatened species list is important. When species are in trouble but not listed, they miss out on basic protections and are unlikely to receive any conservation attention.

We also identified 17 already listed species that should be reassessed by the government as their risk categories need to be changed.

For example, the remarkable freshwater sawfish, found in northern Australian rivers, is listed as vulnerable but all evidence indicates it’s now critically endangered.

One sliver of good news is the fact that the Murray cod, a favoured sport fish across eastern Australia, is now doing better and could be assessed to be removed from Australia’s threatened species list.

Mapping freshwater fish extinction risk reveals fish are in danger right around Australia.
M. Lintermans, N. Whiterod and J. Dielenberg, CC BY-SA

Address the causes of decline

To prevent species extinctions, you need to address the causes of their declines. That might seem breathtakingly obvious, yet our review found a spectacular mismatch between the major threats to species at risk and the most common conservation actions.

The top three drivers of decline are invasive fish (which threaten 92% of threatened freshwater fish species), modified stream flows and ecosystems (82%), and climate change and extreme weather (54%).

For example, Australia has 40 galaxiid species, scaleless native fish shaped like slender sausages that grow to less than 15cm. But 31 of these are threatened with extinction – and rainbow and brown trout, two introduced predators, have been the biggest driver of their loss.

Australia’s southern states are greatly adding to the problem by releasing millions of trout into waterways each year for recreational fishers.

The endangered eastern freshwater cod has dwindled in part due to historic fish kills linked to dynamite blasting and pollution from mines and agriculture. It remains threatened by changes to river flows, removal of woody snags, and other damage to its habitat.

The endangered blackstriped dwarf galaxias is being stressed by the changing climate in southwest WA. Warmer and drier conditions are resulting in lower water levels and warmer water.

A waterfall has so far saved the critically endangered stocky galaxias from extinction by preventing trout from reaching its last refuge.
Tarmo Raadik

The other major threats facing native fish are agriculture and aquaculture (38%), pollution (38%), hunting and fishing (19%), energy production and mining (17%), and urban development (13%).

For example, the endangered Utchee rainbowfish is struggling due to habitat loss and water pollution from farms surrounding the small number of north Queensland streams where it lives.

In contrast, the most common conservation action was simply the fact that the species occurred in a protected area (88%) or conservation area (55%).

Sadly, invasive species and climate change don’t recognise or stop at protected area boundaries.

Prevention and control of invasive species has occurred for only 21% of affected threatened species, mostly in Tasmania.

The Utchee rainbowfish is currently not on Australia’s threatened species list but is recommended for listing as endangered. It is struggling due to habitat loss and water pollution from agriculture surrounding the small number of streams where it occurs in north Queensland.
ANGFA Qld

A blueprint to end extinctions

Without a major funding commitment to address the actual drivers of native fish losses, species will continue to decline, and extinctions will soon follow.

The most important conservation actions for native freshwater fish are:

update the national threatened species list to include all at-risk species
tackle invasive species such as trout, gambusia and redfin perch
identify, establish and protect additional invasive-fish-free refuge sites for species that currently occur only in a small number of locations and could be wiped out by a single event such as a bushfire
halt ongoing habitat loss and improve habitats that have been damaged
improve freshwater flows to maintain habitats such as wetlands and streams, improve water quality and give fish the natural cues they need to breed.

In 2022, the Australian government made a commitment to end extinctions. Our study provides a blueprint for how to do that for our overlooked native freshwater fish.

This waterfall in NSW has protected the native galaxias fish above it from trout. To prevent extinctions we need to find or create more invasive-fish-free refuges for native fish.
Mark Lintermans Läs mer…

Pupil-free or student-free days may seem like an extra holiday for students and an inconvenience for parents, who are juggling work and family.

This week, some parents in New South Wales expressed frustration about the “burden” of these days.

It may even seem like they are “easy” days for teachers without classrooms to run and regular teaching duties.

The name, unfortunately, suggests students are not the focus for these days. But nothing could be further from the truth.

How many days do schools get?

The number of pupil-free days and exactly when these occur varies between states and school sectors.

For example, Queensland government schools have five, NSW has set aside eight pupil-free days, and Victoria is considering doing the same number.

Why do we have them?

Research consistently shows teachers do not have the time to do all the things they need to do in their working weeks.

A 2022 Monash University survey of primary and high school teachers found only 41% intended to stay in the profession. One of the main reasons cited was heavy workloads.

Teachers regularly report they do not have enough time to prepare lessons.
DGL Images/ Shutterstock

Teachers’ work involves much more than teaching in the classroom. It also includes planning, assessments and ever-increasing demands for data collection, administrative work and extra-curricular activities.

On top of this, they need to meet with or talk to parents about what is happening with their child and make sure they are meeting the needs of each individual student.

This means they already work more than they are paid for, either during the week or during school holidays.

When teachers are teaching, they need to keep their focus fully on their students and their families. But on top of this, they also need to fit in professional development to maintain and build on their skills, and meet annual registration requirements.

What kind of development is involved?

Pupil-free days allow teachers to stay up-to-date with curriculum changes and the latest approaches to teaching, including technological developments. This may involve training with outside experts, and importantly, opportunities to work together as a staff to share effective teaching ideas.

It also allows schools to improve what they do in the classroom and work on longer-term, school-wide strategies. For example, a schools’ anti-bullying or inclusive education policy.

When teachers do this professional learning together, it allows the whole school to improve and coordinate what they are doing.

Research also shows that working collaboratively is important for teachers’ wellbeing.

Pupil-free days also mean new teachers and new graduates can be properly inducted into the school and help them feel supported.

The bigger picture

We know we have a problem with retaining teachers in Australia.

They already face enormous pressures in terms of workloads, community expectations and in some cases, abuse from students and parents.

Pupil-free days provide crucial breathing room for teachers to focus on their professional learning and keep their approaches to teaching current. But they also ensure schools are teaching and supporting students as well as they can. Läs mer…

Former winner of TV show Alone Australia Gina Chick was diagnosed with breast cancer just days after finding out she was pregnant. She describes in her recent book her experience with chemotherapy and what followed.

Thankfully, cancer diagnoses during pregnancy and in the year following the birth are rare. But such cases are becoming more common in parts of the world, including Australia. Researchers aren’t exactly sure why.

Here’s what researchers know so far, and the options for treatment.

Gina Chick tells ABC TV’s Australian Story about life, loss and Alone Australia.

How rare is it?

A New South Wales study found that in 1994 there were about 94 cancer diagnoses during pregnancy or within one year of birth per 100,000 women giving birth. That rose to about 163 per 100,000 in 2013. Although these statistics are more than ten years old, these are the most recent and rigorous data available in Australia.

A 2023 Swedish study of pregnancies in 1973-2017 had similar findings.

Both studies found about one-quarter of pregnancy-associated cancers are diagnosed before birth, with the rest diagnosed in the year after birth.

What type of cancers are we talking about?

The United Kingdom’s first comprehensive assessment of cancer during pregnancy looked at diagnoses in 2016-2020.

This study, the NSW study, and others, have found breast and skin cancers (often melanoma) were the most common pregnancy-associated cancers. There were also high rates of thyroid, gynaecological (particularly cervical and ovarian) and blood cancers in this group.

The UK study found about 92% of cancers were new diagnoses and about 82% had symptoms. The majority (81%) were treated with the aim to cure and about 82% of pregnancies associated with a cancer diagnosis resulted in a live birth.

However, 20% of mothers died by the end of the five year study period. Gastrointestinal (gut) cancers were particularly concerning. They had the highest mortality rate at about 46% and were associated with diagnosis at a more advanced stage of cancer.

This may be because many symptoms of gastrointestinal cancers such as abdominal pain, fatigue and acid reflux overlap with those of pregnancy. In other words, some cancer symptoms can be mistaken for pregnancy symptoms, “masking” or delaying a cancer diagnosis.

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed at this time.
My Ocean Production/Shutterstock

Why are cases like this rising?

The broad range of cancers presenting during and after pregnancy suggests a variety of contributing factors.

In high socioeconomic countries women are having children later in life and the biggest risk factor for many cancers is increasing age. However, the evidence for age being a major factor in pregnancy-related cancer is inconclusive. This may account for some but not all cases.

Another factor may be the rising use of prenatal genetic screening tests in early pregnancy. These analyse DNA derived from the mother’s blood to detect chromosomal abnormalities in the developing fetus. But these tests can also give information about the mother’s chromosomes. This has led to diagnoses of Hodgkin disease, breast and colorectal cancer in pregnant women without symptoms.

Oestrogen and progesterone are two hormones important for growth and development of breast tissue and to support other aspects of a healthy pregnancy. These may also contribute to cancer development, particularly breast cancer. However, it’s not clear whether this is linked to rising rates of pregnancy associated cancers.

Other cancers, such as skin cancer, are associated with environmental factors such as UV exposure. Notably, melanoma was the leading pregnancy-associated cancer in the NSW study, reflecting the high rate of skin cancer in the local population. Other environmental factors, such as smoking and human papillomavirus, are associated with cervical cancer. Again we’re not sure whether such factors are linked with rising rates of pregnancy associated cancers.

In the NSW study, skin cancer was the most common.
Africa Studio/Shutterstock

What happens after a diagnosis?

Pregnancy complicates a cancer diagnosis, as any potential treatment for the mother may risk the health and viability of the fetus. So some aspects of treatment may need to be adjusted.

Surgery can usually be undertaken during any trimester depending on where the cancer is located.

Radiotherapy needs careful planning because the impact of radiation on the fetus depends on the developmental stage, where the radiation is applied to the body, and the dose.

Chemotherapy should be avoided in the first trimester due to potential toxic effects on the fetus. But it can usually be given in the second and third trimester. Chemotherapy should be avoided within three weeks of the birth to reduce the chance of bleeding and infection in the newborn, who may also have a weakened immune system from the chemo.

More targeted immunotherapies are generally given to the mother after she’s given birth. Depending on the treatment, she may be advised not breastfeed. That’s because the medicine can pass from the mother via breastmilk to the baby.

What happens to the babies?

Reassuringly, the NSW data found no increase in the rate of babies dying around the time of birth if they were born to mothers with a pregnancy-associated cancer.

However, there were more planned preterm births. This is because women are offered an induction of labour and/or a caesarean to facilitate cancer treatment for the mother, while reducing treatment-related risks to the unborn child.

There were also higher rates of babies born with a low birth weight and low Apgar scores (indicators of a baby’s condition shortly after birth) – possibly related to being born pre-term.

What do researchers want to know?

We have much to learn about what’s behind the increasing rates of pregnancy-associated cancers, and what women diagnosed with these cancers can expect.

We also need to combine cancer and obstetric data in national databases. This would allow us to see which areas to prioritise for further research, inform clinical guidelines to screen for cancers during and after pregnancy, and would help evaluate responses to screening programs or therapies in the future. Läs mer…

“We have entered the Intelligence Age,” proclaimed Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, in September. “Deep learning worked,” he explained, and this breakthrough in learning from data will unleash a smart era in which the more data becomes available, “the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems”.

Altman joins other thought leaders, corporations like Google and Amazon, and organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, in pinning humanity’s hopes on better information.

The logic is enticing. By harvesting all the world’s knowledge, AI models can locate patterns, make correlations, and offer data-driven “insights”. The optimal solutions to our biggest problems are needles in a data haystack, so finding them exceeds the limited human mind. It is up to technology like deep learning to “capture it all”, analyse or train on it –  and then offer up the brilliant game-changing idea or most rational response.

Climate change, according to a Google report, can be simulated and alleviated using forecasting and modelling. Global conflicts, suggest AI engineers Tshilidzi Marwala and Monica Lagazio, can be modelled and mitigated.

But the recent US election showed the limits of this rational framing of reality. Viral rumours and conspiracy theories (JD Vance and the couch, or “they’re eating the pets”) were gleefully shared. It seems some voters were motivated less by abstract policy and more by visceral disgust at those deemed different.

Sam Altman recently declared that we have entered the Intelligence Age.
Markus Schreiber/AAP

Humans are not perfectly rational and ethical. They are deeply emotional, factional and frictional – driven by feelings and friendships, fear and anger.

Donald Trump’s win was aided by tapping deeply into this darker and more “irrational” core of human nature, defying the polls. It was never about perfect information.

In the past five years, my research has explored how technologies construct knowledge – but also exploit emotion and amplify radicalisation. To understand the current political moment, we need to understand both the limits of reason and the power of unreason.

Climate change, genocide and data

Intelligence is a dead end. The entangled social, political and environmental crises we now face will not be addressed by having more information.

Climate change is Exhibit A. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published six assessments detailing the drivers and impacts of global warming. The latest report is 3,949 pages and was based on more than 14,000 scientific papers.

Protesters rally outside the Whitehaven Coal Annual General Meeting at Fullerton Hotel in Sydney last month.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP

Despite this deluge of data and expert evidence, the planet has already passed the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels and may pass 2°C by the end of the decade. Indeed, over the three decades of the United Nations’ Conference of Parties meetings (1994–2024), carbon emissions have steadily ticked upwards. A mountain of facts has not budged the voracious extraction and consumption of “business as usual”.

Gaza is Exhibit B. Law for Palestine, a not-for-profit, youth-led legal organisation, has meticulously compiled a database with more than 500 instances of incitements to genocide.

Relatives pray in front of the bodies of their loved ones, after an Israeli airstrike near displaced people’s tents killed at least five people.
Haitham Imad/AAP

Last week, South Africa filed its Memorial to the International Court of Justice, a key document in its case against Israel. Its evidence is detailed in more than 750 pages of text, supported by exhibits and annexes of more than 4,000 pages.

And yet Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, with deaths mounting up. According to Al-Jazeera, some of the government’s kill lists are generated via big data analysis, a kind of AI-assisted genocide.

In both of these examples, intelligence was ignored or simply co-opted to rationalise a desired action. As a George W. Bush adviser famously stated: there are people who believe solutions emerge from a “judicious study of discernible reality” and there are those who “create our own reality”. While analysts are analysing, empires are acting, reshaping the world.

Facts can be trumped by alternative facts. Scientific reason can be ignored or refused. Machine learning can be overpowered (or weaponised) by men with guns.

In Trump’s first presidential term, I analysed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun to use Palantir technologies, which assembles data into a powerful visual interface to aid in deportations.

A 2017 ICE raid.
Charles Reed/US Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AAP

Even a decade ago, the agency was scanning three billion pieces of information, from licence plates to border-crossing data, using ostensibly sophisticated software to identify targets and home in on “illegals”. And yet these data-driven insights were ultimately a pretence: tokenistic evidence for a war on immigrants the Trump administration had already decided to wage.

Any claims that this computational logic was “post-racial” quickly disappeared in the violence of deportation raids, when immigration officers punched individuals in the face, ordered them to the ground, placed boots on their head, and referred to them as “Mexican shit”.

Machine intelligence, ethics and morals

“Enlightenment reverts to mythology,” predicted influential cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 80 years ago in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

A society obsessed with the perfection of reason inevitably breeds its opposite: brute force and proud irrationality. Their insights were far from abstract. The German theorists had fled for their lives, penning their groundbreaking classic in exile in California while Hitler’s murderous regime played out across the Atlantic.

Reason, the duo observed, has morphed from its ancient origins to become an approach and a set of techniques. Reason is about ordering, classifying, and deducing from data –  and applying this “abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism” in a suitable or scientific way.

Such techniques sit at the core of contemporary machine learning systems, which train, fine-tune and generate claims from data.

This makes reason free-floating, a set of operations that can be applied to anything and everything. Such “intelligence” is effectively content-agnostic: devoid of any intrinsic aim or purpose. Reason does not (and indeed cannot) judge the ethical or moral implications of its use.

But if “all affects are of equal value”, the duo note, then survival becomes “the most probable source of maxims for human conduct”. Self-interest is the most “reasonable” approach of all, and anything that hinders this — social cohesion, protections for the marginal or vulnerable, contributions towards the public good —must be dispensed with.

In a zero-sum game, giving anything to “them” simply means less for “us”. Within nations, we see this in polarisation and division. Internationally, we see it in hardened borders and bunker mentalities. Any other strategy besides domination is suboptimal.

The ticking time bomb of reason

Reason creates a kind of ticking time bomb at the core of society. Reason is a flexible amalgam of information harvesting, data-driven decisions and optimised operations that wins votes and attracts investment.

But because reason is uncoupled from ethics, it can and should be applied to anything: no aim is better or worse than any other. The result for Horkheimer and Adorno is a kind of moral relativism.

A perfect example is Robodebt, Australia’s use of data analytics and machine learning to halt welfare payments. This mechanism for “automating inequality” created untold misery for those who were already vulnerable. Denying care became procedural and therefore “reasonable”.

Robodebt’s mechanism for ‘automating inequality’ created misery for the vulnerable.
Jono Searle/AAP

This calculative logic is both practical and unassailable. Once rooted in the national consciousness, it becomes tough to dislodge. Actions not tied to survival are hard to defend; values not directly linked to self-interest are difficult to rationalise. Any connection or responsibility to the millions of others in the country risks breaking altogether.

In the end, this national community can only be held together by sheer force or terror, Horkheimer observes: liberalism tilts over into fascism.

The rise and rise of strongman leaders, poised between fascism and popular nationalism, exemplifies this tilt.

In Hungary, authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán has a 14-year grip on power, undermining judicial independence and press freedom with his brand of self-styled “electoral autocracy” or “illiberal democracy”. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has created a cult of power, annexing Crimea, waging war in Ukraine — and crushing protest with violence and imprisonment.

Most recently, Trump has once more risen to power, vowing to punish the “enemy within” and carry out mass deportations. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he vowed, “and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

The arc of reason eventually arrives at a brutish world ruled by the most brutal. Democratic “civilisation” collapses back into domineering barbarism.

There has been a ‘rise and rise’ of strongman leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Susan Walsh/AAP

Age of intelligence or age of anger?

As reason’s grand promises inevitably collapse, people grow disenchanted or disaffected, latching onto regressive worldviews that make the world make sense.

My own work has explored how online platforms have repackaged racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into alluring new forms of hate, spawning incels and edge-lords, Christian nationalists and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

While such prejudices can certainly be condemned, they shed light on our world today. For those who adopt them, these narratives offer a compelling account of how the world works, why someone is stuck – and who or what is to blame.

New studies have shown that white Americans who perceive themselves to be in “last place” in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism. The fact that this perception is divorced from reality — that in terms of education, income and imprisonment rates they remain at or near the top — does not diminish its power.

White Americans who perceive themselves as ‘last place’ in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism.
John Bazemore/AAP

The power behind these narratives is not logical, but emotional. This is not the liberal subject, carefully weighing the facts before choosing the claim that best conforms to empirical evidence and contributes to the public sphere. No, it is about grievance, loss and a sense of betrayal by the powers that be.

This affective power is echoed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who spent five years in the Republican stronghold of Louisiana, where many suffer from poor health and lifetime poverty, in the years preceding Trump’s first election. After countless conversations with residents, she stresses that their story is one of anger and mourning: a “feels-as-if” story that bypasses judgement and fact.

For the white subject, the shock and sense of loss is tangible. Advantage is not just “slipping away” but is being “taken by undeserving others”. Having stood atop the social hierarchy for so long, the loss of stature feels like a tumble into the abyss. Regressive views such as hyperconservatism or ethnonationalism offer a handhold or lifeline. And yet, if they bring a renewed sense of stability, they also cultivate a deep-seated hostility.

In this sense, our moment is not the Age of Intelligence but the Age of Anger. This is not to condone naked violence, baseless hatred and shameless propaganda, but to recognise the limits of reason in contemporary life.

The irrational human animal

“If there is anything unique about the human animal,” philosopher John Gray observes, “it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate, while being chronically incapable of learning from experience”.

For modern humanists, humans are inherently rational. The primary future challenge is merely how to make them more logical, more civil, more reasonable. This is the human that Altman and other techno-positivists have in mind when they suggest AI will solve our problems. It is only a matter of augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence.

But history suggests our crises and responses have always been shot through with the “irrational”, a darker mélange of emotional power, bodily violence and political will.

Intelligence — even scaled, automated and operationalised by artificial intelligence — will not save us. Läs mer…

“We have entered the Intelligence Age,” proclaimed Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, in September. “Deep learning worked,” he explained, and this breakthrough in learning from data will unleash a smart era in which the more data becomes available, “the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems”.

Altman joins other thought leaders, corporations like Google and Amazon, and organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, in pinning humanity’s hopes on better information.

The logic is enticing. By harvesting all the world’s knowledge, AI models can locate patterns, make correlations, and offer data-driven “insights”. The optimal solutions to our biggest problems are needles in a data haystack, so finding them exceeds the limited human mind. It is up to technology like deep learning to “capture it all”, analyse or train on it –  and then offer up the brilliant game-changing idea or most rational response.

Climate change, according to a Google report, can be simulated and alleviated using forecasting and modelling. Global conflicts, suggest AI engineers Tshilidzi Marwala and Monica Lagazio, can be modelled and mitigated.

But the recent US election showed the limits of this rational framing of reality. Viral rumours and conspiracy theories (JD Vance and the couch, or “they’re eating the pets”) were gleefully shared. It seems some voters were motivated less by abstract policy and more by visceral disgust at those deemed different.

Sam Altman recently declared that we have entered the Intelligence Age.
Markus Schreiber/AAP

Humans are not perfectly rational and ethical. They are deeply emotional, factional and frictional – driven by feelings and friendships, fear and anger.

Donald Trump’s win was aided by tapping deeply into this darker and more “irrational” core of human nature, defying the polls. It was never about perfect information.

In the past five years, my research has explored how technologies construct knowledge – but also exploit emotion and amplify radicalisation. To understand the current political moment, we need to understand both the limits of reason and the power of unreason.

Climate change, genocide and data

Intelligence is a dead end. The entangled social, political and environmental crises we now face will not be addressed by having more information.

Climate change is Exhibit A. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published six assessments detailing the drivers and impacts of global warming. The latest report is 3,949 pages and was based on more than 14,000 scientific papers.

Protesters rally outside the Whitehaven Coal Annual General Meeting at Fullerton Hotel in Sydney last month.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP

Despite this deluge of data and expert evidence, the planet has already passed the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels and may pass 2°C by the end of the decade. Indeed, over the three decades of the United Nations’ Conference of Parties meetings (1994–2024), carbon emissions have steadily ticked upwards. A mountain of facts has not budged the voracious extraction and consumption of “business as usual”.

Gaza is Exhibit B. Law for Palestine, a not-for-profit, youth-led legal organisation, has meticulously compiled a database with more than 500 instances of incitements to genocide.

Relatives pray in front of the bodies of their loved ones, after an Israeli airstrike near displaced people’s tents killed at least five people.
Haitham Imad/AAP

Last week, South Africa filed its Memorial to the International Court of Justice, a key document in its case against Israel. Its evidence is detailed in more than 750 pages of text, supported by exhibits and annexes of more than 4,000 pages.

And yet Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, with deaths mounting up. According to Al-Jazeera, some of the government’s kill lists are generated via big data analysis, a kind of AI-assisted genocide.

In both of these examples, intelligence was ignored or simply co-opted to rationalise a desired action. As a George W. Bush adviser famously stated: there are people who believe solutions emerge from a “judicious study of discernible reality” and there are those who “create our own reality”. While analysts are analysing, empires are acting, reshaping the world.

Facts can be trumped by alternative facts. Scientific reason can be ignored or refused. Machine learning can be overpowered (or weaponised) by men with guns.

In Trump’s first presidential term, I analysed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun to use Palantir technologies, which assembles data into a powerful visual interface to aid in deportations.

A 2017 ICE raid.
Charles Reed/US Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AAP

Even a decade ago, the agency was scanning three billion pieces of information, from licence plates to border-crossing data, using ostensibly sophisticated software to identify targets and home in on “illegals”. And yet these data-driven insights were ultimately a pretence: tokenistic evidence for a war on immigrants the Trump administration had already decided to wage.

Any claims that this computational logic was “post-racial” quickly disappeared in the violence of deportation raids, when immigration officers punched individuals in the face, ordered them to the ground, placed boots on their head, and referred to them as “Mexican shit”.

Machine intelligence, ethics and morals

“Enlightenment reverts to mythology,” predicted influential cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 80 years ago in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

A society obsessed with the perfection of reason inevitably breeds its opposite: brute force and proud irrationality. Their insights were far from abstract. The German theorists had fled for their lives, penning their groundbreaking classic in exile in California while Hitler’s murderous regime played out across the Atlantic.

Reason, the duo observed, has morphed from its ancient origins to become an approach and a set of techniques. Reason is about ordering, classifying, and deducing from data –  and applying this “abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism” in a suitable or scientific way.

Such techniques sit at the core of contemporary machine learning systems, which train, fine-tune and generate claims from data.

This makes reason free-floating, a set of operations that can be applied to anything and everything. Such “intelligence” is effectively content-agnostic: devoid of any intrinsic aim or purpose. Reason does not (and indeed cannot) judge the ethical or moral implications of its use.

But if “all affects are of equal value”, the duo note, then survival becomes “the most probable source of maxims for human conduct”. Self-interest is the most “reasonable” approach of all, and anything that hinders this — social cohesion, protections for the marginal or vulnerable, contributions towards the public good —must be dispensed with.

In a zero-sum game, giving anything to “them” simply means less for “us”. Within nations, we see this in polarisation and division. Internationally, we see it in hardened borders and bunker mentalities. Any other strategy besides domination is suboptimal.

The ticking time bomb of reason

Reason creates a kind of ticking time bomb at the core of society. Reason is a flexible amalgam of information harvesting, data-driven decisions and optimised operations that wins votes and attracts investment.

But because reason is uncoupled from ethics, it can and should be applied to anything: no aim is better or worse than any other. The result for Horkheimer and Adorno is a kind of moral relativism.

A perfect example is Robodebt, Australia’s use of data analytics and machine learning to halt welfare payments. This mechanism for “automating inequality” created untold misery for those who were already vulnerable. Denying care became procedural and therefore “reasonable”.

Robodebt’s mechanism for ‘automating inequality’ created misery for the vulnerable.
Jono Searle/AAP

This calculative logic is both practical and unassailable. Once rooted in the national consciousness, it becomes tough to dislodge. Actions not tied to survival are hard to defend; values not directly linked to self-interest are difficult to rationalise. Any connection or responsibility to the millions of others in the country risks breaking altogether.

In the end, this national community can only be held together by sheer force or terror, Horkheimer observes: liberalism tilts over into fascism.

The rise and rise of strongman leaders, poised between fascism and popular nationalism, exemplifies this tilt.

In Hungary, authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán has a 14-year grip on power, undermining judicial independence and press freedom with his brand of self-styled “electoral autocracy” or “illiberal democracy”. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has created a cult of power, annexing Crimea, waging war in Ukraine — and crushing protest with violence and imprisonment.

Most recently, Trump has once more risen to power, vowing to punish the “enemy within” and carry out mass deportations. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he vowed, “and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

The arc of reason eventually arrives at a brutish world ruled by the most brutal. Democratic “civilisation” collapses back into domineering barbarism.

There has been a ‘rise and rise’ of strongman leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Susan Walsh/AAP

Age of intelligence or age of anger?

As reason’s grand promises inevitably collapse, people grow disenchanted or disaffected, latching onto regressive worldviews that make the world make sense.

My own work has explored how online platforms have repackaged racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into alluring new forms of hate, spawning incels and edge-lords, Christian nationalists and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

While such prejudices can certainly be condemned, they shed light on our world today. For those who adopt them, these narratives offer a compelling account of how the world works, why someone is stuck – and who or what is to blame.

New studies have shown that white Americans who perceive themselves to be in “last place” in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism. The fact that this perception is divorced from reality — that in terms of education, income and imprisonment rates they remain at or near the top — does not diminish its power.

White Americans who perceive themselves as ‘last place’ in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism.
John Bazemore/AAP

The power behind these narratives is not logical, but emotional. This is not the liberal subject, carefully weighing the facts before choosing the claim that best conforms to empirical evidence and contributes to the public sphere. No, it is about grievance, loss and a sense of betrayal by the powers that be.

This affective power is echoed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who spent five years in the Republican stronghold of Louisiana, where many suffer from poor health and lifetime poverty, in the years preceding Trump’s first election. After countless conversations with residents, she stresses that their story is one of anger and mourning: a “feels-as-if” story that bypasses judgement and fact.

For the white subject, the shock and sense of loss is tangible. Advantage is not just “slipping away” but is being “taken by undeserving others”. Having stood atop the social hierarchy for so long, the loss of stature feels like a tumble into the abyss. Regressive views such as hyperconservatism or ethnonationalism offer a handhold or lifeline. And yet, if they bring a renewed sense of stability, they also cultivate a deep-seated hostility.

In this sense, our moment is not the Age of Intelligence but the Age of Anger. This is not to condone naked violence, baseless hatred and shameless propaganda, but to recognise the limits of reason in contemporary life.

The irrational human animal

“If there is anything unique about the human animal,” philosopher John Gray observes, “it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate, while being chronically incapable of learning from experience”.

For modern humanists, humans are inherently rational. The primary future challenge is merely how to make them more logical, more civil, more reasonable. This is the human that Altman and other techno-positivists have in mind when they suggest AI will solve our problems. It is only a matter of augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence.

But history suggests our crises and responses have always been shot through with the “irrational”, a darker mélange of emotional power, bodily violence and political will.

Intelligence — even scaled, automated and operationalised by artificial intelligence — will not save us. Läs mer…

Rohingya activists, advocates and health organisations in Australia have been frustrated by the lack of support provided to displaced Rohingya people.

This ethnic minority group called Myanmar home for centuries before being made stateless by the government in 1982, persecuted due to both their race and majority Muslim religion.

While a few hundred Rohinhya refugees have resettled in Australia since 2008, at least a million continue to live in desperate circumstances in the world’s largest refugee camp: Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. There are many horrifying stories of displaced Rohingya facing physical and sexual violence and dire health conditions.

In August, the Refugee Council of Australia council called on the government to remain steadfast on its 2023 pledge to increase resettlement places and provide aid to those still living in camps, but we’ve yet to see substantive action.

As such, local advocates are turning to more creative ways to raise awareness, such as hosting events focused on Rohingya art, culture and resistance. These projects help strengthen local Rohingya communities, while educating the public.

Read more:
7 years after genocide, plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is exacerbated by camp violence

For my research, I’ve investigated how activist groups use creativity and pleasure to encourage broader participation in their efforts.

This work led me to local Rohingya community members and their allies at the Creative Advocacy Partnership, (cofounded by four Australians with Rohingya community leaders). They told me traditional advocacy could increase feelings of oppression and “othering”.

Through interviews with them, I found creative advocacy projects can serve several empowering purposes, including preserving culture (and elevating culture over suffering), honouring ancestors and balancing power dynamics between aid workers and displaced people.

Building bridges to Cox’s Bazar

Last year, Creative Advocacy Partnership cofounders Tasman Munro and Arunn Jegan (who is also a Médecins Sans Frontières emergency coordinator) travelled to Cox’s Bazar to create artworks in collaboration with Rohingya artists, children and storytellers. One outcome was a sculpted bamboo story panel based on a Rohingya folktale.

The bamboo story panel, created in the Kutapalong refugee camp, features the banyan tree, representing the Rohingya people’s longing to connect to their motherland.
Victor Caringal for MSF

Munro described the experience to me:

we sat with [Rohingya creators] Nuru Salam and Nurus Safar, in the front room of their shelter and talked about the project. We saw each other’s work, discussed the tools we needed, the time we had and how flexible the bamboo was […] already, there was a common language and understanding. Over two weeks we had the chance to make together, to learn the artful process of stripping bamboo, figuring out the cane-glass technique, listening to Rohingya folktales and collaborating with talented kids to design and make the story panel.

In 2023, Tasman Munro worked alongside Rohingya artist to create the ‘Two Crows’ bamboo mural in Kutapalong, Cox’s Bazar.
Victor Caringal for MSF

This project was shared back on Gadigal land in an exhibition curated by the Creative Advocacy Partnership, Médecins Sans Frontières and Rohingya youth leader Asma Nayim Ullah. It provided ways to engage with both the refugee crisis and Rohingya culture through a photo exhibition, film screening, and live video call set up with Jegan, who was still stationed in Cox’s Bazar, and a Rohingya storyteller named Rezwan.

A delicious meal was cooked by the Australian Rohingya Women’s Development Organisation. The deep connection between both places was palpable.

A live video link was established between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Join The Dots in Marrickville as part of the ‘Two Crows’ exhibition.
Victor Caringal for MSF

Jegan has lived the difference between traditional advocacy methods (such as focus groups or clinical rounds in refugee camps) and arts-focused projects. He is passionate about shifting the power dynamics of aid so that local voices are heard and disadvantage isn’t perpetuated.

He said that, outside of these creative approaches, he’d noticed dynamics that held aid workers in higher regard than the disenfranchised communities they served:

The arts has been ‘the great leveller’ for me. It places the community as experts, where their skills and crafts are centred, and their stories, plight, and are story-told through them, rather than through simply their misery, disease, or their service user-ship (usage). I’ve found that by using arts, I’ve created a stronger, more equal relationship.

Creative advocacy can change discourse

Here on Gadigal land, prominent Rohingya activist and cofounder/director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, Noor Azizah, told me millions of Rohingya continue to face extreme hardship:

With 2.8 million Rohingya worldwide, only 1% live in freedom while 99% remain in refugee camps, in hiding, in exile, or trapped in Arakan, Burma. Cox’s Bazar alone hosts nearly one million Rohingya refugees and the situation there remains dire. We need to ensure their voices are heard as this protracted crisis prevents Rohingya from thriving.

In August, to mark the seventh anniversary of the Rohingyas’ 2017 mass displacement from Myanmar, Azizah co-hosted an event called the Rohingya Social. She described it as an

opportunity to amplify voices and remind everyone that the fight for dignity, rights, and justice continues for those who remain displaced.

The public were invited to share in celebrating Rohingya cuisine, culture and survival over an authentic three-course meal. The event featured stories from survivors and Médecins Sans Frontières workers, poetry by a local Year 11 student and colourful paper decorations created by displaced Rohingya children in Malaysia.

Rohingya Social, held on Gadigal land in August 2024, was co-presented by the Creative Advocacy Partnership, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Rohingya community.
Victor Caringal for MSF

The night was full of generosity of spirit. As Azizah wrote on her social media:

Cooking Rohingya food for family and friends is more than just preparing a meal. It’s about honouring our ancestors who passed down these recipes, supporting our people currently facing struggles, and preserving our culture despite the challenges we face. Läs mer…

Black holes don’t have many identifying features. They come in one colour (black) and one shape (spherical).

The main difference between black holes is mass: some weigh about as much as a star like our Sun, while others weigh around a million times more. Stellar-mass black holes can be found anywhere in a galaxy, but the really big ones (known as supermassive black holes) are found in the cores of galaxies.

These supermassive behemoths are still quite tiny when seen in cosmic perspective, typically containing only around 1% of their host galaxy’s mass and extending only to a millionth of its width.

However, as we have just discovered, there is a surprising link between what goes on near the black hole and the shape of the entire galaxy that surrounds it. Our results are published in Nature Astronomy.

When black holes light up

Supermassive black holes are fairly rare. Our Milky Way galaxy has one at its centre (named Sagittarius A*), and many other galaxies also seem to host a single supermassive black hole at their core.

Under the right circumstances, dust and gas falling into these galactic cores can form a disk of hot material around the black hole. This “accretion disk” in turn generates a super-heated jet of charged particles that are ejected from the black hole at mind-boggling velocities, close to the speed of light.

When a supermassive black hole lights up like this, we call it a quasar.

How to watch a quasar

To get a good look at quasar jets, astronomers often use radio telescopes. In fact, we sometimes combine observations from multiple radio telescopes located in different parts of the world.

Using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, we can in effect make a single telescope the size of the entire Earth. This massive eye is much better at resolving fine detail than any individual telescope.

As a result, we can not only see objects and structures much smaller than we can with the naked eye, we can do better than the James Webb Space Telescope.

Black holes are millions of times smaller than galaxies, yet make jets that are pointed in the same direction as the entire galaxy. Optical image: NASA, ESA, R.M. Crockett (University of Oxford, U.K.), S. Kaviraj (Imperial College London and University of Oxford, U.K.), J. Silk (University of Oxford), M. Mutchler (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee. Top right: MOJAVE Collaboration, NRAO/NSF. Bottom right: Event Horizon Telescope / ESO (same as before)
CC BY-SA

This is the technique that was used to make the first “black hole image” in 2019, showing the halo of light generated around the supermassive black hole hosted by the galaxy M87.

Quasar jets that can be detected using very long baseline interferometry can be millions of light years long and are almost always found in elliptical galaxies. Using very long baseline interferometry, we can observe them all the way down to a few light years or so from their black hole of origin.

The direction of the jet near its source tells us about the orientation of the accretion disk, and so potentially the properties of the black hole itself.

Connection to the host galaxy

What about the host galaxies? A galaxy is a three-dimensional object, formed of hundreds of billions of stars.

But it appears to us (observed in optical or infrared) in projection, either as an ellipse or a spiral. We can measure the shape of these galaxies, tracing the profile of starlight, and measure the long axis and short axis of the two-dimensional shape.

In our paper, we compared the direction of quasar jets with the direction of this shorter axis of the galaxy ellipse, and found that they tend to be pointing in the same direction. This alignment is more statistically significant than you would expect if they were both randomly oriented.

This is surprising, as the black hole is so small (the jets we measure are only a few light years in length) compared to the host galaxy (which can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of light years across).

It is surprising that such a relatively small object can affect, or be affected by, the environment on such large scales. We might expect to see a correlation between the jet and the local environment, but not with the whole galaxy.

How galaxies form

Does this have something to say about the way galaxies form?

Spiral galaxies are perhaps the most famous kind of galaxy, but sometimes they collide with other spirals and form elliptical galaxies. We see these three-dimensional egg-shaped blobs as two-dimensional ellipses on the sky.

The merger process triggers quasar activity in ways we don’t fully understand. As a result, almost all quasar jets that can be detected using very long baseline interferometry are hosted in elliptical galaxies.

The exact interpretation of our results remains mysterious, but is important in the context of the recent James Webb Space Telescope discovery of highly massive quasars (with massive black holes), which have formed much earlier in the universe than expected. Clearly, our understanding of how galaxies form and how black holes influence that needs to be updated. Läs mer…

The housing crisis is pushing more and more people onto the streets. More than one in 10 Canadians report experiencing some form of homelessness in their lifetime.

Forced to camp out, homeless people are increasingly victims of the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon. Governments are dismantling encampments — and some are willing to use the notwithstanding clause to circumvent court rulings on their actions — as well as banning supervised drug consumption sites near day-care centres and schools.

Now involuntary treatment is seemingly on their radar.

The rise in involuntary treatments

It is currently possible to forcibly treat someone anywhere in Canada. Provincial mental health legislation allows involuntary admission and involuntary treatment.

Criteria vary from danger to a lack of capacity for consent and the need for treatment. But involuntary admission and treatment should only be used as a last resort.

The rights of citizens to decide what happens to them is fundamental. According to the Supreme Court of Canada, the right to self-determination outweighs other interests, “including what physicians may think is in the patient’s best interests.” Psychiatric diagnoses or substance addictions have no legal impact on the right to consent to care.

No data is systematically collected in Canada on the use of involuntary admission and treatment. Available studies suggest there’s been a steady increase for more than a decade in the use of mental health legislation being used to detain people in Québec, Ontario and British Columbia.

This increase is similar to the situation in other western countries, suggesting that coercion is now an integral part of mental health treatment. Racialized and Indigenous people and people living in precarious conditions are over-represented among those forced into treatment.

The mother of a man who died due to an overdose from toxic unregulated drugs beats a drum as she and other members of Moms Stop the Harm walk among photographs of overdose victims on International Overdose Awareness Day in Vancouver in August 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Research shows structural violations of the rights of people who are involuntarily admitted or treated. Class-action lawsuits have been won or are underway in several Canadian provinces for abuse of rights in psychiatric wards.

Québec will have to compensate people detained illegally.

The New Brunswick ombudsperson concluded that patients at Restigouche Hospital Centre in Campbellton were “victims of negligence, abuse and unacceptable treatment.”

British Columbia had to set up a service of rights advisers following the alarming findings of its ombudsperson in 2019. He reported a systematic failure by healthcare institutions to comply with the procedural safeguards required by the Mental Health Act, including consent to treatment, and by the Ministry of Health to adequately monitor institutions’ compliance with the procedures.

Yet the B.C. government has announced that it will expand involuntary care to keep people and communities “safe.”

Read more:
B.C.’s plan for involuntary addiction treatment is a step back in our response to the overdose crisis

Baseless arguments

The arguments made by advocates for involuntary treatments aren’t supported by science.

First, they often suggest homelessness is due to mental health issues or addiction, while research shows that financial difficulties are the primary cause of homelessness. Rising housing and living costs and low incomes are behind the unprecedented rise in homelessness.

The situation was predictable.

Economic inequality has been on the rise since the 1980s. Housing affordability has been declining over the same period. Homelessness is a structural problem, not an individual one.

Demonstrators hold a sign at the homeless encampment in front of Halifax City Hall in February 2024 after being told they’d have to vacate the site.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

Second, involuntary treatment proponents make an association between mental health/addiction and public safety, suggesting that people with mental health problems or drug users are violent.

Research has long since disproved this association in terms of mental health and the situation is nuanced for addiction. Nonetheless, involuntary treatment advocates argue that treating people against their will is necessary because they are unable to make decisions for themselves. This assumption is also disproven by research, which reveals a much more complex reality.

In addition, risk assessment and incapacity evaluation tools are controversial and primarily target marginalized and racialized people.

The focus on public safety also perpetuates prejudices and fear, which increases popular support for coercive measures like involuntary treatment. Nearly 70 per cent of Ontario residents, for example, support legislative changes to facilitate forced treatment.

Third, some politicians argue that involuntary treatment works. Current data do not support a strong causal link between involuntary treatment and treatment adherence, relapse prevention or social functioning. On the contrary, they show adverse effects associated with coercion.

Expanded access to community-based services, the use of experiential knowledge from the people concerned and a trauma-informed approach seem promising and more respectful of human rights.

Changing the language

Proponents of involuntary treatments, like Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ont., claim “the old approach isn’t working.”

Because the term “involuntary treatment” has a negative connotation, they talk now of “compassionate care.”

This change in terminology aligns with the CARE program implemented in California in 2022. Homeless people with certain psychiatric diagnoses can be subjected to involuntary treatment through “a compassionate civil court process.” CARE’s compassionate approach is presented as a paradigm shift.

Read more:
The ethical dilemmas behind plans for involuntary treatment to target homelessness, mental illness and addiction

But is it?

Making it easier to confine homeless and marginalized people is, to say the least, not a new or original idea. Rather, it’s a very old approach dating back to the Middle Ages.

Involuntary treatment is claimed to be necessary because people would not enter therapy voluntarily. Yet mental health and addiction services are difficult to access across Canada thanks to decades of under-funding. It’s tough to justify violating people’s rights to engage them in involuntary treatments when voluntary treatments are inaccessible.

Compassionate care, in fact, is nothing more than a smoke screen intended to hide coercion, structural inequalities and governments’ lack of social responsibility. Läs mer…