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For anyone who has been online in Australia longer than a decade or so, the discussion around current proposals to set a minimum age for social media use might trigger a touch of déjà vu.

Between 2007 and 2012, the Rudd–Gillard government’s efforts to implement a “Clean Feed” internet filter sparked very similar debates.

Beset by technical problems and facing fierce opposition, the Clean Feed was eventually abandoned in favour of laws that already existed. Will the proposed social media ban face a similar fate?

How to regulate cyberspace

The question of how to regulate a cyberspace occupied by both adults and children has puzzled governments for a long time. Traditional controls on physical media are difficult to apply to online spaces, particularly when so much online media comes from overseas.

As early as 1998, an Australian Broadcasting Authority report noted a key difficulty in online regulation. Namely, balancing adults’ access to legal online spaces and content with restrictions on childrens’ access to age-inappropriate material and bans on illegal content.

The Clean Feed proposal attempted to address parental concerns about age-inappropriate websites. First raised in 2006 by Labor in opposition, it became a campaign promise at the 2007 election.

Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party promised a ‘clean feed’ internet filter in their campaign at the 2007 federal election.
Alan Porritt / AAP

The proposal aimed to solve the issue of overseas content. Australian authorities could already require website owners in Australia to take down illegal content, but they had no power over international sites.

To address this, the Clean Feed would require internet service providers to run a government-created filter blocking all material given a “Refused” classification by the Australian Classification Board, which meant it was illegal. Labor argued the filter would protect children from “harmful and inappropriate” content, including child pornography and X-rated media. The Australian Communications and Media Authority created a “blacklist” of websites that the filter would block.

Technical trouble

The Clean Feed was plagued by technical issues. Trials in 2008 revealed it might slow internet speeds by up to 87%, block access to legal websites, and wouldn’t block all illegal content.

While the effect on speeds was improved, the 2008 trials and others in 2009 revealed another problem: determined users could bypass the filter.

There were also fears the blacklist would be used to block legal websites. While the government maintained the filter would only target illegal content, some questioned whether this was true.

Internet service providers were already required to prevent access to content that had been given a Refused classification. This, along with unclear government statements about removing age-inappropriate material, led many to believe the blacklist could be more far-reaching.

The government also planned to keep the list secret, on the grounds that a published list could become a guide for finding illegal material.

The blacklist

In 2009, the whistleblowing website Wikileaks published a list of sites blacklisted in Denmark. The government banned those pages of Wikileaks, and in response Wikileaks published what it said was the Australian government blacklist. (The government denied it was the actual blacklist.)

Newspapers noted that around half the websites on the published list were not related to child pornography.

Wikileaks published what it claimed was the government’s planned ‘blacklist’ of websites, along with a rationale for publishing the list.
Wikileaks

The alleged blacklist also contained legal content, including Wikipedia pages, YouTube links, and even the website of a Queensland dentist. This lent weight to fears the filter would block more than just illegal websites.

More debates emerged surrounding how the Refused classification category was applied offline as well as on the internet.

In January 2010, the Australian Sex Party reported claims from pornography studios that customs officials had confiscated material featuring female ejaculation (as an “abhorrent depiction” or form of urination) and small-breasted adult women (who might appear to be minors). Many questioned whether these should be banned, and if such depictions would be added to the blacklist – including members of hacker-activist group Anonymous.

Operation Titstorm and the end of the Clean Feed

While Anonymous members had already protested the Clean Feed, this new information sparked a new protest action dubbed Operation Titstorm.

On February 10 2010, activists targeted several government websites. The Australian Parliament site was down for three days. Protesters also mass-emailed politicians and their staff the kinds of pornography set to be blocked by the filter.

While Operation Titstorm gained media attention, other digital activists (such as Electronic Frontiers Australia and other members of Anonymous) criticised its illegal tactics. Many dismissed the protest as juvenile.

In February 2010, hacker-activists from Anonymous launched denial-of-service attacks and email campaigns in protest of proposed internet filters.
WIkipedia

However, one participant argued that many protesters were children, who had used these methods because “kids and teenagers don’t really get the chance to voice their opinions”. The protesters may have been the very people the Clean Feed was supposed to protect.

The government abandoned the Clean Feed in 2012 and used existing legislation to require internet service providers to block INTERPOL’s “worst of” child abuse list. It remains to be seen whether the social media minimum age will similarly crumble under the weight of controversy and be rendered redundant by existing legislation.

The same, but different

The Clean Feed tried to balance the rights of adults to access legal material with protecting children from age-inappropriate content and making cyberspace safer for them. In a sense, it did this by regulating adults.

The filter limited the material adults could access. Given it was government-created and mandatory, it also decided for parents what content was age-appropriate for their children.

The current proposal to set a minimum age for social media flips this solution by determining what online spaces children can occupy. Similar to the filter, it also makes this decision on parents’ behalf.

The Clean Feed saga reveals some of the difficulties of policing the internet. It also reminds us that anxiety about what Australian youth can interact with online is nothing new – and is unlikely to go away. Läs mer…

Later this week the government will receive the report of the year-long independent inquiry into its handling of the COVID pandemic.

Among the issues it will have to contend with is air quality, in particular the air quality in high occupancy public buildings such as schools, aged-care facilities, shops, pubs and clubs.

Many already have high quality air. High-fitration air conditioning (so-called mechanical ventilation) is standard in offices, hospitals and shopping centres.

But not in schools. Almost all of our schools (98% in NSW) use windows.

In Australia’s national construction code, this is called “natural ventilation” and it is allowed so long as the window, opening or door has a ventilating area of not less than 5% of the floor area, a requirement research suggests is insufficient.

Windows, but no requirement to keep them open

There’s no requirement to actually open the windows. School windows are often shut to keep in the heat in (or to keep out the heat in summer).

The result can be very, very stuffy classrooms, far stuffier than we would tolerate in shopping centres. This matters for learning. Study after study has found that when air circulation gets low, people can’t concentrate well or learn well.

And they get sick. Diseases such as flu, COVID and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) spread when viruses get recirculated instead of diluted with fresh air.

The costs of the resulting sickness are borne by students, parents, teachers and education systems that need to find replacement staff to cover for teachers who are sick and parents who need to look after sick children at home.

A pilot study prepared for the Australian Research Council Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection (known as “Thrive”), suggests the entire cost of installing high-filtration air conditioning in every Australian school would be offset by the savings in reduced sickness.

What classroom air is like

ARINA put CO2 meters in classrooms.
Geogif/Shutterstock

The study carried out by the education architecture firm ARINA compared the ventilation of 60 so-called naturally ventilated schools in southern NSW and the Australian Capital Territory to that of a school in Sydney that happened to have been fitted with a Standards Australia-compliant air conditioning system to control aircraft noise.

It used carbon dioxide levels to measure ventilation. Carbon dioxide is a good proxy for ventilation because its levels are determined by both the number of people breathing out concentrated carbon dioxide and the clean air available to dilute it.

Under a normal load, defined as 26 students, one teacher and one assistant, measured levels of carbon dioxide in the air-conditioned school stayed below 750 parts per million (ppm) and were typically between 500 and 600 ppm.

A reading of 700 ppm is particularly good. It means the people in the room breathe in less than 0.5% of air breathed out by others.

But in “naturally ventilated” classrooms the reading often climbed to 2,500 ppm and sometimes more, within an hour of a class commencing.

At 2,500 parts per million, people in the room are breathing in 5.5% of the air breathed out by others. This is also high enough to affect cognition, learning and behaviour, something that begins when carbon dioxide climbs above 1,200 ppm.

Research suggests using ventilation to cut carbon dioxide to 700 ppm can cut the risk of airborne transmission of disease by a factor of two and up to five.

The economic case for healthy air

In 2023, Australia had 9,629 schools with 4,086,998 students.

ARINA has previously estimated the cost of ensuring all of these schools are mechanically ventilated at A$2 billion per year over five years.

Offsetting that cost would be less sickness. Documents released under freedom of information laws show Victoria spent $360.8 million on casual relief teachers between May 2023 and May 2024, 54% more than before COVID in 2019.

The figures for other states are harder to get, but if Victoria (with 26% of Australia’s population) is spending $234 million more per year on casual relief teachers than before COVID, it is likely that Australia is spending $900 million per year more.

Add in the teachers in non-government schools (37% of Australia’s total) and the potential saving from air conditioning schools exceeds $1 billion per year.

Add in the other non-COVID viruses that would no longer be concentrated and circulated in classrooms and the potential savings grow higher still.

Worth more than $1 billion per year

And, in any event, the cost of replacement teachers is a woefully incomplete measure of the cost of illness in schools. Many ill teachers can’t be replaced because replacements aren’t available, making schools cancel lessons and combine classes, costing days, weeks and sometimes months of lost education.

Also, the bacteria and viruses spread by recirculated air infect students as well as teachers, keeping students (and often their parents) at home as well.

This suggests the costs per year of not air conditioning schools exceed $1 billion and may well approach or exceed $2 billion, which is the estimated cost per year over five years of air conditioning every Australian school.

Natural ventilation was never a good idea for classrooms: it was cheap at the time, but not cheap at all when the costs are considered. Those costs happen to extend beyond disease to thermal comfort, energy use and the ability of students to concentrate.

It’s time we gave students and teachers the kind of protections we demand for ourselves in our offices, our shopping centres and often our homes. It would soon pay for itself. Läs mer…

Welcome to our ‘Light and health’ series. Over six articles, we look at how light affects our physical and mental health in sometimes surprising ways.

For most of our evolutionary history, human activity has been linked to daylight. Technology has liberated us from these ancient sleep-wake cycles, but there is evidence sunlight has left and continues to leave its mark.

Not only do we still tend to be awake in the daytime and sleep at night, we can thank light for many other aspects of our biology.

Light may have driven our ancestors to walk upright on two legs. Light helps explain the evolution of our skin colour, why some of us have curly hair, and even the size of our eyes.

As we’ll explore in future articles in this series, light helps shape our mood, our immune system, how our gut works, and much more. Light can make us sick, tell us why we’re sick, then treat us.

Million of years of evolutionary history means humans are still very much creatures of the light.

We stood up, then walked out of Africa

The first modern humans evolved in warm African climates. And reducing exposure to the harsh sunlight is one explanation for why humans began to walk upright on two legs. When we stand up and the Sun is directly overhead, far less sunshine hits our body.

Curly hair may have also protected us from the hot Sun. The idea is that it provides a thicker layer of insulation than straight hair to shield the scalp.

Early Homo sapiens had extra Sun protection in the form of strongly pigmented skin. Sunlight breaks down folate (vitamin B9), accelerates ageing and damages DNA. In our bright ancestral climates, dark skin protected against this. But this dark skin still admitted enough UV light to stimulate vital production of vitamin D.

However, when people colonised temperate zones, with weaker light, they repeatedly evolved lighter skin, via different genes in different populations. This happened rapidly, probably within the past 40,000 years.

With reduced UV radiation nearer the poles, less pigmentation was needed to protect sunlight from breaking down our folate. A lighter complexion also let in more of the scarce light so the body could make vitamin D. But there was one big drawback: less pigmentation meant less protection against Sun damage.

How our skin pigmentation adapted with migration patterns and changing light.

This evolutionary background contributes to Australia having among the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.

Our colonial history means more than 50% of Australians are of Anglo-Celtic descent, with light skin, transplanted into a high-UV environment. Little wonder we’re described as “a sunburnt country”.

Sunlight has also contributed to variation in human eyes. Humans from high latitudes have less protective pigment in their irises. They also have larger eye sockets (and presumably eyeballs), maybe to admit more precious light.

Again, these features make Australians of European descent especially vulnerable to our harsh light. So it’s no surprise Australia has unusually high rates of eye cancers.

We cannot shake our body clock

Our circadian rhythm – the wake-sleep cycle driven by our brains and hormones – is another piece of heavy evolutionary baggage triggered by light.

Humans are adapted to daylight. In bright light, humans can see well and have refined colour vision. But we see poorly in dim light, and we lack senses such as sharp hearing or acute smell, to make up for it.

Our nearest relatives (chimps, gorillas and orangutans) are also active during daylight and sleep at night, reinforcing the view that the earliest humans had similar diurnal behaviours.

This lifestyle likely stretches further back into our evolutionary history, before the great apes, to the very dawn of primates.

The earliest mammals were generally nocturnal, using their small size and the cover of darkness to hide from dinosaurs. However, the meteorite impact that wiped out these fearsome reptiles allowed some mammalian survivors, notably primates, to evolve largely diurnal lifestyles.

If we inherited our daylight activity pattern directly from these early primates, then this rhythm would have been part of our lineage’s evolutionary history for nearly 66 million years.

This explains why our 24-hour clock is very difficult to shake; it’s so deeply ingrained in our evolutionary history.

Successive improvements in lighting technology have increasingly liberated us from dependence on daylight: fire, candles, oil and gas lamps, and finally electric lighting. So we can theoretically work and play at any time.

However, our cognitive and physical performance deteriorates when our intrinsic daily cycles are disturbed, for instance through sleep deprivation, shift work or jet lag.

Futurists have already considered the circadian rhythms required for life on Mars. Luckily, a day on Mars is around 24.7 hours, so similar to our own. This slight difference should be the least of the worries for the first intrepid martian colonists.

How would humans cope on Mars? At least they wouldn’t have to worry too much about their body clocks.
NikoNomad/NASA/Shutterstock

Light is still changing us

In the past 200 years or so, artificial lighting has helped to (partly) decouple us from our ancestral circadian rhythms. But in recent decades, this has come at a cost to our eyesight.

Many genes associated with short-sightedness (myopia) have become more common in just 25 years, a striking example of rapid evolutionary change in the human gene pool.

And if you have some genetic predisposition to myopia, reduced exposure to natural light (and spending more time in artificial light) makes it more likely. These noticeable changes have occurred within many people’s lifetimes.

Light will no doubt continue to shape our biology over the coming millennia, but those longer-term effects might be difficult to predict. Läs mer…

The British Columbia election has turned out to be a nail-biter. Throughout the four-week campaign, the polls predicted a very close race between the incumbent NDP led by David Eby and a newly rejuvenated Conservative Party under the leadership of John Rustad. Those polls turned out to be accurate as no clear winner has emerged in the hours after British Columbians cast their ballots.

The B.C. Liberal Party, a right-of-centre amalgam of Liberal and Conservative voters federally that had ruled the province between 2001-2017, disappeared from the scene, resulting in a political realignment — New Democrats vs. Conservatives — and matching what has become the norm in Canada’s three other western provinces.

As I write this, the NDP leads or is elected in 46 seats, the Conservatives in 45, with the Green Party’s two elected members holding the balance of power. The results are so close in several ridings that it may be at least another week for outstanding mail ballots to come in and recounts to occur before knowing the definitive result.

Parallels to previous elections

In one way, the 2024 election is a repeat of the 2017 vote, when the B.C. Liberals and the NDP were just two seats apart. The Greens threw their three seats behind the NDP to pave the way for an NDP government. The same may well prove to be the case this time around once the dust has settled.

In another way, this election is reminiscent of 1952, when a newly led Social Credit party under W.A.C. Bennett came out of nowhere to topple the old-line Liberal and Conservative parties, edge out the CCF (the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) — predecessor to today’s NDP — by a single seat and go on to rule the province for a full 20 years.

Read more:
How the British Columbia election is being haunted by the ghosts of 1952

In 1951, Bennett had broken with his party, the Conservatives, to sit as an Independent MLA. Rustad had been turfed out of his party, the B.C. Liberals, to sit as an Independent MLA, before assuming the leadership of a B.C.’s dormant Conservative Party. The Conservatives had not held a seat in the provincial legislature for almost 50 years, and had last won a provincial election in 1928.

Yet in 2024, with 43.5 per cent of the popular vote compared to the NDP’s 44.5 per cent, Rustad’s party is a major contender for power.

In this two-photograph panel, B.C. NDP Leader David Eby, left, and B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad, right, pause while addressing supporters on election night in Vancouver on Oct. 19, 2024.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck, Ethan Cairns

Geographical and ideological divides

What the election results ultimately show is that there are two British Columbias. The NDP tends to dominate on the coast, with a clear majority of the seats in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island. The Conservatives dominate the B.C. Interior of the province, with a fair sprinkling of suburban seats in the Lower Mainland as well.

Beyond the geographical divide lies a deeper ideological one. In some ways it parallels the old divide between a more free-enterprise oriented party and one with a stronger commitment to the welfare state. Rustad said as much in his speech on election night. But there is more to the story than that.

Dave Barrett is honoured at a state memorial service in March 2018 after his death at 87 in Victoria.
(The Province of British Columbia)

The NDP, after all, has become much more of a centrist party than it was previously, in particular when it governed the province under Dave Barrett between 1972 and 1975.

It’s no accident that in the 2024 election, no small number of federal Liberal supporters voiced their support for the NDP rather than the Conservatives. With respect to issues like gun control, protection of the environment, reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples or vaccine mandates during pandemics, their views align more closely with the NDP than the Conservatives.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, spoke to the frustrations many British Columbians feel in terms of the housing affordability crisis, the serious shortcomings in the province’s health-care system and the toxic drug crisis in B.C. cities. Eby admitted as much in his own election night speech.

The B.C. Conservatives’ call for change echoed what federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been saying at the federal level. Not surprisingly, support for the Conservatives provincially closely matches for support for the federal Conservatives in the province.

Governing from the centre

British Columbia is clearly polarized politically, a phenomenon we’re seeing even more distinctly south of the border and in various European countries.

The task of governing from the centre — on the assumption that the NDP and Greens reach a confidence-and-supply agreement — may therefore prove a more challenging one than before due to a much empowered Conservative opposition.

But had the Conservatives won a clear mandate to govern, they would have faced significant opposition from the more liberal-minded sections of the population given some of the party’s hard-line positions on unabashed resource development, Indigenous reconciliation and the role of private versus public providers in the health-care system.

Such is the state of play in Canada’s westernmost province. Läs mer…

Outsiders may find it disconcerting to hear the religious references, whether sincere or opportunistic, that have been working their way into U.S. political discourse since the Reagan years, including some by certain religious leaders.

Despite this, the role of religious identities in American elections cannot be decoded by simply pitting the faithful against secularized progressives. Even quite far on the left, it’s not rare to hear male and female politicians referring to their faith.

Although the leaders of the Christian right are united in their goal of gaining privileged access to the Oval Office, the different religious populations in the U.S. are politically quite divided.

Trained as a geographer, historian and religiologist, I have been studying the evolution of ethnoreligious diversity in Québec as a whole, as well as in certain specific religious universes, for twenty years. My analyses are based on both Canadian census data and field surveys. Since 2016, I have examined different elections at various levels of government (Montréal, Québec, Canada, United States), particularly from the angle of geography and culture.

Ethnic realities

The meaning of the partisan leanings of faith-based groups will escape us unless we take into account how the ethnic or racial groups that form these groups express strong socio-political differences due to their historical experiences, sociology and sensibilities.

Through surveys, specialized research institutions such as the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) have been able to identify and highlight ethnoconfessional subsets.

Three main Protestant blocs

According to the PRRI census, in 2022, 41 per cent of the U.S. population associated itself with one of the many churches that make up the Protestant world. These churches can be opposed in terms of theology and certain social positions.

Mainline churches are more liberal and sensitive to social justice causes. Evangelical churches have a reputation for being conservative to different degrees. That said, there are some liberal evangelical churches.

By combining the liberal/conservative dynamic with the ethnic dimension, we can distinguish, under umbrella names, three major ethnoconfessional blocs.

Attendees at a party organized by Democrats from Miami’s Haitian-American community gather for a group photo.
(The Associated Press, Rebecca Blackwell)

The first two blocs are made up of the Euro-descendant fringe of the mainline and evangelical churches. Each bloc represents a third of the American Protestant universe, or 14 per cent of the total population.

The third bloc is made up of the third of Protestants who come from other origins (Afro-descendant, Latino, etc.). More than half of these are African Americans, representing eight per cent of the country’s population. Two out of three Protestant African Americans are members of congregations associated with “Black churches” of various denominations. Evangelical Latinos are often overlooked in analyses.

According to a Pew study published in 2014, congregants of Black churches are closer to white evangelicals in their theological beliefs, but closer to the liberal positions of mainline white congregants on social issues such as abortion. In contrast to white evangelicals and mainline Protestants, Black Protestants look positively on government intervention to help the poor.

LaTosha Brown, of Black Voters Matter, speaks during a press conference at the State Capitol on April 1, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn.
(The Associated Press, George Walker IV)

Generally speaking, the Republican Party wins, hands down, among white evangelicals. The mainline white vote is more divided between the two major parties, although the majority leans Republican.

Black Protestants, for their part, have leaned overwhelmingly towards the Democratic Party, especially since the heyday of the civil rights movement.

With their conservative values, particularly on the abortion issue, Latinos are closer to Republican Euro-descendant evangelicals.

Supporters hold up a sign before Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, arrives to speak at a campaign event at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in Tucson, Ariz. on Sept. 12, 2024.
(The Associated Press, Alex Brandon)

Catholics: United but diverse

Catholics, meanwhile, make up 23 per cent of the U.S. population according to the 2022 PRRI census. While their universe is united in terms of religious denomination, it is ethnoculturally highly diverse.

More than half (55 per cent) are of European origin (Irish, French, Italian, Polish, etc.). Four out of 10 (37 per cent) are of “Latino” or “Hispanic” origin (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Salvadorian, etc.). These two groups represent 13 per cent and nine per cent of the U.S. population, respectively.

Although this dynamic plays out inside a single church, there is still polarization between conservatives and liberals within it.

For the past 25 years, Euro-descendants have favoured the Republican Party. The propensity of Latino Catholics to vote Democrat is significant, although allegiances are now diversifying. Anti-socialists of Cuban and Venezuelan origin are inclined to vote Republican.

The other communities

The Christian panorama also includes three per cent of members of other churches, including Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Orthodox Christians. While Mormons largely favour the Republican Party, this margin of support is eroding.

Non-Christian Americans (Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) make up six per cent of the population. As different as they may be, members of these religious universes mostly support Democrats.

Changing the political landscape

In spite of what the context seems to suggest, the trend of secularization in western societies is affecting the United States, as well. The different Protestant churches and the Catholic Church have been losing members for decades now, despite the contribution of Christian immigration.

According to PRRI, between 2006 and 2022, the share of white mainline Protestants in the U.S. population fell from 18 per cent to 14 per cent. The proportion of white Catholics slipped from 16 per cent to 13 per cent. A little known fact: white evangelicals, who used to dominate the religious landscape of the U.S. with a share of 23 per cent, are now down to 14 per cent.

Conversely, the proportion of people with no religious affiliation has climbed from 16 per cent to 27 per cent. The latter are either affiliated with “no religion in particular,” or are atheist or agnostic. This segment is more naturally inclined towards supporting the Democratic Party, in a ratio that ranges from two-thirds to three-quarters.

Fluctuating partisan leanings from Bush to Biden

According to Pew exit polls, between the presidential elections of 2000 and 2012, Protestant support for Republican candidates fluctuated little. It reached 59 per cent in 2004, a year when international political issues helped George W. Bush to be elected. It dipped to 54 per cent in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected for the first time.

Since 2004, three-quarters of white evangelicals have supported Republican candidates. The Republican preference of white mainline Protestants remains very stable at around 53-55 per cent. Black Protestants’ support for Democratic candidates, although massive, can also fluctuate. It dipped to 86 per cent in 2004 and rose to 95 per cent in 2012, during Obama’s second election. Black voter turnout then exceeded that of whites.

Between 2000 and 2012, the majority of Catholics preferred Democratic candidates, except in 2004 (47 per cent). However, the majority of white Catholics preferred Republican candidates, with rates rising from 52 per cent to 59 per cent. Latino Catholics lined up clearly behind Democrats by a margin of two to one, peaking at 75 per cent in 2012.

A supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris (left) discusses abortion rights with supporters of Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, Sept. 3, 2024, in Boynton Beach, Fla.
(The Associated Press, Rebecca Blackwell)

In 2016, the leaders of the Christian Right found, in Donald Trump, the right candidate to accomplish their goal of restoring the role of the Christian religion to governance and society more broadly, with the immediate aim of opposing abortion rights. The religious right is a coalition that brings together mainly evangelicals, but also other Protestants and fundamentalist Catholics.

While Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, the small number of her white evangelical supporters slipped further in favour of the Republican Party. Trump won not only the majority of Protestants (56 per cent), but also of Catholics (52 per cent).

In 2020, 59 per cent of Protestants supported Trump thanks to the mobilization of white evangelicals, of whom 84 per cent voted for him. Compared with 2016, the white mainline Protestant vote was unchanged (57 per cent). Joe Biden, a practising Catholic, managed to save the day by rallying 49 per cent of Catholics, just short of the 50 per cent who were pro-Trump. Biden also retained 40 per cent of Protestants, of whom African Americans are a significant proportion.

It was actually the religiously unaffiliated voters who changed the game, with 71 per cent voting for Biden. That’s six points more than for Clinton. The Democratic victory was made up of more diversified support.

What’s changing

Religious issues are not usually at the forefront of presidential campaigns. The cost of living, health care, access to affordable housing and safety are currently the most frequently raised concerns.

However, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 turned abortion rights into an election issue. While Trump has won the loyalty of the religious right, the Republican Party has been weakened electorally since, according to surveys PRRI and Pew published in May 2024, the majority of religious populations, both Christian and non-Christian, say they are in favour of preserving this right. The only exceptions are the majority of white evangelicals and a few other groups.

Abortion rights activists and Women’s March leaders demonstrate as part of a national day of strike action outside the Supreme Court on June 24, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
(The Associated Press, Alex Brandon)

In terms of the political sensibilities of ethnoreligious groups, the numerical decline of evangelicals, the rise of the unaffiliated and the demographic growth of Hispanics create challenges for political strategists and researchers — especially as individual choices appear to be less automatic than before.

For some time now, certain Mormons have been distancing themselves from Trump. Biden lost support in some ethnic communities (African Americans, Latinos, Indigenous people). Some Hispanics have turned to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Traditionally polarized in favour of the Republican Party, white evangelicals remain a political force, aided by their high-profile leaders. At the same time, African-American Protestants and a host of small non-Christian groups are equally polarized in favour of the Democratic Party. And that’s not counting the religiously unaffiliated.

By contrast, although Republican presidential candidates have been supported by the majority of white mainline Protestants as well as by the majority of Catholics since 2016, these two worlds remain the most politically divided. This is increasingly the case for Hispanics. This makes these voters strategic.

Also, the Muslim, Jewish or Indigenous vote could create local surprises. All these elements are liable to rupture the usual dividing line between partisan identities.

At the moment

After the Biden-Trump rematch was cancelled, followed by a handover from Biden to Harris and a rallying of Kennedy to Trump, will this campaign result in a reshuffling of ethnoreligious cards?

Against a backdrop of polarized male and female voting, the recent Pew poll shows that the political leanings of ethnoreligious groups have moved very little since the spring, when Biden emerged weakened. Harris has won back a solid number of Black Protestants and especially Hispanic Catholics. The majority (52 per cent) of Catholics remains pro-Trump, with the gap narrowing. On the other hand, the EWTN News/Real Clear poll indicates that half (50 per cent) of Catholics are now leaning towards Harris.

At a time when every vote counts, the slightest changes in partisan leanings, or in voter mobilization rates of different ethnic and religious groups, could play an unexpected role in several key states. Läs mer…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT or Dall-E are changing how creative work is done, particularly in industries that rely on innovation.

However, AI use in the innovation process requires careful considerations. Our research shows that the key to success is understanding and leveraging the distinct but complementary roles that both humans and AI play.

Innovation is vital for any business that wants to succeed today. In fact, 83 per cent of companies see innovation as a top priority, yet only three per cent are ready to turn this priority into action. This shows how much companies need to improve their approach to innovation.

Innovation is about solving complex problems that result in real improvement. It’s not just about coming up with good ideas — it also involves knowledge work, which is the process of using information to create something valuable.

Generative AI can help businesses get ready to innovate by making knowledge work easier, but its full potential in this area is still not fully understood.

AI use in the innovation process requires careful considerations.
(Shutterstock)

Design sprints

Our team, which includes academic researchers with expertise in emerging digital technologies and a practitioner experienced in leading human-centred innovation projects, conducted a detailed study of how generative AI was used in design sprints at three organizations. (The study is available as a pre-print and has been submitted to a journal for peer review).

A design sprint is a fast, structured process for solving important problems that helps teams test if a product, service or strategy will work. Sprints are useful because they reduce the risks and costs of traditional product development

During a design sprint, a small team of five to seven employees from different areas works together intensely for a few days to solve a problem. Their work is co-ordinated by a facilitator, who organizes activities, guides the team, keeps track of progress, makes sure the goals are clear and that time is used efficiently.

The first stage of a design sprint focuses on understanding and defining the problem, while the second stage is about creating and testing a solution. Both stages require teams to use two key types of thinking:

Divergent thinking, which means coming up with many different ideas and possibilities.
Convergent thinking, which means narrowing those ideas down to identify priorities or solutions.

Our study examined how the facilitator used generative AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3 or Uizard to help the team engage effectively in both divergence and convergence.

The design sprint process that was used in the three innovation projects.
(Cédric Martineau, Carverinno Conseil)

AI and humans working together

In divergent thinking activities, we found two main benefits of using generative AI. First, it encouraged teams to explore more possibilities by providing baseline ideas as a starting point. Second, it helped to rephrase and synthesize unclear ideas from team members, ultimately leading to better communication within the teams.

One participant told us:

“Sometimes we had a lot of ideas, and the AI summarized them into a concise text. This allowed us to wrap our head around it. It gave us a base, there were many fragmented ideas that everyone had contributed, and now we had a text we all agreed on. This way, we started from the same base which served as a springboard to move forward.”

The real value of generative AI was thus not in contributing brilliant new ideas itself, but in the valuable synergies that emerged from the process. Team members used their contextual knowledge and stayed in charge of the process while the AI helped to better convey their ideas, expand exploration and address possible blind spots.

The real value of generative AI was not in generating groundbreaking ideas itself, but in fostering productive synergies between team members and AI.
(Shutterstock)

Making better informed decisions

We noticed different dynamics in convergence activities where teams had to make decisions after demanding sessions of idea generation. By that point, team members were usually mentally exhausted. Generative AI was especially helpful for doing the heavy lifting during this part.

The AI helped manage the information-intensive tasks necessary for team alignment like reformulating, summarizing, organizing, comparing and ranking options. This reduced the mental strain on team members, allowing them to focus on important tasks like evaluating ideas. In this process, the team was responsible for:

Checking AI’s outputs to make sure the content was accurate and useful. For example, ChatGPT and Uizard helped create draft scenarios and prototype drafts to validate their concept, but the team still had to refine them to meet project goals.

Adding their own insights and contextual nuances to guide final decisions, considering factors like feasibility, ethics and long-term strategic impact.

One participant said:

“Sometimes, the AI would focus onto details that were insignificant to us…Sometimes we needed less general synthesis and more personalized input.”

Overall, this form of human-AI collaboration in convergent activities helped the team make better informed and more confident decisions about which problem to focus on and which solution to pursue. This made them feel in control of the sprint’s final outcomes.

One participant said:

“For pivotal phases like making decisions or voting on something important like a success factor, if we relied solely on AI to determine what is important, there would be rejection. We are better positioned to know. We are the employees who will execute the final solution.”

Challenges and opportunities

Consistent with research on cognitive automation and intelligent automation, we found that generative AI was of great help in handling cognitively demanding tasks like reformulating poorly articulated ideas, summarizing information and recognizing patterns in team members’ contributions.

A key challenge with using Generative AI in innovation is ensuring it complements, rather than replaces, human involvement. While AI can act as a useful companion, there’s a risk it could reduce team engagement or ownership of the project if overused.

The design sprint facilitator told us:

“Feasibility needs to be balanced with desirability. You could technically automate most of the process but that would kill the need for pleasure, interaction, and humans’ doubts won’t be addressed; plus humans need to own the problem — all these are essential elements in a human-centred innovation process.”

Consequently, regularly assessing AI’s impact within this process is crucial in order to maintain a healthy balance. Automation should enhance creativity and decision-making without undermining the human insights that are central to innovation.

As AI continues to develop, its role in innovation will grow. Companies that integrate AI into their workflows will be better equipped to handle the fast-paced demands of modern innovation. But it’s important to understand both the strengths and limits of AI and humans to ensure this collaboration is effective.

This article was co-authored by Cédric Martineau, CEO and innovation management consultant at Carverinno Consulting. Läs mer…

There’s a saying in sports journalism: “The answer to all your questions is money.” But in the case of Saudi Arabia’s massive sports investment programs during the reign of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, money is not the whole story.

In a simple sense, there is a clear profit motive. With US$925 billion in assets in 2023, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund exists to convert oil revenues into even greater national income.

Last year, the country’s Public Investment Fund reported $36.8 billion in profits. Since 2016, it has spent $51 billion on sports properties.

The point is not to turn bin Salman into the world’s greatest sports impresario. Rather, it’s that he’s seeking to improve the economic and geopolitical situation of Saudi Arabia through sports investments while ensuring the long-term survival of the Saudi regime.

Beyond Newcastle United, LIV Golf

Investing in sports is a common way for developing countries to announce their arrival on the global stage. Instead of one-and-done mega events, Saudi Arabia is pursuing a more dispersed and diverse approach.

The Public Investment Fund’s highest profile investments are well known, especially the 2021 purchase of Newcastle United of the English Premier League and the LIV golf tour that challenged the PGA’s decades-long dominance of the sport.

Majed Al-Sorour, CEO of Golf Saudi, right, and LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman, left, stand on the stage during a ceremony after the final round of the LIV Golf Team Championship in Doral, Fla., in October 2022.
(AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Beyond golf and soccer, Saudi Arabia has also spent dizzying sums on lower profile investments in esports, wrestling and motorsports. In other games, like chess and snooker, the profit motive is less clear.

The logical conclusion is that Saudi Arabia treats its sports investments as a loss leader — an unprofitable activity meant to stimulate more profitable activity somewhere else. In the words of Public Investment Fund’s 2022 annual report, international investment pools “allow Saudi Arabia to extend its global reach and influence.”

But what does that really mean?

‘Sportswashing’

The conventional term for Saudi Arabia’s strategy is sportswashing, the practice of reputation-laundering in the hopes that a cleaner national image will translate into soft power on the world stage.

Read more:
Sportswashing is just about everywhere – but it may be backfiring on the countries that do it

But that explanation doesn’t go far enough. For bin Salman, the suite of sports investments and properties is only a small part of a larger strategy to prepare Saudi Arabia for a 21st century when global oil demand is expected to fall by mid-century and geopolitics will become more complicated.

This is no secret: Saudi Arabia’s official grand strategy — Vision 2030 — envisions the complete modernization of the country’s economy and foreign policy. Saudi Arabia’s sports diplomacy is therefore part of a broader geopolitical strategy to prepare Saudi Arabia for an era of multipolarity, when power is distributed among several states.

Sports diplomacy also normalizes western financial and political engagement with the Saudi regime. Internationally, bin Salman wants to cultivate economic and security relationships with entities whose interests align with those of the Saudi royal family and the Saudi state, thereby ensuring the long-term health of both.

Regular interactions between Saudi Arabia and the West create an understanding that Riyadh is a “normal” place to do business — and if it’s good business, there is no reason to risk the relationship with too much rancour over its authoritarianism and abysmal human rights record. Sports investing, in short, is a Saudi hedge against western abandonment.

The allure of the big payday

To western eyes, the most troubling implication of Saudi sports investment is the normalization of authoritarian capitalism — economic freedom without political freedom — as a feature of the emerging international order.

Along with China, Russia, Singapore and others, Saudi Arabia represents an alternative to western democratic capitalism as a pathway to development.

This would be surprising to a previous generation of scholars and policymakers who once thought that free markets and free societies were a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

But given the staying power of authoritarian capitalism, doing business with dictators and strongmen has become inevitable and even desirable in some cases. In the sports world, few have resisted the charms of a huge payday.

Closely related to authoritarian capitalism is democratic backsliding. Around the world, the quality of democracy and freedom is eroding, and the slow-drip normalization of economic intercourse with authoritarian capitalists is part of that erosion.

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Could the world’s autocrats successfully plot to defeat the West?

How to proceed?

So can anything be done? Western states have options, but they’re limited.

After all, Saudi Arabia’s investments are legal and eagerly sought after by both private and public sectors.

Western officials can put up resistance to the awarding of mega events to authoritarian states. But mewling about problematic hosts means little unless liberal democracies are prepared to pay the hosting costs themselves, which they are increasingly unwilling to do.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal looks on as Republican Sen. Ron Johnson speaks during a homeland security and governmental affairs subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in September 2023 on a proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership. Final details are still being hammered out.
(AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)

Meanwhile, authoritarians are eager to host mega events and attract the prestige that comes with them. Currently, for example, Saudi Arabia is the sole bidder for the 2034 FIFA World Cup.

Countries could try regulatory intervention to delimit the extent of Saudi influence. National security is often used as a pretext for blocking foreign investments in strategically important sectors, like ports and 5G wireless networks.

Saudi plan is working

But golf and video games do not rise to the level of national security concern, so American regulators are unlikely to step in. Political intervention from the United States Congress or the White House is even less likely. Saudi Arabia is a key part of the American strategy on the Middle East to confront Iran, and quibbling too intensely about human rights or sports investment is not worth the strategic costs.

The genius of Saudi Arabia’s enterprise is that it’s power projection by consent. Investors and fans want what bin Salman is selling, governments have limited recourse and critics are left to grasp at standard, out-dated arguments.

For Saudi Arabia, however, its sports charm offensive is about more than money. It’s about an investment in the future prosperity and security of the kingdom and the longevity of the Saudi dynasty. So far, the plan is working. Läs mer…

Jessica Campbell has made history as the first full-time female coach in the National Hockey League, marking a significant milestone in professional hockey.

Campbell was hired by the Seattle Kraken in July, and during the team’s home opener against the St. Louis Blues on Oct. 8, the crowd erupted into cheers when she was introduced as part of the team’s coaching staff.

While the Kraken went on to lose to the Blues 3-2, the game was a pivotal turning point for gender equality and coaching in the NHL. Campbell’s appointment as a full-time assistant coach shows there’s a path forward for women who aim to coach at the men’s professional level.

Campbell’s story serves as a reminder of the challenges women coaches face. However, it also demonstrates how achieving a coaching role in a professional league, though difficult, is not impossible.

‘I didn’t know it was possible’

Campbell brings a wealth of knowledge to her new role with the Kraken, from her playing experiences in the NCAA, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and on Canada’s women’s national team.

Her coaching career began as an assistant with the U18 Canadian women’s national team, and from there she coached in Sweden with the Malmö Redhawks. She then served as an assistant coach for the men’s national team in Germany and the Nürnberg Ice Tigers. Campbell later became the first female coach in the American Hockey League when she was hired by the Coachella Valley Firebirds as an assistant coach.

Jessica Campbell runs a drill during a Seattle Kraken rookie development camp in July 2024 in Seattle.
(Nick Wagner/The Seattle Times via AP)

Even with her breadth of experience, Campbell never envisioned herself as an NHL coach. Instead, she was focused on supporting players through her business, JC Power Skating School.

“I didn’t imagine this path for me. I didn’t see it,” Campbell said in a 2023 interview. “Quite frankly there was no visibility and there weren’t other females doing this work, and so I didn’t know it was possible.”

It was not until more and more NHL players sought out her skating and skill development program that she began to consider coaching in the NHL as a potential career path.

Women coaches in the major leagues

The NHL has been slow on the uptake when it comes to full-time women coaches. The other three major leagues — the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association — have had women in coaching roles for years.

At the start of the 2024 season, there were 15 full-time women coaches in the NFL. In 2023, the MLB had 43 women coaching. Within the NBA, there are currently five female assistant coaches.

Yet, these numbers still reflect an alarming gender disparity. Like Campbell, many women may struggle to envision themselves in coaching positions. This moment encourages us to consider both the importance of women in coaching, and why there continues to be an under-representation of women coaching men’s sports.

Research on women in coaching has continuously highlighted barriers in high performance sport. Women coaches often face stereotypes, discrimination and gendered organizational cultures that hinder their advancement in the field.

To combat these barriers, the NHL has implemented various supports to ensure Campbell will not remain in a league of her own.

The NHL Coaches Association launched a Female Coaches Development Program in 2021 to support the development of women coaching hockey. By providing leadership strategies, skill development, networking and career opportunities, the program aims to normalize women coaching men and expand the pool of available candidates.

Paving the way

While Campbell is the first full-time assistant coach in the NHL, others have had opportunities to guest coach at NHL camps or to be on the bench for pre-season games.

For instance, Kim Weiss, the first woman to coach NCAA Division III men’s hockey, served as a guest coach for the Colorado Avalanche.

Similarly, Kori Cheverie, the first woman to coach a Canadian university men’s hockey team, was a guest coach with the Pittsburgh Penguins and became the first female coach on the bench during an NHL pre-season game.

Montréal head coach Kori Cheverie gives instructions during the first period of an PWHL hockey game against Toronto in Pittsburgh in March 2024.
(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Along with Campbell, the visibility that each of these women provides can spark meaningful change in the NHL. While Campbell’s coaching debut with the Kraken is breaking down barriers, sustained effort and dedication is required to create a more inclusive sport culture.

Continued emphasis on initiatives like the NHL’s Female Coaches Development program are necessary for both current and aspiring women coaches so girls and women can envision themselves in leadership roles in the future.

As a scholar who has studied the under-representation of women coaches, my hope is that Campbell will not remain an anomaly in the NHL, and eventually we see more women in both assistant and head coaching roles.

Campbell’s new position with the Kraken could spur this change, with her and others enriching the NHL through the abilities, contributions and diverse perspectives that women bring to coaching. Läs mer…

We’ve all been there – caught outside without an umbrella as the sky opens up. Whether it’s a light drizzle or a heavy downpour, instinct tells us that running will minimise how wet we get. But is that really true? Let’s take a scientific look at this common dilemma.

You’re out and about, and it starts to rain – and naturally you’ve forgotten your umbrella. Instinctively, you lean forward and quicken your pace. We all tend to believe that moving faster means we’ll spend less time getting wet, even if it means getting hit with more rain as we move forward.

But is this instinct actually correct? Can we build a simple model to find out if speeding up really reduces how wet we’ll get? More specifically, does the amount of water that hits you depend on your speed? And is there an ideal speed that minimises the total water you encounter on your way from point A to point B?

Let’s break it down while keeping the scenario simple. Imagine rain falling evenly and vertically. We can divide your body into two surfaces: those that are vertical (your front and back) and those that are horizontal (your head and shoulders).

When moving forward in the rain, vertical surfaces such as a person’s body will be hit by more raindrops as speed increases. From the walker’s perspective, the drops appear to fall at an angle, with a horizontal velocity equal to their own walking speed.

While walking faster means encountering more drops per second, it also reduces the time spent in the rain. As a result, the two effects balance each other out: more drops per unit of time, but less time in the rain overall.

When the walker is stationary, rain only falls on horizontal surfaces – the top of the head and shoulders. As the walker begins to move, she or he receives raindrops that would have fallen in front, while missing the drops that now fall behind. This creates a balance, and ultimately, the amount of rain received on horizontal surfaces remains unchanged, regardless of the walking speed.

However, since walking faster reduces the total time spent in the rain, the overall amount of water collected on horizontal surfaces will be less.

When the skies open up, moving quickly affects where the raindrops hit you.

All in all, it’s a good idea to pick up the pace when walking in the rain

For those who enjoy a mathematical approach, here’s a breakdown:

Let ρ represent the number of drops per unit volume, and let a denote their vertical velocity. We’ll denote Sh as the horizontal surface area of the individual (e.g., the head and shoulders) and Sv as the vertical surface area (e.g., the body).

When you’re standing still, the rain only falls on the horizontal surface, Sh. This is the amount of water you’ll receive on these areas.

Even if the rain falls vertically, from the perspective of a walker moving at speed v, it appears to fall obliquely, with the angle of the drops’ trajectory depending on your speed.

The difference in rainfall depending on whether you are stationary or on the move.

During a time period T, a raindrop travels a distance of aT. Therefore, all raindrops within a shorter distance will reach the surface: these are the drops inside a cylinder with a base of Sh and a height of aT, which gives:

ρ.Sh.a.T.

As we have seen, as we move forward, the drops appear to be animated by an oblique velocity that results from the composition of velocity a and velocity v. The number of drops reaching Sh remains unchanged, since velocity v is horizontal and therefore parallel to Sh. However, the number of drops reaching surface Sv – which was previously zero when the walker was stationary – has now increased. This is equal to the number of drops contained within a horizontal cylinder with a base area of Sv and a length of v.T. This length represents the horizontal distance the drops travel during this time interval.

In total, the walker receives a number of drops given by the expression:

ρ.(Sh.a + Sv.v). T

Now we need to take into account the time interval during which the walker is exposed to the rain. If you’re covering a distance d at constant speed v, the time you spend walking is d/v. Plugging this into the equation, the total amount of water you encounter is:

ρ.(Sh.a + Sv.v). d/v = ρ.(Sh.a/v + Sv). d

This equation gives us two key insights:

The faster you move, the less water hits our head and shoulders.
The water hitting the vertical part of your body stays the same regardless of speed, because the shorter time spent in the rain is offset by encountering more raindrops per second.

To sum it all up: it’s a good idea to lean forward and move quickly when you’re caught in the rain. But careful: leaning forward increases Sh. To really stay drier, you’ll need to increase your speed enough to compensate for this. Läs mer…

Football is a game of passion, and passions can become particularly inflamed when the sport represents larger political struggles. In Nigeria in 1977, an Africa-wide football contest fuelled the ethnic rivalry between the Yoruba and the Igbo people to the point that the military had to intervene. The game was to be played as a semi-final in the Africa Cup Winners’ Cup, the club football tournament that would go on to become the Caf Confederation Cup.

As scholars of sports communication, we recently published a research paper about that 1977 confrontation between Shooting Stars of Ibadan (Ibadan is home to a Yoruba majority in the south-west) and Enugu Rangers (Enugu is an Igbo state).

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Our study adds to a history of football and politics that is not well documented in Africa. In the process it shows that football represents more than just sport, but can also be a way of understanding cultural and political issues.

Yoruba vs Igbo

The rivalry between the Igbos and Yorubas is almost as old as the formation of Nigeria in 1914. Both groups vie politically and for jobs. Each forms roughly a fifth of the Nigerian population. The Igbo had lost political power after the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.

This rivalry became particularly visible in Nigerian football from the 1950s when ethnic groups contested annually for the Alex Oni Cup. The Yorubas often won, the Igbos a close second but the tournament was eventually discontinued because of fights between players and spectators.

After this, Igbos did not have a representative club team in national competitions until after the war ended in 1970. Top Igbo footballers were employed at various clubs across the country, particularly in Lagos. Yorubas played for various clubs in their home region. One such club was the Shooting Stars. They made up the bulk of the Ibadan Lions team that won the national Challenge Cup four times from 1959 to 1969.

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Football and politics in Kinshasa: how DRC’s elite use sport to build their reputations and hold on to power

After the civil war, most Igbo footballers – who had fought unsuccessfully for the secession of Biafra state – were afraid to live in other parts of the country. Enugu Rangers was formed and the club dominated Nigerian football in the 1970s and 1980s.

Shooting Stars had become the beacon club of the Yorubas and quickly developed a rivalry with Enugu Rangers.

The semi-final that caused all the trouble

This ongoing rivalry escalated when the two clubs beat off opposition from across the continent to meet in the two legs of the semi-final of the Africa Cup Winners Cup in 1977. Shooting Stars were defending the title. Rangers chose not to take part in the more prestigious Africa Champions Club’s Cup – instead they sought to equal Shooting Stars’ feat of winning the Cup Winners Cup.

To add to the tension, Nigeria’s national team was made up of mainly by players from these two clubs – and the national team was competing in the last stage of the qualifiers for the 1978 men’s football World Cup. It was feared that the rivalry would affect its chances. Almost daily, the newspapers reported on accusations levelled by officials of the two teams at each other and the Nigerian Football Association (today the Nigeria Football Federation).

The association had to find solutions – fast. Both teams had played their home matches in their own cities so far. The association decided that their two semi-final games should be played in a “neutral” location: Lagos.

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But after the first leg, a designated “home game” for Shooting Stars, ended 0-0, controversy erupted. Lagos is in the west of the country, home of the Yorubas. This was seen to give the Shooting Stars an advantage. There was also controversy about whether the teams could call up some or all of their players in the national team. The association’s authority to re-schedule the second leg was then called into question. These issues were argued at fever pitch and publicly by fans and in the media, with threats and ethnic undertones.

The association wanted to bar both Rangers and Shooting Stars from using their national team players, but was eventually forced to agree on the release of all players to play in the final leg of the Africa Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final. But not before making a very late request that the Confederation of African Football put off the game until after the national team’s World Cup qualifying games.

Shooting Stars, frustrated by the postponement, lashed out publicly and in the media. They accused Nigeria’s federal sports commissioner, Dandeson Isokrari, of ethnocentrism and favouritism. Isokrari was an easterner, from Enugu Rangers territory.

With tension boiling over and threats issued from both sides, the second-in-command of the Nigeria state, Major General Musa Yar’ Adua, stepped in to avoid ethnic strife and possible violence. He instructed the match to move to Kaduna, a northern city, away from the homes of the clubs. This decision by the country’s military leadership calmed nerves.

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An overflowing crowd packed the Kaduna venue from the early morning. In the early minutes of the game, Shooting Stars mounted a siege in the Rangers’ goal area. It was so tense that journalists and photographers converged behind the Rangers goal. Angry Rangers supporters claimed they were not journalists and photographers, but disguised juju men concocting mystical incantations that kept the ball rooted in the Rangers goal area.

The match ended in another 0-0 tie but Rangers advanced when goalkeeper Emmanuel Okala helped to turn the penalty kick tiebreaker in the club’s favour, 4-2. Despite the tensions, there were no reported incidents of violence during the match.

This epic contest between two clubs during a continental cup contest in 1977 reminds us of the rivalry that persists even today among ethnic groups across the continent. Football often represents such ethnic rivalries beyond the field of play – and in the case of Enugu Rangers and Shooting Stars it reached a dangerous level that forced the state to step in. Läs mer…